Netocracy was a term invented by the editorial board of the American technology magazine Wired in the early 1990s. A portmanteauofInternet and aristocracy, netocracy refers to a perceived global upper-class that bases its power on a technological advantage and networking skills, in comparison to what is portrayed as a bourgeoisie of a gradually diminishing importance.
The concept was later picked up and redefined by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist for their book Netocracy — The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism (originally published in Swedish in 2000 as Nätokraterna : boken om det elektroniska klassamhället, published in English by Reuters/Pearsall UK in 2002).
The netocracy concept has been compared with Richard Florida's concept of the creative class. Bard and Söderqvist have also defined an underclass in opposition to the netocracy, which they refer to as the consumtariat.
Alexander Bard describes a new underclass called the consumtariat, a portmanteauofconsumer and proletariat, whose main activity is consumption, regulated from above. It is kept occupied with private problems, its desires provoked with the use of advertisements and its active participation is limited to things like product choice, product customization, engaging with interactive products and life-style choice.[1]
Similar to netocracy, is the concept of cyberdeutocracy. Karl W. Deutsch in his book The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control[2] hypothesized about "information elites, controlling means of mass communication and, accordingly, power institutions, the functioning of which is based on the use of information in their activities." Thus Deutsch introduced the concept of deutocracy, combining the words 'Deutsch' and 'autocracy' to get the new term. Cyberdeutocracy combines 'deutocracy' with the prefix 'cyber-' and is defined as a political regime based on the control by the political and corporate elites of the information and communication infrastructure of the Internet space. As a tool of social control, Cyberdeutocracy allows elites to engage in the:
The term was coined by Phillip Freiberg in his 2018 paper "What are CyberSimulacra and Cyberdeutocracy?"[3]
Netocracy can also refer to "Internet-enabled democracy" where issue-based politics will supersede party-based politics. In this sense, the word netocracy is also used as a portmanteauofInternet and democracy, not of Internet and aristocracy: