PERFORMING VIRTUAL WHITENESS: THE PSYCHIC FANTASY
OF GLOBALIZATION
IN
THE GLOBAL EXPANSION of cyberspace, the complex mixture of high technology and
U.S. cultural politics has made white supremacy paradoxically both more powerful
and more invisible. As Toni Morrison argues, “Race has assumed a metaphorical
life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary
and more on display than ever before.” This is due in part to a
rhetorical and performative collapse between two definitions of the individual:
the common man and the entrepreneurial corporation as person. The result has
been a visible invisibility, in which supremacy achieves its ends by making an
almost literal equation between two things that would initially seem to be
unrelated: the need for deregulation in the marketplace and the need for
meritocracy in the culture at large, with both firmly anchored in a narrow
interpretation of God’s natural law, drawing on a passionate reservoir of
emotional and spiritual resources. To explain how this works, one could find no
better guide than the cyberspace guru, George Gilder, who joins neoconservative
political economy to a theocratic belief in natural law in a message reinforced
by other highly visible conservative media celebrities.
I. George Gilder
Though in the world of neoconservatism, technology, and high finance, Gilder’s
every word makes waves, he is relatively unknown to a wider public not avidly
following their investments in technology stocks. If you’ve heard of him at
all outside that context, it is probably only as the author of a remarkably
regressive sociology that draws on sociobiology to assert the natural, intrinsic
nature of gender and racial hierarchies.1 Gilder’s technological
pronouncements, however, at least prior to the crash of 2001, produced something
called the Gilder-effect, “a form of momentum madness that overcomes a stock
after it’s endorsed in the Gilder Technology Report” and increases the
stock’s value by 20-60%. The Report once boasted 65,000 online
subscribers at $295 per subscription; subscribers also organized meetings around
the country at which Gilder occasionally showed up, “though he never promise[d]
to in advance, for fear of unmanageable crowds.” In addition,
Gilder’s 1981 book, Wealth and Poverty, inspired supply-side economics
in the Reagan era, and in 1993 he contributed a chapter to Renewing American
Civilization, the college course developed for the Progress and Freedom
Foundation by Newt Gingrich. Out of this course came the Contract with America
that propelled the conservative takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994
and helped set the rhetorical parameters for contemporary governmental policies,
whose “center” has been moved very far to the right. Although those on the
right complain that the center has moved left, they can do so only because the
public sphere has been so thoroughly redefined in opposition to privatization
that advocates of a role for the public sphere are now referred to as
socialists.
Gilder is also a founder of the Discovery Institute, a think tank in Seattle
whose participating fellows engage in dialogue in the form of conferences,
debates, books, articles, congressional testimony, and a website through which
it engages members of the public, public officials, business people, academics,
and the media. Furthermore, Gilder Publishing has just purchased one of the
major conservative journals, The American Spectator. Gilder is described
in a profile in Communications Week International as “the voice of
unbridled optimism for telecoms progress, backed by deep intellectual
rigor.” As I hope to show, such a statement reveals with stark clarity
the stakes in contemporary U.S. politics: the very redefinition of intellectual
rigor and democracy, as conservatism joins an anachronistic nineteenth-century
cosmology and a belief in absolutism to the postmodern digitalized economy.
If one has been following Gilder’s career closely, it is easy to see how he
brings together overtly regressive theocratic moralism and abstract, breathless
theories of digitalized imperialism. However, Gilder’s reactionary social
positions have often been overlooked or misunderstood by the left, or they have
elicited only a sigh of embarrassment from his techie admirers, who boast of
their own open-minded, libertarian tolerance, which they separate from his stock
tips and technological advice. What I want to do here, however, is to follow the
suggestion of Richard Dyer and to make strange the whiteness of Gilder’s
discourse so that it will be easier to see how crucial that frame is to linking
the two seemingly unconnected aspects of Gilder’s thinking: neoconservative
political economy of the free market and theocracy. Here the discourse of
digitalized capital is enmeshed, in visibly invisible ways, in the highly
abstracted, anachronistic fantasy of Christian white supremacy, founded, of
course, on heterosexual male supremacy.