It is precisely in this context that Peter Drucker—one of America’s foremost business gurus—compliments American workers for their flexibility and adaptability (incidentally uncovering the economic structure that underlies such “virtues”). Referring to deep measures of economic restructuring entailed by the transformation from industrial to information economy, Drucker says, “In Germany, you have a social compact of the social market economy. Therefore, to lay off people, even to shift them, is very difficult . . . In those countries [Germany and Japan] it’s very much a social rather than an economic problem . . . In this country [the United States], the restructuring has caused amazingly few social problems because our labor force is so mobile, so adaptable. Our disorder is a great advantage” (Schwartz and Kelly 1996). Here again, adaptability to market demands is seen as an asset—something that American workers posses and on which a network economy thrives.
The digital discourse does not simply describe the chaotic nature of the digital economy but also insists on the inevitability and benevolence of chaos. It suggests that since chaos is part and parcel of the network economy, it would be worthless and even dangerous to react to it defensively and try to counter this economic reality with a political and social action. In this context, Kelly invokes the anti-Luddite maxim that perceives any opposition to technologically induced change as a reactionary and futile struggle waged by shortsighted people. Such reaction, Kelly explains, is a symptom of “future shock,” a term Kelly borrows from futurist Alvin Toffler, who coined it in 1970 to describe what he considered to be a natural human response to accelerating technological change. Only now the “shock” is even greater, since “the network economy has moved from change to flux” (Kelly 1998, 109). It is no longer the same type of “domesticated,” linear change we became familiar with during industrialism. Instead, the nature of change itself has been paradigmatically transformed. It is a change that accelerates and morphs into creative destruction, a change that “overturns the old ways of change” (115). In the face of such radical change, shock may be a reasonable personal reaction, but in no way, Kelly suggests, should it guide any social action; our reaction should ultimately be to adapt to the new reality.
Network Market
59