(Schwartz 1993). The ushering in of new forces of production, in the form of information, knowledge, and information technology, transforms the very basis of social class. It is noteworthy that Druker’s theorization follows in the footsteps of Daniel Bell’s thesis regarding The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1999).
What substitutes the blue-collar working class in the digital discourse on network work is a new persona, no longer tied to the traditional industrialist conceptions of a proletariat or working class. At the phenomenological level, work relations have been dehierarchized to such an extent that the differentiation between mangers and workers, employers and employees, is blurred. In the fictional story “Microserfs,” the narrator refers to his superior at work as “my ‘boss’” (Coupland 1994); the quotation marks around “boss” indicate the term is actually a misnomer, a relic of power relations that no longer exist. Power structures, he insists, are now completely flattened and dehierarchized: “The person with the most information pertinent to any decision is the one who makes that decision” (Coupland 1994). Upholding the meritocratic ethos of the digerati (to which I return later in this chapter), power in the network workplace is presented in the digital discourse as a corollary of knowledge and expertise, not of capital.
Indeed, money and even capital (i.e., money diverted to further capital accumulation, rather than for consumption) seems an ill-fitting variable to distinguish employers from employees according to the digital discourse. The protagonist of “Microserfs,” while nominally a worker, constantly checks his “WinQuotes” on his computer screen to follow Microsoft’s NASDAQ price. “It was Saturday,” he recounts, “and there was never any change, but I kept forgetting. Habit. Maybe the Tokyo or Hong Kong exchanges might cause a fluctuation?” Workers are also stakeholders in the company; in the case of “Microserfs,” they are actually shareholders. “Most staffers,” he continues, “peek at WinQuote a few times a day. I mean, if you have 10,000 shares . . . and the stock goes up a buck, you’ve just made ten grand!” (Coupland 1994). Such positioning of the digerati—not quite capitalists, not quite proletarians—undermines previous notions of class. Should they be better understood as workers or as owners? Or is the very distinction nothing more than an industrial-era relic that has been blurred beyond distinction and does not hold for the digerati? Let us look more closely at the narratives regarding the two sides of the coin: the digerati entrepreneurs and the digerati workers.
Network Work
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