The discourse on prosumption and prosumers also lends legitimacy to the privatization of work. Workers are reconceptualized in the digital discourse as atomized nodes of entrepreneurship in the network of social production. The seemingly ad hoc, contractual, egalitarian, dehierarchized relations that usually characterize market relations between producers and consumers are transplanted into the relations of production. The discourse on network production is therefore “class-blind”; individuals are reconceptualized as nodes in the network, equal to all other nodes, competing on the shared and leveled playing field of the network. That means that everything that is not translated directly into profit (i.e., everything that is not a contributing component in the process of production) is privatized. Workers become entrepreneurs, selling not their labor power, but the fruits (and only the most ripe of which) of this labor power (on the entrepreneurialization of workers see Huws 2003, 98).
Put in the broader theoretical context of this book, in the digital discourse network production is constructed as a transcendence of the pitfalls of industrial and Fordist production, which entailed a hierarchy between producers and entrepreneurs on the one hand and consumers and workers on the other hand; alienation of the worker from the productive process; suppression of creativity and personal expression; the massification of production and consumption, and so forth.
What we see with these new narratives regarding network production follows the key observation offered by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (2005). The digital discourse offers at one and the same time an affirmation and inclusion of the humanist critique of capitalism into the spirit of contemporary techno-capitalism, and a rejection and exclusion of its social critique. At the same time that the new spirit of networks promises more engaging roles for individuals in the process of production, it also accepts and naturalizes the individualization, atomization, and privatization of work life, and the liquidation, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) imagery, of protective structures and mechanisms. As it promises more flexibility and creativity, the spirit of networks also accepts and legitimates greater precariousness, instability, and vulnerability.
Moreover, in the digital discourse the humanist demands for decentralization, dehierarchization, debureaucratization, more individual empowerment and satisfaction (i.e., criteria judged by the conditions of the labor process), go hand in hand with the traditional demands of capitalism for productivity (judged by the quality and quantity of the end result of production). Through the axial notion of network production, these two demands are now seen as mutually constitutive. More productivity demands individual freedom, it demands that creativity and personal expression would be brought to bear on the productive process. And at the same time it also demands the atomization of workers, their adaptability and flexibility, and so forth.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age