The digital discourse expects that the network economy will be much more turbulent than the industrial economy. What is left out of this representation of reality is the fact that the stability and predictability of industrial economy was not merely the product of its different nature, as implied by the digital discourse, but precisely a product of the political and social barriers put forth by governments on markets. Stability through the curbing of flux and chaos was precisely what governments tried to achieve through the construction of social democracies. The welfare state, the New Deal, Keynesianism, corporatism, embedded liberalism—all were varied attempts to reduce the instability associated with laissezfaire economics and to provide at least minimal protection to individuals against unpredictable markets.
It is precisely against this historical backdrop that Kelly makes a revealing statement regarding the underlying political (rather than merely technological) project entailed in the construction of the new economy: “In a poetic sense,” Kelly says, “the prime goal of the new economy is to undo—company by company, industry by industry—the industrial economy” (112). It is precisely the undoing of the political constraints put on markets and the layer of social arrangements that were constructed throughout the twentieth century in order to insulate individuals from an unforgiving, unpredictable, and irrational markets (in the broader sense of substantive rationality) that the digital discourse is calling for and legitimates through a naturalization and technologization of flux and chaos. What the digital discourse constructs is a structure of the network market as a chaotic but self-regulating mechanism, the operation of which is best achieved by leaving it to its own devices and in no way regulating it politically.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age