With such new spirit, it is hardly a surprise that the new informational entrepreneur—committed to creativity and discovery—is at severe odds with the strict, profit-driven, industrial-age corporation. Hence, the digital entrepreneur is also a rebellious character, a contrarian. Describing his experiences while running a small research and development lab, Harris recalls the clash of his new digerati spirit and the old corporate mentality: “At first I made it [the lab] a pure art house . . . I mean, why not? How often do you get the chance to do that kind of thing? The price I paid was that I had to deal with the corporate people at Prodigy . . . Executives at [Prodigy] . . . understood that they were dealing with a loose cannon who had little respect for their corporate culture” (Platt 2000; emphasis mine). The persona of the digerati represents a break with previous corporate culture. In the digital discourse on network work, the digerati are constructed as reverse images of the industrial man, indeed as an embodiment of a critique and a repudiation of him.
It is also worth pointing out precisely the depth at which the new spirit breaks with the old and where the two are actually agreeable. If Harris was so subversive to Prodigy’s “corporate culture,” one might wonder why they nevertheless put up with him. According to Harris, “They didn’t want to fuck with me because I was accounting for 25 percent of the total hourly traffic on their service” (Platt 2000). Hence, the divide between new and old capitalists that Harris was referring to seems to be located at a cultural and stylistic, rather than a structural, level. Notwithstanding the presence of the “old-fashioned” bottom line in Harris’s narrative of the new digerati entrepreneur, the façade is casual and subversive, decidedly antiestablishment, an establishment of which he is (perhaps grudgingly) a part.
Network Work
91