This environment—chaotic, unpredictable, and formless—is emblematic of technological progress to such a degree that it in fact defines the new form of technological and economic activity. As the article concludes, “Change is driving everything. Chaos is the form” (Hughes 1994). In the same vein, Kelly addresses the increasingly chaotic and unstable working arrangements that characterize the network economy. The trend whereby full-time, long-term careers within organizations are substituted by an increasingly unstable and chaotic employment environment is interpreted by Kelly through the notions of flexibility.
Flexibility, according to the digital discourse, is a key dynamic in the network society, specifically in the network market. Flexibility entails two interlocking sets of meanings: reactive and proactive. The reactive set of meanings sees flexibility as the prime mechanism to cope with the chaotic nature of network markets and to adapt to it. It is in essence a defense mechanism of individual nodes (workers, companies, states, and so forth) against the fluctuating, chaotic nature of network market. In the proactive set of meanings, flexibility is seen as beneficial from the point of view of individuals, allowing them more degrees of freedom in their professional and creative life and increasing personal choices and freedom. I treat the proactive meanings of flexibility in the digital discourse in Chapters 4 through 6. In what follows, I focus mostly on the reactive set of meanings.
Kelly uses the employment schemes of the entertainment industry as an example for a healthy adaptation to the chaotic market through flexibility. In the entertainment industry part-timers, subcontractors, outsourced workers, and freelancers—all “convene as one financial organization for the duration of the movie project, and then when the movie is done, the company disperses” (Kelly 1998, 111). And the workers, one might ask? According to Kelly “after the [movie] gets slotted to video, everybody just vanishes” (111). In what sounds like a fantasy of employers in the flexible economy, once workers do what needs to be done for the ad hoc project, these “Hollywood film ad-hocracies” (111) just vanish. Flexibility, in this case, entails the construction of workers as atomized, individualized nodes who are required to adapt to the dictates of a network economy.
Indeed, flexibility is the key to success in the new economy. Information-based businesses—in sectors such as high tech, knowledge, and service—“rely on speed and flexibility to survive in a self-made speedy and flexible environment” (111). Such industries, according to Kelly, can only be managed with a “flattened, atomized” (111) business model. That is, they require the atomization of workers and their flexible and temporary employment arrangements. Here the model of the network economy as the space where individual nodes swarm together in bursts of rationality can be looked at from the opposite angle. The rationality of the network requires that nodes (specifically, in this case, workers) remain as atomized as possible so that their overall levels of flexibility and adaptability can be augmented. What might look like insecurity and instability from the point of view of workers is seen as a positive trend from the point of view of the functioning of the system.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age