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# Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks
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What connects the five separate photos, and what appears in all of them, is in fact the real protagonist of this story—the object, literally and figuratively, of Lego’s network production: little Mindstorms.15 In these visual representations, as in the textual representation throughout the article, the object of desire is in fact quite obscured. Because the object at which the Lego executives fix their gazes in the photograph— regardless of their personal disposition and character—represents desire for profit, growth in sales, and so forth. In contrast, each of the MUPers in the photos is holding an object of quite a different desire: for creativity, self-expression, participation, and innovation. It is precisely the difference between these two different objects of desire that the language of networks—with its emphasis on collaboration and the blurring between different types of nodes—obscures. Or put differently, it is the discrepancy between the two objects of desire that is presumed to evaporate thanks to network production. In the digital discourse, these two very different desires—the emancipatory desire of individuals for dealienation and the system’s desire for new sources of profit (i.e., new modes of exploitation)—are presented as complementary and even codependent.
From “Power of the People” to “People Power”
This chapter opened with an introduction to the narrative of network production as facilitating individual empowerment and emancipation. Network production, Kevin Kelly maintains, democratizes the means that allow individuals to be more creative and more engaged and turns individuals into participators and collaborators rather than merely competitors in the marketplace. The ramifications of network production on individual empowerment are so revolutionary that Kelly opens his article with a “warning”: “beware the power of the people” (Kelly 2005).
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This warning receives an interesting twist in an article by Wired’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson: Kelly’s “power of the people” becomes Anderson’s “people power” (Anderson 2006). This shift in emphasis stems from a shift in point of view: while Kelly’s article is written primarily from the point of view of the masses—the little people, individuals, nodes in the network—Anderson’s is written from the point of view of the “global economy.” Anderson’s article is the first of six short essays discussing the most prominent “trends driving the global economy,” a feature supplementing the special issue of The Wired40 for 2006.16 The most significant trend in the global economy is identified as the collaborative production power of the network: “Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing—the peer production era has arrived” (Anderson 2006).
The shift in emphasis from “the power of the people” to “people power” is significant in that it displaces the individual from the center of the narrative about network production and recounts it from a more systemoriented view. To put it in sociological terms, it substitutes a macro level structural view for a micro level agency-centered one. Anderson situates the network mode of production within its historical context in a manner that recalls Alvin Toffler’s (and to some extent Daniel Bell’s) historical materialism—one that puts technology at the heart of social change: “First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world” (Anderson 2006).
For Anderson peer production has become a hallmark of the digital era, and among the most important trends in the new economy, because of its ability to harness new—and hitherto unutilized—sources of power for the production process. Ford’s “assembly line” is transformed into network assemblages, and with it changes the whole process of production: “Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production.” And the economy is thus restructured to take advantage of this new power resource. According to Anderson, “From Amazon. com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content” (2006).
Anderson not only celebrates network production as creating a new source for economic growth but also sees a deeper social transformation brought about by network production. He ties together labor, technology, and democracy in a manner that is particularly revealing: “the tools of production, from blogging to video sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine of growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale” (Anderson 2006).
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The new source of production, the new engine of growth, according to this narrative, is the labor power that hitherto has been left unexploited, that is, has been left outside of the process of capital accumulation. It is comprised of “spare cycles” (i.e., spare time, time that is not yet harnessed for the productive process; time that—contrary to the famous maxim—is not money) and “talent” (i.e., skills, craftsmanship, and knowledge). The new source of production is also predicated on the technological ability to mobilize these “leftovers” of time and talent into the productive (i.e., profitable) process. The more this technological ability improves and the more it is possible to aggregate those forces of production, the more the labor force becomes, in Anderson’s words, “distributed.” Here the full meaning of democracy in Anderson’s statement is revealed. The more “fully” “the tools of production . . . are . . . democratized,” the more the “labor force” becomes “distributed.” Here, democratization is reframed as the decentralization of labor. Democracy, according to this statement, entails more individual autonomy and empowerment and the evaporation of centralized, societywide, and organized power.
