What connects the five separate photos, and what appears in all of them, is in fact the real protagonist of this story—the object, literally and figuratively, of Lego’s network production: little Mindstorms.<sup>15</sup> In these visual representations, as in the textual representation throughout the article, the object of desire is in fact quite obscured. Because the object at which the Lego executives fix their gazes in the photograph— regardless of their personal disposition and character—represents desire for profit, growth in sales, and so forth. In contrast, each of the MUPers in the photos is holding an object of quite a different desire: for creativity, self-expression, participation, and innovation. It is precisely the difference between these two different objects of desire that the language of networks—with its emphasis on collaboration and the blurring between different types of nodes—obscures. Or put differently, it is the discrepancy between the two objects of desire that is presumed to evaporate thanks to network production. In the digital discourse, these two very different desires—the emancipatory desire of individuals for dealienation and the system’s desire for new sources of profit (i.e., new modes of exploitation)—are presented as complementary and even codependent.
From “Power of the People” to “People Power”
This chapter opened with an introduction to the narrative of network production as facilitating individual empowerment and emancipation. Network production, Kevin Kelly maintains, democratizes the means that allow individuals to be more creative and more engaged and turns individuals into participators and collaborators rather than merely competitors in the marketplace. The ramifications of network production on individual empowerment are so revolutionary that Kelly opens his article with a “warning”: “beware the power of the people” (Kelly 2005).
Network Production
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