The question of who uses the Internet is both necessary and misleading. It is necessary because we have to ask who is participating in the digital economy before we can pass a judgment on the latter. It is misleading because it implies that all we need to know is how to locate the knowledge workers within a class, and knowing which class it is will give us an answer to the political potential of the netas a whole. If we can prove that knowledge workers are the avant-garde of labor, then the net becomes a site of resistance;²² if we can prove that knowledge workers wield the power in informated societies, then the net isan extended gated community for the middle classes.23 Even admitting that knowledge workers are indeed fragmented in terms of hierarchy and status won't help us that much; it will still lead to a simple system of categorization, where the net becomes a field of struggle between the diverse constituents of the knowledge class
The question is further complicated by the stubborn resistance of knowledge to quantification: knowledge cannot be exclusively pinned down to specific social segments.Although the shift from factory to office work, from production to services is widely acknowledged, it just isn't clear why some people qualify and some others do not.²4 The knowledge worker is a very contested sociological category.
A more interesting move, however, is possible by not looking for the knowledge class within quantifiable parameters but by concentrating instead on labor. Although the notion of class retains a material value that isindispensable to make sense of the experience of concrete historical subjects, it also has its limits: for example, it freezes the subject, just like a substance within the chemical periodical table—one is born as a certain element (working-class metal) but then might become something else (middle-class silicon)if submitted to the proper alchemical processes (education and income). Such an understanding of class also freezes out the flows of culture and money that mobilize the labor force as a whole. In terms of Internet use, it gives rise to the generalized endorsements and condemnations that I have described above and does not explain or make sense of the heterogeneity and yet commonalities of Internet users. I have therefore found it more useful to thinkin terms of what the Italian autonomists, and especially Maurizio Lazzarato, have described as “immaterial labor." For Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor:
On the one hand, as regards the “informational content" of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers’ labor processes... where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards theactivitythat produces the “cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as "work"—in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.25
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The ShiftingSites of Labor Markets