In the case of Lego, the involvement of consumers was prompted at a much earlier stage. When it wanted to upgrade its robot kit Mindstorms, “Lego didn’t even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design” (Koerner 2006). As one of the fans/engineers who was mobilized for the MUP reveals, “I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too . . . We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined” (Koerner 2006). In this case, Lego was pushing the envelope in terms of how much of the production process was transferred to consumers.
The digital discourse tells not only of the obvious benefits of network production for producers but also of the newfound opportunities for individuals to collaborate and take a meaningful part in a creative process (as the last quote from one of the MUPers reveals). As the production process becomes networked—that is, more democratic and participatory—people have greater opportunity to take part in shaping the material world they live in: in this case, their toys. As the story continues, it oscillates between the narrative of prosumption as a source of profit and the narrative of prosumption as a new mode of collaboration and individual opportunities. It is instructive to follow how those two narratives are interwoven in the story of Lego’s Mindstorms.
To develop Mindstorms, Lego recruited four engineers—who are also “obsessed fans” of Lego—who for eleven months “were de facto Lego employees” with “one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck” (Koerner 2006). Not only were they not getting paid, they even paid some of the expenses related to their work, such as airfare for meetings in Lego’s headquarters in Denmark. The four panelists, however, saw no problem with that: “They [Lego] actually want our opinion?” enthuses one of them. “It doesn’t get much better than that.” The satisfaction that comes from taking a significant role in a creative process substitutes more traditional forms of compensation; to be part of the productive network is taken to be compensatory enough in the digital discourse.
This enthusiasm translates into consumption practices as well. As the article reports, “such loyalty isn’t unusual among the fanboys” of Mindstorms, who also made it Lego’s all-time bestselling product (Koerner 2006). The spirit of network production no longer follows the traditional separation between producers who labor hard to create a fun toy and consumers who play joyously with it; now it is the fun and playfulness of consumers that are mobilized and fed back into the production process. In this move, the toil of tedious, unsatisfactory work clears way for work as fun. And because it is fun—because it is about satisfaction, self-fulfillment, and creativity—traditional pay is cleared out of the way as well.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age