---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: "9781349379743"
library_document_id: "8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a"
source_sha256: "e0fe4a3ba71da0975703fbe21f2c5c2e3d53a0d1fcbd04a49eae35190fe90a6f"
pdf_physical_page_count: 258
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 80
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a?start=80&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a.md?start=80&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a.md?start=70&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a.md?start=90&limit=10"
---
# Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks
> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=80 | PRINTED_PAGE=76
3–34, 157–59). In neoliberal theory the market is seen metaphorically as a machine for the coordination of the interests and actions of free individuals in a rational benevolent fashion. In the digital discourse, and with the introduction of network technology, this machine is no longer merely a metaphor; it is a reality, assumed to reaffirm and fortify the neoliberal claims. Thus, Thomas Friedman—who perhaps more than anyone in the public sphere epitomizes the synergy of network technology and neoliberalism—can write, “The Internet offers the closest thing to a perfectly competitive market in the world today” (Friedman 2000, 81). And Milton Friedman, the most prominent figure in neoliberal thinking in America, recently made similar assertions, noting that “the Internet . . . moves us closer to ‘perfect information’ on markets” (Friedman 2006). By percolating through a technologistic framework, the postulates of neoliberalism are added a gloss of realism by which they are vindicated and affirmed not only intellectually but also technologically.
That technology seems to vindicate a particular political and economic system is of course not unprecedented. In a work of history, Otto Mayr examines the discourse on the technology of the mechanical clock in seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Europe (Mayr 1986). He shows the role that this technology played as a metaphor in the political discourse of the day. What is most striking about his account is that the clock came to serve as a metaphor for two conflicting political doctrines. In the European continent, the mechanical structure and operation of that technology confirmed in the eyes of contemporaries the neutrality and superiority of an authoritarian conception of order.7 Political order, like the regularities and order produced by the clock, is superior when it has a maker. In the same vein, that the self-regulating clock was constructed by a maker served as a metaphor for God as the ultimate source of authority.
The English, on the other hand, vigorously rejected the metaphor of the clock as a validation of authority. In England, where liberalism was experimented with in political life, the clock (and other automata technologies, as these were called) came to play a central role in reaffirming the liberal idea of a spontaneous, self-regulated order. Most notably to our discussion here, Adam Smith and David Hume found in the operation of self-regulated machines the material affirmation for the liberal operation of the market, which they could only have envisioned in the abstract (see Mayr 1986, chap. 10). For both Smith and Hume, it was liberty, rather than authority, that was affirmed by these machines.
76
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=81 | PRINTED_PAGE=77
“UPGRADING” HABERMAS’S MARKET LEGITIMIZATION
As we can see, technology discourse is well linked with the history of political legitimation. In his essay, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” Habermas (1970) lays out a history of market legitimation whereby a legitimation based on the principles of political economy à la neoclassical economics, that is, on the internal workings of the market, is replaced by another, external legitimation with the emergence of the welfare social democratic state and, more broadly, the emergence of Fordist society. It is from this point onward that political practice is measured in terms of the technical problems at hand rather than in substantive terms. The role of politics is reduced to finding the technical means to achieve goals (such as economic growth) that are in themselves understood to lie outside the realm of politics (Habermas 1970, 100–103). Technology is ideological to the extent that political issues are treated as technical issues: tensions and contradictions are overcome by delimiting the scope of the political, and, as a result, the instrumental rationality of technical language colonizes the sphere of politics.
