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According to Kelly, the “link[ing of] the distributed bottom” (14) in the economic sphere renders the network economy a system so complex that it yields nonlinear, and therefore unexpected, incalculable results. This is in contrast to the industrial economy. In the industrial age, Kelly writes, “success was in proportion to effort” (31), and the future was therefore easy to predict: “To imagine the future of an enterprise or innovation one needed only to extrapolate the current trends in a straight line” (31–32). This simple algorithm fell by the sidelines “with the advent of large-scale electronic media networks in the mid century” (32). These technological systems no longer work as if they were man-made systems—which would make them easier to control—but rather as if they were living things. “Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything” (32). And now that biological principles took hold of the economy, its workings become more volatile and chaotic and hence less predictable.
The new economic rationality, spontaneously emerging from the nature of technological networks, is presented in the digital discourse as a mirror image of the instrumental rationality that was the backbone of the modern economy. Industrial economic rationality, succinctly encapsulated by Max Weber at the beginning of the twentieth century, entailed calculability, control, and predictability. The digital discourse heralds the emergence of a new rationality that features precisely the opposite symptoms: unpredictability and incalculability.
I have mentioned above the role that the biological imagination takes in forming the digitalistic worldview: information and communication technologies are seen as biological-like systems, which in turn create biological-like social systems. Here Kelly explains the fluctuating, unstable, turbulent new economy as inherent to the nature of networks, by using insights from biological systems: “As networks have permeated our world, the economy has come to resemble an ecology of organisms, interlinked and coevolving, constantly in flux, deeply tangled, ever expending at its edges. As we know from recent ecological studies, no balance exists in nature; rather, as evolution proceeds, there is perpetual disruption as new species displace old, as natural biomes shift in their markup, and as organisms and environments transform each other” (108, emphasis mine).
The argument is that as technologically enabled networks become the central axis of social activity, the economy has come to resemble nature: both are evolving progressively and are in perpetual imbalance. In fact, Kelly ties together those two processes—chaos and progress—to account for the realities of the new economy. Using an evolutionary framework, Kelly proposes that economic progress comes about through constant flux and disruption. These are not by-products or side effects of economic rationality and growth but the motor thereof. “Harmony in nature,” Kelly asserts, “is fleeting” (108), and so it is in the new network economy: “Companies come and go quickly, careers are patchworks of vocations, industries are indefinite groupings of fluctuating firms” (108). Kelly implicitly directs his arrows of critique not toward these new realities but rather toward the outdated language used to describe and explain them. Thus, Kelly’s description should be read as offering us a new lexicon, where new definitions, more appropriate for the new economy, substitute for traditional, industrial-age terms: “Careers are patchworks of vocations” (108, emphasis mine)—not the construction of tenured, stable, secure, progressive, lifelong professional tracks; “industries are indefinite groupings of fluctuating firms” (108, emphasis mine)—not demarcated, stable units and businesses. To treat careers and businesses as stable, in Kelly’s view, reflects an imposition of an anachronistic framework (entailing linearity, stability, predictability, and harmony) of a bygone era on the new digital reality. The new economy is a network economy, and “networks are immensely turbulent and uncertain” (111).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age