Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class

Overview

Arthur Kroker examines the emergence of a new social formation produced by late twentieth-century information technologies and global capitalism. He coins the term "virtual class" to describe a transnational elite whose power derives from control over flows of information, finance, and cultural production rather than traditional ownership of factories or land. Kroker treats the internet and allied technologies as both material infrastructures and symbolic systems that reshape subjectivity, labor, and the public sphere.
His tone mixes cultural theory, polemic, and social critique, drawing on philosophers such as Baudrillard and Foucault while mapping concrete shifts in corporate strategy, media practice, and everyday life. The work confronts techno-optimism with a sustained analysis of commodification, surveillance, and disposability, arguing that the digital revolution restructures inequality as much as it reconfigures possibility.

Main Arguments

Kroker argues that information is not simply neutral raw material but a new axis of accumulation and exclusion. The virtual class accumulates value by converting ephemeral signals into tradable assets, managing networks of liquidity, and shaping taste through media and advertising. That process produces "data trash", the detritus of constant information production that masks profit-driven curation, obsolescence, and planned disposability.
He emphasizes the political consequences of this reordering: power becomes less about territorial sovereignty and more about controlling attention, protocols, and standards. The regulatory and cultural institutions that once mediated public life are recast as instruments that enable the virtual class to extract value from social relations, and dissent is often neutralized by incorporation into the very channels that facilitate it.

The Virtual Class

The virtual class is composed of high-tech entrepreneurs, information brokers, financial engineers, and cultural producers whose labor and decisions shape global networks. Kroker highlights how their influence crosses national boundaries, leaning on deregulation, venture capital, and speculative markets to expand the dominance of immaterial goods. Membership in this class is defined less by property title and more by access to code, data, and platform infrastructures that organize consumption and sociality.

Culture, Technology, and Politics

Cultural life undergoes commodification as aesthetic forms, social interactions, and identities become data streams to be harvested and monetized. Kroker interrogates the rhetoric of user empowerment and democratization, revealing how participatory technologies can simultaneously give voice and generate new formats of control. He draws attention to the paradox that digital openness often coexists with concentrated corporate power and algorithmic governance.
Technological optimism is met with warnings about surveillance, loss of privacy, and the erosion of public deliberation. Kroker insists that understanding technology requires attention to its economic motives and ideological effects, since design choices privilege particular modes of extraction and social order. At the same time, he leaves room for contested terrains where artists, activists, and alternative producers can expose and resist the logic of the virtual class.

Legacy and Relevance

Kroker's intervention anticipated many debates about platform capitalism, the attention economy, and the political economy of data that dominate contemporary discourse. His critical vocabulary, especially the concept of a virtual class that governs through information, offers a durable lens for analyzing social inequality in the internet age. The book's provocation remains useful for diagnosing how corporate strategies, technological architectures, and cultural practices intertwine to reshape civic life.
While some claims are rooted in the moment of early web expansion and read as prophetic rather than empirically exhaustive, the work's synthesis of theory and critique continues to provoke reflection about who benefits from digital change and how alternatives might be forged. It encourages vigilance about the power embedded in networks and invites continued imagination of democratic and equitable technological futures.