Postmodernity abandons modern difference while retaining its technological infrastructure.

Evidence

The very concept of belief is then the casualty of a period in which otherness as such — valorized difference resulting in an exceptionalism of the present, with its subalternities of the past and of other cultures — is critically grasped as a cornerstone of the modern and as its most deeply cherished superstition about itself. The clear conscience of the postmodern in this respect has not, of course, been paid for by any principled abdication of the technological and scientific infrastructure on which modernity’s claim to difference was based; rather, it has been bought on credit and concealed by the representational transformation of that infrastructure in which the word processor replaces the assembly line in the collective mind’s eye. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 832

Categorization

• SEED: A usable angle: how the shift in self-image from assembly line to word processor (production metaphors changing) actually masks — not changes — the material base; could be an essay on AI-era metaphors doing the same work.
• XREF: connects to: In postmodern architecture physical materials cease circulating while traditional infrastructures persist — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 202; The technical knowledge interest’s value-basis was forgotten through capitalist modernization. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 601; Technofeudalism displaces capitalism by substituting cloud capital for terrestrial capital. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 849 (+1 more)