More than that, chaos and flux should be actively sought and encouraged. Taking his cue from nature again, Kelly reports what ecologists, familiar with the notion of constant flux, have learned: “The sustained vitality of a complex network requires that the net keeps provoking itself out of balance” (110). Rather than seeking stability and certainty of the economy, and rather than attempting to work toward harmony and balance, network societies should encourage and provoke conditions of flux and chaos in their economy. Flux is quintessential to the health of the network economy; the network economy, he says, thrives on its own destruction, and our goal should therefore be “to sustain a perpetual disequilibrium” (110) rather than to mitigate it. He wraps up this lesson with the Stalinist-sounding slogan: “constant innovation is perpetual disruption” (110).
As I have argued in the Introduction, the digital discourse offers not just a new worldview that replaces an old-fashioned one, but one that constitutes a critique of Fordist definitions of economic life. This is succinctly exemplified in the “Encyclopedia of the New Economy” (Browning and Reiss 1998). Chaos, according to the entry in the encyclopedia, means not disorder but quite the opposite. It is order without ordering, order without central oversight, without planning, but an order nonetheless, order that does not follow “a strict rule book,” which characterized the top-down, centralized, planned industrial economy, but that represents “an evolving collection of shared goals” (Browning and Reiss 1998).
Lastly, we have already seen the careful construction of the technologistic argument, which explains why the network economy—a decentralized, self-regulating system built on disparate and atomized nodes, working together through mechanisms of spontaneous order—is inherently chaotic and in constant flux, demanding flexibility and adaptability on the part of nodes. But even if one accepts this premise, another question remains to be answered: Why should we accept and even encourage such flux if it leads to a constant state of uncertainty and even “hovers on the edge of chaos” (Kelly 1998, 109)? Why, in other words, should we not control and mitigate it?
The answer, according to the digital discourse, is that this chaos is at the heart of the most important factor of economic growth in contemporary society: technological innovation. Chaos is both a breeding ground for technological innovation and the product thereof. Flux is a precondition for technological innovation: “Innovation,” says Kelly, “is the productive and desirable moment between ordinary and insignificant change on the one hand, and a change too radical to be implemented on the other hand”; it is located on the borderline between “the rigid death of planned order and the degeneration of chaos” (113). To foster technological innovation, the motor of economic growth in the network society, we need to willingly occupy the space at the edge of planning and order, the space at the intersection of complete disorder. This place is precisely the network: “The ideal environment for cultivating the unknown,” Kelly says, “is to nurture the supreme agility and nimbleness of networks” (Kelly 1997). The “trick” to fostering innovation, according to Kelly, is to have an environment favorable of change with as little paralyzing rules as possible and as little friction as possible. Rather than wanting to mitigate and curb flux and chaos, we need to accept that “the price of progressive change in maximum doses is a dangerous (and thrilling) ride to the edge of disruption” (Kelly 1998, 114). Hence, technological innovation, the new dynamo of economic and indeed human progress, makes the network economy inherently chaotic. Chaos and progress are inextricably tied.<sup>4</sup>
Network Market
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