Technocapitalism
Technocapitalism is a term used to describe an evolution of market capitalism rooted in technological invention and innovation. It can be considered an emerging era, with distinctive characteristics that differ from those of industrial and post-industrial capitalism.One of the salient features of technocapitalism is the overarching importance of intangibles, and the emergence of new economic sectors, such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, bioinformatics, genetic medicine, molecular computing or biorobotics. These sectors may become to the twenty-first century what aerospace and electronics were to the twentieth.
The emergence of these sectors is driven by a new ecology of business organizations that are highly focused on research, and depend on it for their survival. Also driving the emergence of technocapitalism are the vast accumulation of inventions and innovations of the second half of the twentieth century, and the massification of higher education, particularly in science and technology fields.
Prof. Luis Suarez-Villa, in his book Invention and Rise of Technocapitalism (published in October 2000) argues that it is a form of capitalism in which intangibles such as creativity and knowledge play the parts that raw materials, factory labor and capital played in industrial capitalism.
Dinesh D'Souza, writing about Silicon Valley, uses the term to describe the corporate environment and venture capital relationships of the high tech economy.
Technocapitalism is a contraction of "technology" and "capitalism," two of the most commonly used words in the social sciences. The term was also used by philosopher Douglas Kellner in an examination of trends in production from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, to describe the use of technology and its social relationships.