The democratization of production tools creates another mechanism of wealth creation. The new engine of growth is based not only on the conscious mobilization of the spare time and talent of unpaid individuals, “There’s also gold in the casual Web droppings we all leave online,” Anderson explains (Anderson 2006b). Network technology is well adept in harnessing the noncreative facets of people power as well, such as customer reviews for example, and commodifying them: “Your click trail on Amazon is used to create better recommendations for those who follow. Your query on Google and the pages you find relevant give feedback that fine-tunes the search algorithms. The ads you click don’t just boost revenue for Google, they also tell it how much to charge the next advertiser. These companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd, extracting information that was there all along, just latent and lost” (Anderson 2006). Network technology is particularly adept at tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd”—that market-defined, tautologically self-affirming intellect—and redirecting it into the process of production.
Anderson refers to the nonmonetary nature of network production from the point of view of labor. “Previous industrial ages,” Anderson says, “built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time . . . Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy” (Anderson 2006). He also, as we have seen, stresses the monetary gains for capital from network production. This unequal exchange between “produsers” and companies using network production, are not seen as problematic in the digital discourse. On the contrary: network production signifies a new, healthier relationship between those two ends of the production pole: work and capital. Anderson says, “It’s a mistake to equate peer production with anti-capitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere” (Anderson 2006). Network production is seen in the digital discourse as a platform for a more reciprocal and satisfying relationship between capital and work—a relationship that is about substituting monetary gains and secure and stable careers with satisfaction and inclusion in the exciting prospects of the network.
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Conclusion: Between Cooperation and Competition
The chapter has proceeded in two parallel, but also intersecting, lines of analysis. On the one hand, I have presented the central narratives of the digital discourse concerning network production, and have shown the emergence of a new spirit of networks, with its emphasis on the compatibility of the emancipatory potentials of network production with its increased rationality. On the other hand, I have pursued a more critical analysis that highlights the latent assumptions and conditions of possibility for such assertions. Let me briefly summarize the central narratives of the digital discourse regarding network production and discuss the ideological and sociological significance of the emergence of this new discourse.
According to the digital discourse, the revolutionary nature of the integration of production into network technology is anchored in the creation of more complex and seamless interactions between components of production that had hitherto been separated and dispersed. It is therefore best understood in terms of the eradication of the distinctions between these components: between companies and the network, producers and consumers, producers and users, labor and fun, forces of production and the production process, and so forth. These established industrial demarcations (and more specifically, part and parcel of the Fordist phase of capitalism) are now overturned with the emergence of network production.
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The network, according to the digital discourse, becomes the prime locus and axial coordinator of production, replacing the company, the workplace, and the assembly line. It facilitates new productive modes that are predicated on the ability to harness the working power of autonomous and dispersed nodes into the productive process. Moreover, network production is able to mobilize forces of production that have been hitherto unexploited and inaccessible (like free time), elusive (like joy and fun), or highly dispersed (like expertise and knowledge). From the point of view of individuals, these new productive modes allow more people to engage more meaningfully with, and to bring their skills, talents, and passions to bear more fully upon the productive process. The productive process becomes more democratic and collaborative and is geared more fully toward personal fulfillment (of the lifeworld), rather than toward the fulfillment of system’s ends. Finally, and crucially, network production makes possible the perfect fusion of the needs of personal emancipation with the system’s needs of capitalism.
DEALIENATION VERSUS EXPLOITATION
We should understand network production not simply as a description of a new mode of capitalist production brought about by technological networks, but as an analytical framework that at one and the same time also naturalizes and legitimates the new realities, and new constellation of power that this mode entails, specifically, in regards to work. These narratives amount to a discourse where the very notions of work, workers, and by extension the working class, are undermined. “Work” is reconceptualized as an eroticized, playful activity of production and consumption, involving creativity, deep engagement, interactivity, and interpersonal communication. Likewise, the category of “workers” is substituted by a new category of the prosumers: an individualized and independent unit of production, consumption, and entrepreneurship.
