This warning receives an interesting twist in an article by Wired’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson: Kelly’s “power of the people” becomes Anderson’s “people power” (Anderson 2006). This shift in emphasis stems from a shift in point of view: while Kelly’s article is written primarily from the point of view of the masses—the little people, individuals, nodes in the network—Anderson’s is written from the point of view of the “global economy.” Anderson’s article is the first of six short essays discussing the most prominent “trends driving the global economy,” a feature supplementing the special issue of The Wired40 for 2006.<sup>16</sup> The most significant trend in the global economy is identified as the collaborative production power of the network: “Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing—the peer production era has arrived” (Anderson 2006).
The shift in emphasis from “the power of the people” to “people power” is significant in that it displaces the individual from the center of the narrative about network production and recounts it from a more systemoriented view. To put it in sociological terms, it substitutes a macro level structural view for a micro level agency-centered one. Anderson situates the network mode of production within its historical context in a manner that recalls Alvin Toffler’s (and to some extent Daniel Bell’s) historical materialism—one that puts technology at the heart of social change: “First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world” (Anderson 2006).
For Anderson peer production has become a hallmark of the digital era, and among the most important trends in the new economy, because of its ability to harness new—and hitherto unutilized—sources of power for the production process. Ford’s “assembly line” is transformed into network assemblages, and with it changes the whole process of production: “Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production.” And the economy is thus restructured to take advantage of this new power resource. According to Anderson, “From Amazon. com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content” (2006).
Anderson not only celebrates network production as creating a new source for economic growth but also sees a deeper social transformation brought about by network production. He ties together labor, technology, and democracy in a manner that is particularly revealing: “the tools of production, from blogging to video sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine of growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale” (Anderson 2006).
138
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age