Habermas writes at the zenith of Keynesianism, when the state is still very much involved in the administration of the capitalist economy. This administration of the economy is in fact the source of political legitimation. But this is politics “light,” in Habermas’s view; it is politics limited to technical administration: “Insofar as government action is directed toward the economic system’s stability and growth, politics now takes on a peculiarly negative character. For it is oriented toward the elimination of dysfunctions and the avoidance of risks that threatens the system: not, in other words, toward the realization ofpractical goals but toward the solution oftechnicalproblems” (102–3). Habermas further outlines the circular and reinforcing relations between technical rationality and politics in the context of the welfare state. Incidentally, he also launches a critique on the postindustrial thesis and its underlying technologistic bent. With minimal modifications, this description might also apply to the operation of the digital discourse in contemporary political culture:
It is true that social interests still determine the direction, functions and pace of technical progress. But these interests define the social system so much as a whole that they coincide with the interest of maintaining the system. As such the private form of capital utilization and a distribution mechanism for social rewards that guarantees the loyalty of the masses are removed from discussion. The quasi-autonomous progress of science and technology then appears as an independent variable on which the most important single system variable, namely economic growth, depends. Thus arises a perspective in which the development of the social system seems to be determined by the logic of scientific-technical progress. The immanent law of this progress seems to produce objective exigencies, which must be obeyed by any politics oriented toward functional needs. But when this semblance has taken root effectively, then propaganda can refer to the role of technology and science in order to explain and legitimate why in modern societies the process of democratic decision-making about practical problems loses its function and ‘must’ be replaced by plebiscitary decisions about alternative sets of leaders of administrative personnel [i.e., technocracy] . . . it can also become a background ideology that penetrates into the consciousness of the depoliticized mass of the population, where it can take on legitimating power. It is a singular achievement of this ideology to detach society’s self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action and from the concepts of symbolic interaction and replace it with a scientific model. Accordingly, the culturally defined self-understanding of a social life-world is replaced by the self-reification of men under categories of purposive-rational action and adaptive behavior. (105–6)
Network Market
77
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=82 | PRINTED_PAGE=78
Science and technology are presented as the central axis of social development; this in turn requires the technical administration of system; finally, questions that should have been addressed politically by citizens (through communicative action) are subjected to purposive rational (i.e., technical) considerations to be resolved by system experts. The result of this postindustrial, or technocratic, condition is “the disappearance of the difference between purposive-rational action and interaction from the consciousness not only of the sciences of man, but of men themselves. The concealment of this difference proves the ideological power of the technocratic consciousness” (107). This is then an ideological phenomenon: “The ideological nucleus of this consciousness is the elimination of the distinction between the practical and the technical” (113)—that is, the elimination of the distinction between substantive (ends) and instrumental (means). Technology as ideology “severs the criteria for justifying the organization of social life from any normative regulation of interaction, thus depoliticizing them. It anchors them instead in functions of a putative system of purposive-rational action” (112). The depoliticizing effect of this is quite obvious: “The new politics of state interventionism,” he says, “requires a depoliticization of the mass of the population. To the extent that practical questions are eliminated, the public realm also loses its political function” (103–4).
Now, with the shift to post-Fordism—that is, with the marketization of society and the disorganization of the economy—technology discourse in contemporary times no longer serves as the legitimation for political power to technically manage the capitalist economy. Instead, it serves as the legitimation for political power to take a step back from the capitalist economy. With the rise of neoliberalism as the economic dogma of contemporary society, and as the state withdraws from the economy, market legitimation has now returned to what Habermas identifies as the old model of market legitimation—classical political economy based on the internal workings of the market—but with a technologistic twist.
78
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=83 | PRINTED_PAGE=79
It is in this respect that the digital discourse is most crucial. It offers a renewed confidence in the market as a superior medium of economic and social life based on its improvements by technological means. The reason for the state to recede, and for the market to dominate is due to the materialization and perfection of the workings of the market by technological means. The legitimation of the market can rest entirely on technology. Contemporary technology discourse legitimizes not the intervention of the state in the economy but instead its withdrawal; not the external managing of the market, but the need of politics to let the market self-regulate. The goals have changed, but the underlying depoliticizing ramifications of technology discourse that Habermas was concerned with still persist.
It is in this context that the narratives of the digital discourse discussed in this chapter (as well as in the following chapters) are relevant. The ideas of spontaneous order, infinite prosperity, classless society, and market democratization—woven into network technology, integrated into the very medium where the social now takes place—reassert what for the good part of the twentieth century has been harshly criticized: the superiority of the market—open, frictionless, unhindered, and most importantly insulated from any political intervention—as a medium for social relations. In this respect, the digital discourse has the same ideological thrust as neoliberalism, as succinctly identified by Duggan (2003): “The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance . . . is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique” (Duggan 2003, xiv). Previous critiques of capitalism (most notably Marx’s) were aimed at the political economy underlying market legitimation, from Smith to Hayek. Through recourse to a technologistic framework, the digital discourse offers the rhetorical means by which neoliberal tenets are upheld and the critique of capitalism is bypassed.
