ABSTRACT
This introduction outlines the book’s argument, methods, and theoretical contribution. It offers the concept of “upgrade culture” to describe the constellation of practices, discourses, and affects that have emerged based on the assumptions that new technologies will rapidly, perpetually, and inevitably emerge. It argues that upgrade culture has made the process of technological change a banal aspect of everyday life. Following the turn of the millennium, upgrade culture coalesced as a unique configuration in the technological imagination that was neither sublime nor banal, but axiomatic. Upgrade culture thus shifted how individuals, governments, and private organizations engage, resist, and manage the impending process of technological change.
Over the last four decades, marketers in the consumer technology industry displaced prior experiences and understandings of technological change. The primary experience of technological change is no longer intermittent collective shock and celebration followed by incremental changes over time. Rather, due to Intel’s monopoly backing Moore’s Law, technological change is understood and experienced as rapid, perpetual, and inevitable on an exponential curve. The book examines how tech industry marketers, at both industrial and individual scales, create the cultural economic conditions of exchange, rather than merely promotional messages.
