Thus, anxiety about old age and about the future begins almost at the outset of the digerati’s careers. Referring to a group of new employees at Microsoft, the protagonist of “Microserfs” says,
[We] were wondering last week what’s going to happen when this new crop of workers reaches its inevitable Seven Year Programmer’s Burnout. At the end of it they won’t have two million dollars to move to Hilo and start up a bait shop with, the way the Microsoft old-timers did. Not everyone can move into management. Discarded. Face it: You’re always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing. Everybody I know at the company has an estimated time departure and they’re all within five years. It must have been so weird—living the way my Dad did—thinking your company was going to care for you forever. (Coupland 1994)
Under such circumstances, the digerati worker is required to assume the mindset of an entrepreneur. If the undertone in “Microserfs” is one of lament, this critical edge is completely silenced in another piece, which more forcefully asserts the emergence of the worker-cum-entrepreneur and the concurrent demise of the distinction between workers and capitalists. Here, Tom Campbell, a former politician and the current dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California–Berkeley, reflects on the golden age of Silicon Valley:
The paradigm was creative destruction, or cannibalistic capitalism. To survive here, everyone needed to be mentally prepared to jump ship at a moment’s notice. The basic building block ofthe economy was the entrepreneur, and every individual needed to think more like an entrepreneur and less like an employee . . . Jazzed by this new ethic, laid-back Generation X turned into the self-determinist Generation Equity. Average job tenure in 1999 was 15 months. We assumed that Moore’s law applied to far more than chips. It applied to everything—bandwidth, user bases, even the Nasdaq doubled every 18 months . . . Silicon Valley was an argument in the form of a place. It argued for a new way to live, a new relationship between owners and employees, a new bond between work and play. (Bronson 2003; emphasis mine except “everything,” emphasis in the original)<sup>4</sup>
For Campbell, the new dynamics of the high-tech sector have made workers into entrepreneurs, work into play, and wage laborers into shareholders, effectively rendering these distinctions obsolete. According to
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age