The discourse on network production legitimizes a shift to a post-Fordist organization of labor and production. The sites where the social organization of work during Fordism (and during much of industrialism) were contained and anchored—the company, the union, the guild, the professional, the cadre—are rendered obsolete with the emergence of the prosumer. At the same time that work becomes more meaningful and humane, allowing greater outlet for personal potential, and harnessing amateurish skills and leisure time into social reproduction, it also becomes more privatized and individualized, shifting more risks from capital to labor, and dismantling the social buffer zone offered during Fordism—a buffer zone that favored social equity and personal security over the development of individual potential (Harvey 2005). The discourse on network production legitimates a production process that is at one and the same time more democratic and engaging and undermines the institutional arrangements that made those processes more stable and protective during Fordism.
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The discourse on prosumption and prosumers also lends legitimacy to the privatization of work. Workers are reconceptualized in the digital discourse as atomized nodes of entrepreneurship in the network of social production. The seemingly ad hoc, contractual, egalitarian, dehierarchized relations that usually characterize market relations between producers and consumers are transplanted into the relations of production. The discourse on network production is therefore “class-blind”; individuals are reconceptualized as nodes in the network, equal to all other nodes, competing on the shared and leveled playing field of the network. That means that everything that is not translated directly into profit (i.e., everything that is not a contributing component in the process of production) is privatized. Workers become entrepreneurs, selling not their labor power, but the fruits (and only the most ripe of which) of this labor power (on the entrepreneurialization of workers see Huws 2003, 98).
Put in the broader theoretical context of this book, in the digital discourse network production is constructed as a transcendence of the pitfalls of industrial and Fordist production, which entailed a hierarchy between producers and entrepreneurs on the one hand and consumers and workers on the other hand; alienation of the worker from the productive process; suppression of creativity and personal expression; the massification of production and consumption, and so forth.
What we see with these new narratives regarding network production follows the key observation offered by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (2005). The digital discourse offers at one and the same time an affirmation and inclusion of the humanist critique of capitalism into the spirit of contemporary techno-capitalism, and a rejection and exclusion of its social critique. At the same time that the new spirit of networks promises more engaging roles for individuals in the process of production, it also accepts and naturalizes the individualization, atomization, and privatization of work life, and the liquidation, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) imagery, of protective structures and mechanisms. As it promises more flexibility and creativity, the spirit of networks also accepts and legitimates greater precariousness, instability, and vulnerability.
Moreover, in the digital discourse the humanist demands for decentralization, dehierarchization, debureaucratization, more individual empowerment and satisfaction (i.e., criteria judged by the conditions of the labor process), go hand in hand with the traditional demands of capitalism for productivity (judged by the quality and quantity of the end result of production). Through the axial notion of network production, these two demands are now seen as mutually constitutive. More productivity demands individual freedom, it demands that creativity and personal expression would be brought to bear on the productive process. And at the same time it also demands the atomization of workers, their adaptability and flexibility, and so forth.
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Technology plays a central role as a source of social change in the digital discourse, transforming them in a direction that reduces and even eliminates class antagonism, which dominated industrial capitalism, and that was brought under tight political control with the construction of the Fordist social compact (see Chapter 1). As the means of production are decentralized and democratized, the digital discourse presumes, so are social relations in general. Network technology provides a fix that speaks to both system and lifeword (Habermas 1984). On the one hand, it answers the systemic demands of the economy—rationality, productivity, and growth—by facilitating a mode of production that is more rational and efficient, and musters more creative and productive forces. On the other hand, network technology answers the demands of lifeword, the other half in the promise of modernity for human emancipation and liberation through life activity, through work.
