and are therefore not regarded as demanding monetary incentives and compensations. The article makes this assumption more explicit by theorizing the phenomenon using Eric von Hippel’s thesis (put forth in his book Democratizing Innovation [2006]), which argues that “the joy of the learning associated with membership in creative communities drives people to generously share their time” (Koerner 2006). Indeed, the relations between consumers and producers brought about by network production are described not with a vocabulary of economic rationality but with terms belonging to the irrational and the erotic; they are based not on interests but on love. “The MUPers,” the reporter says, “weren’t getting paid. But they were playing a vital role in shaping a product they loved.” And one of the MUPers readily admits, “If it had been any company other than Lego, I wouldn’t be here” (Koerner 2006).
Prosumption, and more generally network production, therefore, not only reduces the cost of production and taps into the talent of amateurs, or highly skilled individuals, or into the smartness of the network. In addition, it allows the creation of a circular feedback channel—or cybernetics, in Norbert Wiener’s terms (1965)—between people’s deepest feelings about products on the one hand and the process of their making on the other. Network production—in this case of a Lego product—is able to mobilize a force of production that becomes increasingly significant in the new economy: knowledge. What is more, it is knowledge that seems to be decreasingly that of books and theories (i.e., abstract, universal, rational, and conscious) and increasingly that of the everyday experience (i.e., practical, particular, emotional, concrete, and unconscious). It is knowledge that is made concrete, for example, through playful engagement with a Lego product in one’s leisure time.
Whatever it is that “citizen developers” have and Lego employees do not, it is clear that network production is seen as a mechanism of extracting new forces of production from consumers and integrating them into the production process. Forces of production that can in fact only be materialized in the very act of consumption: wants, desires, joy, and so forth. Network production is seen as a mechanism to mobilize this kind of dispersed and intangible knowledge that solely consumers possess. In fact, according to the analysis presented in the article, the incentive for Lego to move to an open network model of production was that its products were beginning to be too cut off from consumer’s demands; they began to be too abstract and theoretical.
But what is mobilized from consumers for the process of production is not just their creativity, ideas, and labor power but also their commitment and loyalty as consumers. It is quite ironic that while networks are presumed in the digital discourse to require and predicate an ethic of flexible, ad hoc, noncommitted relations between employers and workers, when it come to the relations between producers and consumers the network is seen as facilitating an ethic of stronger intimacy and tighter relations. As the article suggests, “relying on the MUP is a gamble that Lego hopes will lead not only to a better product but also to a tighter, more trusting bond between corporation and customer” (Koerner 2006; emphasis mine). The open source model can help not only in the production process but also in marketing: “Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism.” In the spirit of democratization, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, hopes that in the future every Mindstorms customer will “be able to have an effect on how Mindstorms is used and designed.” This participation, he further presumes, would have positive effect on sales (Koerner 2006).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age