CRITI<sub>QU</sub>E IN THE C<sub>UL</sub>T<sub>U</sub>RE OF THE NEW CAPITA<sub>L</sub>ISM
This formulation of a classless society, where social power is determined not by ownership over the means of production but by technological dexterity, can partially explain the oddity of referring to the digerati entrepreneur with such a plebeian demeanor as we have already seen, as was the case with Andy Grove. But there is another facet of the digerati entrepreneur that must be elucidated: his contrarian, antisystemic, critical posture vis-à-vis the very social order of which he is integral and most significant part. To understand this oddity, it is important to point out here the historical sources of what I am calling in the book the “humanist critique.” In the context of its historical sources the name that Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) are using—the “artistic critique”—is more telling. This type of critique of capitalism emerges from artistic and bohemian circles of Europe’s nineteenth century and is closely linked with the values and aspirations of artists in that era: authenticity, self-expression, noninstrumentality, and critical distance from the prevailing social order, particularly from its most systemic structures: the market and the state.
This culture of critique, the negation of and resistance to prevailing bureaucratic and capitalist norms and to the “system” at large, has found its way into the spirit of networks, most noticeably in the presentation of the digerati, particularly the digerati entrepreneur. An antihero hero, a persona of resistance and negativity, a contrarian and revolutionary, this “great man” is at one and the same time a pillar of contemporary social structure and an emblem of its critique. Put differently, negativity and critique have become part of the culture of the new capitalism. More than that, they have become essential forces of production, that is, features of the counterculture that became part of the digital culture, a contrarian “cool” that is now part and parcel of work life for the informational worker. Writes Alan Liu in The Laws ofCool (2004), “Increasingly, knowledge work has no true recreational outside. Cool therefore arises inside the regime of knowledge work as what might be called an intraculture rather than a subculture or counterculture. Cool is an attitude or pose from within the belly of the beast, an effort to make one’s very mode of inhabiting a cubicle express what in the 1960s would have been an ‘alternative lifestyle’ but now in the postindustrial 2000s is an alternative workstyle” (Liu 2004, 77–78). In the same vein, Richard Lloyd speaks of “the bohemian ethics and the spirit of flexibility” (Lloyd 2005, 235) as characterizing the new postindustrial social category of informational workers, Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (1997) lament the commodification of dissent, and Naomi Klein (1999) has persuasively shown the co-optation of countercultural symbols by corporations in contemporary, informational capitalism.
Network Work
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