In this respect, the digital discourse represents not disengagement with the traditional critique of capitalism, but a continuation thereof. In the language of Boltanski, the digital discourse shows network technology to be a means that better capitalism in two senses: it gives better responses to the internal demands inherent in capitalism (such as assuring the infinite process of accumulation), while at the same time changes how capitalism works so as to alleviate many of the humanist critiques of capitalism (such as the demand for a less alienating, more satisfying and creative work process).
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C H A P T E R 6
Network Human
In the previous three chapters we have seen the digital discourse’s treatment of the integration of network technology and central components of the economic mechanisms of contemporary capitalism: the market, work life, and the process of production. The analysis offered an explanatory framework according to which the digital discourse legitimates the new constellations of power entailed by the rise of the contemporary phase of post-Fordist capitalism. A central concern of these chapters has been humans and how the transformations of market, work, and production transform their lives. After all, they are still the objects and subjects of the digital discourse, a discourse that is concerned primarily (though not exclusively, as we will see in the Chapter 7) with the human condition.
As the material and technological conditions of humans change, so do they, or at least our understanding of what it means to be human. As Gramsci has taught us, the intensified rationalization of production and work that characterized industrial societies at the beginning of the twentieth century also required a new type of human (Gramsci 1971, 297) who would facilitate the emergence of a Fordist mode of accumulation. The new, Fordist “methods of work,” Gramsci postulates, “are inseparable from a specific mode of living and of thinking and feeling life” (Gramsci 1971, 302). In the specific context of Fordism, Gramsci writes, “Life in industry demands a general apprenticeship, a process of psycho-physical adaptation to specific conditions of work, nutrition, housing, customs, etc. This is not something ‘natural’ or innate, but has to be acquired” (Gramsci 1971, 296). A new mode of production and social regulation entails new modes of experiencing life and new perceptions of the individual, its body, and its identity (Lowe 1995; Shilling 2005). Gramsci summarizes the American phenomenon of Fordism as “the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of purpose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and of man” (Gramsci 1971, 302). Thus, with the shift to post-Fordism and new modes of production and work, the current chapter examines the digital discourse on the intersection of network technology and humans.
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More specifically, I will ask, What does it mean to be human in a digital civilization? What, according to the digital discourse, is the new conception of humans in a network society? How is the intersection of network technology with humans understood? I will be particularly interested in understanding the ways in which the new network human fits into the networks of market, work, and production—that is, into the post-Fordist situation. The narratives regarding the network human are organized around four facets, or sites, of the human: body, mind, identity, and the unconscious, moving as it were from physical and material facets through the cognitive to self-identification and, ultimately, the unconscious components of the human.
Network Body
THE BODY SIMULACRUM
Let me begin with an image that appeared in “Electric Word,” a longstanding feature in Wired capturing the current lingo and discourse of the digital society through short expositions of people, events, technologies, and cultural artifacts. The feature’s May 2002 edition presents an artwork by Alba D’Urbano in a short piece entitled “Second Skin” (Moreno 2002). The artwork is a suit tailored from a fabric and printed with an image of the artist’s naked body. The photo shows a model wearing a suit of a naked female body (Figure 6.1). Why is this artwork—which has seemingly nothing to do with network technology—featured in Wired? What is the meaning of this artwork in the context of the digital society? Why is it an important enough cultural expression—in the eyes of Wired—to be counted as an “Electric Word”?
This artwork, I want to suggest, encapsulates a key narrative of the digital discourse concerning the meaning of being human in a digital age. It does that by undermining the modernist conceptions of “the human” as a distinct, autonomous entity demarcated from its environment, quasi-transcendental, unique (or singular) in its capacity for subjectivity. Admittedly subtle and suggestive and through a specific facet of the human—the body—this artwork nevertheless delivers a poignant exposition of the critical stance of the digital discourse concerning the “human” by undercutting humanism’s constitutive human/nonhuman distinction, as well as a few other derivative distinctions (subject/object, nature/culture, and human/technology).
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