From the point of view of individuals, these new productive modes allow more people to engage more meaningfully with—and to bring their skills, talents, and passions to bear more fully upon—the productive process. The productive process becomes more democratic and collaborative and is geared more fully toward personal fulfillment of the lifeworld rather than toward the fulfillment of system’s ends. Moreover, network production makes possible the perfect fusion of the needs of personal emancipation with the system’s needs of capitalism. These narratives amount to a discourse where the very notions of work, workers, and certainly the working class are undermined and in fact eliminated. Work is reconceptualized as an eroticized, playful activity of production and consumption, involving creativity, deep engagement, interactivity, and interpersonal communication. Likewise, the category of worker is substituted by a new category of the prosumer: an individual and autonomous unit of production, consumption, and entrepreneurship. Therefore, the discourse on network production legitimizes a shift to a post-Fordist organization of labor and production. The sites where the social organization of work during Fordism were contained and anchored—the company, the union, the professional, and the cadre—are rendered obsolete with the emergence of the prosumer. At the same time that work becomes more meaningful and humane, allowing greater outlet for personal potential and harnessing amateurish skills and leisure time into social reproduction, it also becomes more privatized and individualized, shifting more risks from capital to labor and dismantling the social buffer zone offered during Fordism—a buffer zone that favored social equity and personal security over the development of individual potential. The digital discourse presents network production as making the production process both more democratic and more engaging and, at the same time, undermining the institutional arrangements that made those processes more stable and protective. As such, the digital discourse is understood here to legitimate more flexible and precarious employment arrangements, which have become pervasive in post-Fordist capitalism.
Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation
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