Markets are not the only systems that are transformed by network technology; the whole system of production changes as well. The next two chapters present the digital discourse on these transformations. Chapter 4 focuses on the ramifications of network technology for the traditional (or industrial) world of work, mostly within the confines of the workplace and the company. Chapter 5 focuses on new forms of work and production brought about by network technology and taking place outside of these traditional sites.
Network Market
79
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=84 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Network Work
In critical social theory, technology occupies a central role in the organization and distribution of power. Foucault, for example, sees the capilarization and disciplinarization of power in modernity as tied to science and technology. The shift from overt authoritative control to implicit disciplinary control entails the emergence of disciplining techniques. Subjectification and self-disciplining through the construction of a panoptic space is a prime example of such technique (Foucault 1995). Technologies, even in the narrowest sense of tools or machines, are a particular case of Foucault’s indivisible knowledge/power nexus; they are a phenotype of both knowledge and power and cannot be analyzed solely in terms of one or the other (Foucault 1994). More recently, Bruno Latour upheld the indivisibility of knowledge—in the form of technology— from social relations, stating that “technology is society made durable” (Latour 1991), and Castells concurs, saying “technology is society, and society cannot be understood and represented without its technological tools” (Castells 1996, 5).
A somewhat similar position regarding the nexus of technology and power can also be found in the Marxist tradition. Here, technology is seen as part and parcel of a class struggle. For Marx, the mode of production is a product of a dialectical play between relations of production and forces of production. In this formulation, technology, as a force of production, constitutes and is constituted by social relations (see Figure 4.1).
Hence, research along Marxist lines sought to unravel this nexus and uncover the component of power within technology. It sought to show how technology was not simply a force of production, that is, a rational, universal tool waiting to be deployed for the service of humans, as the Weberian framework of rationalization suggests (Weber 1978, 67; Hård 1994, 16), but rather is submerged in social relations and is a tool of class struggle. Most research on technology in the Marxist tradition focused on technologies of production, assuming that the reproduction of capitalism took place within the confines of the work process itself. Groundbreaking studies, such as Harry Braverman’s and David Noble’s, have shown that major technological developments were introduced into the labor process as part of a class struggle. Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) analyzed Taylorism and the fragmentation of the labor process in terms of the deskilling of workers, that is, the dwindling down of the most precious resource that labor has vis-à-vis capital, its skills. Noble’s Forces ofProduction (1984) further showed that the technologies of choice in the workplace were those that transferred more control over the production process from workers to managers. These choices reflect not simply the dictates of technical rationality, but stem from a compulsion, rooted in capitalism, for total control over the labor process (Feenberg 1991, 35). The ramifications of deskilling and diminishing control of labor over the work process brought about by technology was well understood by eighteenth-century Luddites, either tacitly or explicitly (Robins and Webster 1985). In short, and as numerous other studies along this line have shown, technologies play a central role in the power struggle between workers and capital, with the general trend being the weakening of the former vis-à-vis the latter (Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Aronowitz 2001; Huws 2003; Greenbaum 1995; Dyer-Witheford 1999; Noble 1995).
C H A P T E R 4
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=85 | PRINTED_PAGE=82
In this formulation technologies of production are central tools in the reproduction of social relations, and technology in the workplace plays a central role in the reproduction of a capitalist class structure throughout the industrial era. But how, according to the digital discourse, does this nexus of technology, work, and class change with the introduction of network technology into the equation? What does the new nexus look like? This chapter examines the digital discourse at the intersection of network technology and the world of work. It asks what, according to the digital discourse, happens to the workplace, and the world of work in general, upon its integration into network technology. This chapter explores these questions through three narratives. The first narrative concerns the blurred boundaries between work and leisure, work space and life space, and work time and private time. The second narrative concerns the blurred boundaries between capitalists and workers, bosses and employees, that is, those who own the means of production and those who do not. These two narratives, I suggest, downplay the significance of power in the new informational mode of production and give prominence to network technology as the sole coordinate of social power. This conceptual move is further explored in the third theme, which highlights the prominence of professionalism and meritocracy and the centrality of network technology in their construction. Network technology becomes for the informational worker not only an instrument and a vehicle to define his class position but also the prime source of the self, a central axis to define the worker’s social position.
