The Blurred Boundaries between Worker and Capitalist
The blurring between work time and workspace, on the one hand, and leisure time and leisure space, on the other hand, is coupled with another narrative regarding the revolutionary nature of network work. Network work also entails the reconstitution of workers as individual nodes within the network, a mirror image of workers in the Fordist organization. The Fordist workers were conceived as part of a system: functionally, they were cogs in the machine; structurally, they were members of a social class. Both of these imply hierarchy and differentiation between functional levels of the organization, between management and workers, between tasks, and, ultimately, between capital and labor. The digerati embody a critique and an alternative to hierarchy and differentiation at work and in society. In the network workplace, hierarchy and differentiation are replaced by a network structure where information flows between individual nodes, with each node structurally homologous to its peer and capable of multitasking and entrepreneurship. Workers are therefore conceived in more individualized and privatized terms rather than in terms of members of a class.
The new informational worker, in fact, resents the modernist, industrial-age distinction between capitalists and proletarians, a distinction formulated at the height of industrial capitalism and deemed no longer applicable. When information technology becomes the center of the economy, says Peter Drucker, information and knowledge rather than capital, and informational workers rather than capitalists, take center stage. Since knowledge substitutes capital as “the new basis of wealth,” since information displaces “the traditional factors of production—land, labor, and capital—[which] are becoming restraints rather than driving forces,” contemporary society is better understood as “post-capitalist” (Schwartz 1993). For Drucker, the emergence of “knowledge, not capital, [as] the new basis of wealth” also signifies the downfall of the bluecollar working class, which “dominate[d] every single developed society”
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age