Networks create a space that facilitates the positive blurring of work and leisure, of productive time and free time, of office space and home space, of public and private activities. Network work is ever present and can be performed everywhere. With networks, play, joy, and passion are reintegrated into the reproduction of society; the civilizational demands of labor are eroticized, and the chasm between those demands (for productivity and self-fulfillment) is overcome. Network work does away with bureaucratic, stifling organization and creates an airy, debureaucratized, and decompartmentalized structure of work.
The spirit of networks also heralds the coming of a new mode of production, which almost completely does away with the existing structure, experience, and meaning of work. Networks create a productive space that is, in fact, defined not by “corporations,” “capital,” “labor,” and so forth but by the deconstruction of these structures and their reconstruction as homologous units of prosumption and entrepreneurship. Networks allow for each of their nodes easy access for participating in production. The spirit of networks heralds the demise of workers and in their stead come the prosumers—atomistic nodes of production and consumption that compete and collaborate with other production-consumption nodes (such as corporations) as entrepreneurs. All prosumption nodes are ontologically homologous.
Networks allow for the dealienation and reenchantment of the reproduction of society. Creativity, self-expression, personal idiosyncrasies, passion, hobbies, individualism, and particularism—all of these become not simply legitimate components of the productive process but become, in fact, assets to be harnessed into wealth creation. Network production is conducive to personal characteristics and, in that sense, allows for more individualfreedom, emancipation, and authenticity. Networks are a space of self-realization through production; they therefore entail the dealienation of the productive process. But production and work become dealienated in another way as well: networks allow individuals to encounter products not simply as producers (whose activities are prescribed and who see only a fragment of the product) and not only as passive consumer, but as prosumers, a role that entails control and deep engagement with production and consumption, epitomized by the notion of interactivity and techniques such as mass customization and socialproduction.
The spirit of networks is the spirit of perpetual nonconformism and paradigmatic antiestablishmentarianism. It is inherently contrarian, countercultural, and counterhegemonic. It holds deep disbelief in any grand project and disloyalty to any stable structures, such as “the company.” Instead, the spirit of networks upholds loyalty to the very project of the network—fleeting assemblages and ad hoc crystallizations focused on a particular outcome—and, of course, to the very notion of network technology as progressive and benevolent.
214
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age