The chapter concludes by offering a theoretical framework to understand these new narratives. Network work, according to the digital discourse, creates a new constellation of technology, work, and power. The workplace become more flattened and dehierarchized, work becomes more decentralized and eroticized, and workers become more liberated. In contrast to industrial technology and the organization of work that sprouted from it—which were oppressive, heavy handed, and authoritarian, rendering workers cogs in a big machine—network technology and network work are more liberating, allowing more personal expression and freedom. These transformations in the workplace are presented by the digital discourse as undermining the industrial notion of class. These new narratives constitute a new spirit of networks that locates network work as a response to the humanist critique of industrial technology and industrial capitalism and that, at the same time, downplays a response to the social critique. In other words, the discourse on network work legitimates a new trade-off between alienation and exploitation: as it promises to mitigate alienation, it conditions this mitigation by the exacerbation of exploitation.
The nexus of network technology, work, and class in the digital discourse can be illustrated through the analysis of a new persona, or a new subjectivity, that permeates the digital discourse on work: the digerati. The term “digerati” is a compound of “digital” and “literati” and denotes, according to Wikipedia,<sup>1</sup> “the elite of the computer industry and online communities.” The digerati are the carriers of the “spirit of informationalism,” in Castells’ terms (1996, 195), or the spirit of networks, in mine. The digerati—mostly men (Stewart Millar 1996)—work in and around information technology, usually at the forefront of the development, financing, and deployment of that industry. The digerati, and the social group to which they belong, have been variably referred to as “informational workers” (Castells 1996), “symbolic analysts” (Reich 1991), the “virtual intelligentsia” (Lovink 2002), the “virtual class” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996), and the “creative class” (Florida 2003). The term “digerati” is frequently used in Wired.<sup>2</sup> Indeed, Wired addresses chiefly the digerati and plays a central role in the articulation and construction of the identity of this new social category. The digerati are defined first and foremost by their work, specifically their engagement with network technology. Their presentation in the magazine is therefore an appropriate locus to explore the new nexus of network technology and work.
Network Work
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