Technocapitalism (a portmanteau word combining "technology" and "capitalism," two of the most commonly used words in the social sciences) is a term used to describe the changes in capitalism brought about by the emergence of high technology sectors in the economy.
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Luis Suarez-Villa, in his 2009 book Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism argues that it is a new version of capitalism that generates new forms of corporate organization designed to exploit intangibles such as creativity and new knowledge. The new organizations, which he refers to as experimentalist organizations are deeply grounded in technological research, as opposed to manufacturing and services production, and in the appropriation of research outcomes as intellectual property.
Under technocapitalism, creativity and new knowledge become the most valuable resources, much as raw materials and factory labor were under industrial capitalism. His book argues that new technology sectors such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and its many fields, such as synthetic bioengineering, bioinformatics, biopharmacology, and agro-biotech, the emerging new field of biomimetics and its transformation of robotics, and the introduction of molecular processors in computing and communications, among various new sectors and technologies, will become symbolic of the 21st century, in much the same way that aviation and mass production were of the 20th century.
Dinesh D'Souza, writing about Silicon Valley, used the term to describe the corporate environment and venture capital relationships of the high tech economy. The term technocapitalism was also used by philosopher Douglas Kellner in an examination of trends in production from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, to describe the use of technology and its social relationships.
One of the main benefits of technocapitalism is the fact that because technology is getting more advanced, the efficiency to produce goods increases, making them cheaper. As more production is automated, and the supply of goods is limited more by the availability of the raw resources rather than the cost to produce them (which is just the maintenance costs of the automated system), goods and services slowly turn into free public goods. This leads to an automated economy in which nearly all needs and wants are satisfied. This state of economy is sometimes referred to as technologic utopia.
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