82
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=86 | PRINTED_PAGE=83
The chapter concludes by offering a theoretical framework to understand these new narratives. Network work, according to the digital discourse, creates a new constellation of technology, work, and power. The workplace become more flattened and dehierarchized, work becomes more decentralized and eroticized, and workers become more liberated. In contrast to industrial technology and the organization of work that sprouted from it—which were oppressive, heavy handed, and authoritarian, rendering workers cogs in a big machine—network technology and network work are more liberating, allowing more personal expression and freedom. These transformations in the workplace are presented by the digital discourse as undermining the industrial notion of class. These new narratives constitute a new spirit of networks that locates network work as a response to the humanist critique of industrial technology and industrial capitalism and that, at the same time, downplays a response to the social critique. In other words, the discourse on network work legitimates a new trade-off between alienation and exploitation: as it promises to mitigate alienation, it conditions this mitigation by the exacerbation of exploitation.
The nexus of network technology, work, and class in the digital discourse can be illustrated through the analysis of a new persona, or a new subjectivity, that permeates the digital discourse on work: the digerati. The term “digerati” is a compound of “digital” and “literati” and denotes, according to Wikipedia,1 “the elite of the computer industry and online communities.” The digerati are the carriers of the “spirit of informationalism,” in Castells’ terms (1996, 195), or the spirit of networks, in mine. The digerati—mostly men (Stewart Millar 1996)—work in and around information technology, usually at the forefront of the development, financing, and deployment of that industry. The digerati, and the social group to which they belong, have been variably referred to as “informational workers” (Castells 1996), “symbolic analysts” (Reich 1991), the “virtual intelligentsia” (Lovink 2002), the “virtual class” (Barbrook and Cameron 1996), and the “creative class” (Florida 2003). The term “digerati” is frequently used in Wired.2 Indeed, Wired addresses chiefly the digerati and plays a central role in the articulation and construction of the identity of this new social category. The digerati are defined first and foremost by their work, specifically their engagement with network technology. Their presentation in the magazine is therefore an appropriate locus to explore the new nexus of network technology and work.
Network Work
83
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=87 | PRINTED_PAGE=84
One of the most elaborate and crystallized portrayals of the digerati in Wired can be found in “Microserfs” (Coupland 1994), a fictional story about seven Microsoft employees told in the first person by one of them. This literary piece (written by novelist Douglas Coupland, a leading voice in the digital culture, and later published as a book with the same title in 1995) encapsulates the “essence” of the digerati as a new social category, specifically, as a new type of worker. Let us follow the subjective experiences of the informational worker as represented in “Microserfs,” as well as a few other articles in the magazine.
The Blurred Boundaries between Work and Leisure
According to the digital discourse, network technology facilitates the blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, between productive time and free time, between office space and home space. This means that work is ever present and can be performed everywhere, but it also entails the infusion of creativity, joy, and personal expression into work and, in turn, the dealienation of work. The digerati is a new subjectivity that embodies a profound transformation in the notion of work from the Fordist to the post-Fordist workplace. It is no longer the image of the worker going from his home space to his work space in order to labor, only to retreat afterward to his leisure activities. The distinction between work and leisure is thus blurred.
This blurring is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this blurring commonly entails the colonization of leisure by work to the extent that work seems to define and structure the digerati’s personal lives.
84
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=88 | PRINTED_PAGE=85
One indication of that is simply the amount of time that the workers in “Microserfs” spend at work. While one of their colleagues is reported to be locked in his room at 2:30 a.m., trying to solve a problem with the code he is writing, the other Microserfs are heading to the supermarket, which is “completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people” (Coupland 1994). Elsewhere in the story, the protagonist wonders whether a co-worker—whose eyes are “all red and sore”—ever sleeps. But the penetration of work into leisure time is not just a quantitative matter: private life is overwhelmed by work life. As the protagonist of “Microserfs” grudgingly admits, “Microsoft is not conductive to relationships.” He tries, he acknowledges, to get other things going, “but then work takes over my life,” leaving him with “work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep” (Coupland 1994). This description is reminiscent of Marx’s lament about the alienating effects of (industrial) labor, where the worker “feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most also on his dwelling and in personal adornment—while in his human functions he is reduced to an animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal” (Marx 1995, 99).
