The list of compatibilities of the network human to the network capitalism could go on: the disembodiment and distribution of the network human (i.e., the separation of thoughts, feelings, and experiences from the body) and network capitalism’s demand for work to be performed everywhere; the network human’s fragmentation and flexibility and the reconceptualization of worker not as a whole but as a part of a business project; and the underdetermination and instability of network identity and the demands for constant flexibility and adaptability to system’s needs.
Reconstructing the narratives of the information revolution through an examination of the “visions,” or Technomanifestos (Brate 2002) of some of its protagonists, such as Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing, Adam Brate (2002) notes that “the goal of the information revolutionaries [was] to create new systems—technological, social, political, and economic—that adapt to people instead of the other way around” (Brate 2002, 4). Put in the language of this book, the narratives that Brate registers assign network technology with the purpose of creating a new human that transcends the industrial human. In a similar fashion, albeit critically, Jodi Dean sums up this project thus: “Technoculture is an ideological formation that uses democracy, creativity, access, and interconnection to produce the subjectivities of communicative capitalism” (Dean 2002, 103).
Informationalization, disembodiment, distribution, fragmentation, inessentiality, instability, flexibility, interactivity, play—according to the digital discourse, it is precisely these authentic human potentialities that industrial-mechanical technology suppressed and can now be unleashed and flourish with network technology. These are also the human characteristics that, as Dean (2002) points out, render the new kind of network capitalism possible.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age