This moral imperative is brought home in an article that compares the culture of technological change in the United States and Europe (Glenny 2001). Europe, the article argues, shows a lack of interest in the new network economy: “Change is happening. But Europe’s innate conservatism has made it a recalcitrant host to the rapid transformation sweeping the globe.” This innate conservatism, he contends, involves “veneration of the state, and obsession with national identities and borders, and . . . a suspicion of—not to say hostility toward—science and technology” (Glenny 2001). At the heart of the author’s critique is Europe’s unwillingness to surrender to what are, according to the digital discourse, the determining and inevitable effects of network technology on the economy—chaos, acceleration, unpredictability, and instability—and her insistence on mitigating them by recourse to political means—that is, through state actions.
The Europeans, he says, tend to examine past “episodes of destruction [brought about by technology] that could easily be repeated.” Their American counterparts, by contrast, are future-oriented and optimistic (Glenny 2001). But what does it mean to be future oriented and optimistic? To put the question in Toffler’s terms, if, after the initial shock, we should adapt to the future, what is it that we should adapt to? On this question, Kelly cannot be more unequivocal. The economic instability and uncertainty that we now experience, he says, is here to stay. What might have been called in the past “change” has turned by now into “flux.” And flux, unlike change, is no longer a road to stability, a difficult phase, or a bump en route to a solid ground but a permanent reality. Flux, in Kelly’s words, is a constant state of “destruction and genesis. Flux topples the incumbent and creates a platform for more innovation and birth. This dynamic state might be thought of as ‘compounded rebirth. And its genesis hovers on the edge of chaos” (Kelly 1998, 109).
CHAOS AS A CREATIVE FORCE IN THE ECONOMY
But flux is not simply a new force to be reckoned with, an inconvenient “bad” we must now adapt to in order to enjoy the “good”; instead, it is a positive thing in itself. Hence, not only should flux not be tampered with or mitigated, but also, more than that, it should be encouraged. Thus, for example, instead of lamenting the loss of job security in the new economy, Kelly suggests we simply revoke our perception of what jobs are, “rather than considering jobs as a fixed sum to be protected and augmented . . . the state should focus on encouraging economic churning—on continually recreating the state’s economy” (109). By employing outdated categories of economic life (such as predictability, calculability, security, and stability), Kelly implies, we might end up misjudging the benefits of a new network rationality. Rather than resorting to an industrial-age framework to evaluate the present, Kelly suggests we should come to grips with the chaotic and fluctuating characteristics of networks.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age