But for the most part, the blurring between on duty and off duty is seen as positive progress by the digerati and as a trend that allows the injection of creativity, joy, and personal expression into work, or the “erotization” of the workplace in Marcuse’s (1974) terms (see also Agger 2004). The blurring of work and leisure can be seen, for example, in the production of new workspaces that openly incorporate leisure ethics and culture. This is evident at a symbolic level: work no longer takes place in a factory but on a “campus” (Coupland 1994). Work is a place where “research and development,” “intellectual work,” “creative work,” and the “analysis of symbols”—to name just few of the neologisms associated with network work—substitute labor. Work in a campus is not so much about production as it is about creativity and contemplation.
This blurring is also evident on a spatial level. An illustration in a special issue of Wired, guest edited by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, shows the network workspace to be explicitly designed to blur the distinction between the rationalized, productionist, public, and disciplined world of work and the eroticized, irrational, consumerist, and private world of leisure.3 This space combines elements of work (or social reproduction), such as computer stations and small cubicles, with elements of a more social and eroticized space (pertaining to social communication), like a coffeehouse and a living room; as the text accompanying the image explains, “the lobby looks like a living room, a cluster of workstations like a café” (Koolhaas 2003). The title of the article—“Where Do You Want to Work Today?”— implies a more lenient, flexible approach to work. It is not only that workers can decide where it is they are going to work: in front of a computer, at the coffee bar, or on the couch in the living room; more important, perhaps, is that work itself is reconstrued in terms of leisure, involving—in this case— personal, consumer-like choices (where do you want to work? the “cubicle,” the “café,” or the “living room”?—it’s your choice). At the same time, these sites of leisure are also reconstituted as spaces of work.
Network Work
85
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=89 | PRINTED_PAGE=86
The blurring of the time and space of work and that of leisure, with the liberating undertones of a workspace that feels like home or a coffee shop, is reiterated in two advertisements for mobile technology. Their analysis also allows a glimpse into the unvoiced and underplayed hegemonic meanings of such blurring. In both, mobility—afforded by network technology—implies more opportunities and more freedom by liberating individuals from the constraints of the traditional workspace. But what is the nature of this freedom? What kind of emancipation does mobile technology promise to deliver?
The first advertisement, for Verizon Wireless (2004), depicts a woman dressed in a business suit seated on a platform of a train station and working on her laptop. The advertisement’s copy reads, “Even if the train’s late, your work gets out on schedule.” The digerati, the new informational workers, process information rather than matter and are therefore able to break free from the industrial anchors of space and time, from the shop floor of production. But in this freedom, afforded by network technology, lies also its dialectics. Inasmuch as the digerati are liberated from the particular space of work, they also potentially become workers at all times. The mies-en-scène of the advertisement could just as well be the woman’s bedroom before she goes to sleep or a hotel room on her vacation. The digerati, who no longer subscribe to the old dichotomy of work and leisure, work time and playtime, find themselves at work, or in a capacity to work, at potentially all times and all spaces. It is not only the café that penetrates the workspace; it is also work that penetrates the café.
The opportunity and freedom afforded by mobile technology links leisure to work in a manner that makes their demarcation more flexible and makes it easier for companies to colonize the time of their employees by making the technologies of production (such as mobile phones, laptop computers, and above all, Internet connectivity) available to workers at all times. As the text openly says, “You can always count on Verizon Wireless . . . So keep productivity on schedule across the U.S.” (Verizon Wireless 2004; emphasis mine). The blurring boundaries between work and leisure results in the expansion of productive time and space; mobility turns out to be a new force of production, and freedom turns out, in this case, to be the freedom to work during one’s leisure time.
86
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a.md?start=90&limit=10)