The first image features Grove, at a conference at Stanford Business School, behaving in a manner that would clearly be atypical for an industrial-era tycoon but that typifies the new digerati entrepreneur: he is casually sitting on the floor, suit jacket off, relaxed and listening. The second image is even more explicit, since it depicts not just a fleeting moment at a conference but rather a more permanent reality: Grove’s workspace. The photo carefully captures a wide-angle perspective of Intel’s workspace: a multiplicity of cubicles in a shared work floor. Andy Grove, this “great man,” is visually rendered as small, photographed from above, and as part of the hive of workers in the network work. The title of the photo tells that this is “Grove’s 8’ by 9’ cubicle at Intel,” implying that Grove is treated like any other worker (Heilemann 2001). The flattened, dehierarchized network workplace is perceived as an emblem of a new social structure that is better defined in terms of the network than in terms of class. (Little surprise, then, that in this workplace without differentiation, a quick entrepreneur is marketing a new line of clothing to fit the new persona of the digerati, described as “fashion for the no-collar workforce” [Glickman 1999]).
But while the structural tension (or even the personal animosity) between employers and employees is presented as a thing of the past, there are still reminders in the text of the relational positions of these two categories within the company and within society at-large. At these moments, the elasticity of the narrative of a new network-cum-classless society seems to fail, and the persistence of class in the information society and the high-tech company surfaces. One indication of that is the harsh language used by the protagonist of “Microserfs” to refer to work. He tells, for example, of how the group “slaved until 1:00 a.m.” Of course, there is the very use of the term “Microserfs” (Coupland 1994; emphasis mine), which evokes both the highly advanced Microsoft Corporation and the highly regressed system of medieval feudalism.
With this subtle choice of wording, the author seems to point out the complexity of what is presented throughout much of the digital discourse as an unproblematic blurring of the dichotomy between workers and employers. While indeed far removed from the terminology of industrial working relations, the reference to slavery and serfdom also connotes feudal relations with its blurring—indeed, annihilation—of the distinction between work and leisure, between private and public life. Perhaps, these terms suggest, these new working arrangements and work ethics are taking us back, not forward. But such moments of critical reflection are relatively rare–slips of the tongue. For the most part, the digital discourse narrates the transformations of network work quite uncritically.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age