To survive and thrive in the ecology of networks, nodes must face the increasingly accelerated change of their realities with the highest measure of adaptability. They must do away with any claim for stability, anchors, roots, and constants and substitute them with flexibility. In the network, there are no already established groups and structures based on essentialized categories and actors. Since networks are comprised of unstable, nonessentialized nodes, nodes, too, are characterized by a high degree of flexibility. Groupings in the network are project-specific, ad hoc assemblages of nodes. In such assemblages, nodes assume no essentialist homology and no long-term commitment to their groupings. This lack of commitment is reciprocated from the direction of the ad hoc project as well.
Networks offer a more apolitical mechanism for social interaction by embedding the dynamic characteristic of markets into the very workings of technology; the hidden order of spontaneous order, self-regulation, and the invisible hand are guaranteed by the very operation of network technology. Networks are therefore freer from political considerations and the oppressive powers of centralized institutions.
But networks do not simply make the operation of markets more perfect, or more akin to the market’s ideal type; they also completely transform the activities entailed in the reproduction of society. Networks make the workplace decentralized and dehierarchized. With the de-differentiation between various echelons (workers, managers, and owners) the workplace becomes flat. Power relations are determined based on the criteria of professionalism and meritocracy, not on the ownership of the means of production or lack thereof. They are therefore not fixed and pre-established but ad hoc and changing according to the particular task at hand and the particular skills required. The multiple actors that once populated the workplace (the boss, the worker, the manager, and the CEO) are substituted by a single actor in the network workplace, which is defined first and foremost by its relations with network technology: the digerati.
The digerati construct their identity around the axis of network technology. They are characterized by being technologically savvy, nerds and geeks; being able to multitask, flexibly shifting between different projects and deploying different skills; and being entrepreneurial—not a cog in the system, but a node among competing nodes in the network. Even the most powerful of the digerati—its entrepreneurial tycoons—are essentially the same: they are passionate about technological progress and they deploy their technological expertise, not their financial prowess, to command power. The space of network work is flat and adverse to command, bureaucracy, and hierarchy to such an extent that these entrepreneurs themselves are bent on being antiestablishment, negative, contrarian, and critical.
Networks as the Techno-political Culture of Post-Fordism
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