Wired, network work renders each worker into a more individualized, independent node, who does not have a “job” in the industrial-era sense, but rather takes part in ad hoc projects. The spirit of networks is also the spirit of workers as entrepreneurs.
It is noteworthy that by 2003, Campbell suggests this dynamic was overturned, and more old-fashioned, industrial-age relations were reinstated: “The culture of shifting alliances and temporary agreements is out; permanence and settling down is in” (Bronson 2003). From Campbell’s words it is clear that this entails a return to the idea of the “worker,” a persona admittedly less sexy than that of the digerati and one that reestablishes its relational position in the mode of production.
Technology as an Axis of Professional Identity
As we have seen thus far in this chapter, in the digital discourse on network work, the digerati are no longer industrial-type workers whose hierarchical positions are determined by inferior power relations vis-à-vis the capitalist and the capitalists, in turn, are also no longer the profit-driven industry titans commanding power and respect simply for their capital. These hierarchical and structural positions are replaced by flattened and networked relations facilitated by network technology. Network technology becomes the predominant axis in the tripartite nexus of work, technology, and class. As Daniel Bell puts it, power in postindustrial society is organized around a technological axis. This point is made even clearer in Bell’s new forward for the 1999 edition of The Coming ofPost-Industrial Society, titled “The Axial Age of Technology” (Bell 1999). The digerati’s subjective position in the workplace and the economy-at-large does not so much stem from their relational position in the mode of production. Instead, their identity and social position are now determined solely by their location on a technological scale. The axis of their identities is now constructed around the dominant force of production, network technology; their subjectivity is mediated through technology and through their engagement with it.
In the digital discourse network technology becomes the central axis of class location and class analysis. Class location is determined by how high or low a person is on a “techie” scale. In other words, dehierarchization in the workplace, and, by extension, between capitalists and workers, does not annul the making of hierarchical distinctions altogether, but these are now based on the level of individual engagement and expertise with network technology, that is, they are based on meritocracy, or better yet “technocracy,” or technological meritocracy. Thus, the digerati identify themselves as a distinct—indeed as an elite—social group. A reader of
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