Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks

According to the digital discourse, network production brings about a shift in business culture as well. Larry Huston, an executive with Proctor & Gamble, depicts “the current R&D model” as “broken.” To overcome this crisis, the current model of tenured positions within R&D departments is replaced by a new employment model, which is flexible, ad hoc, and project-based—in short, networked. The locus of production becomes decreasingly the company, or the organization, and increasingly the network itself, an assemblage of disparate productive nodes that gather ad hoc for a particular project (Castells 1996, 168–72). Hence, from the point of view of companies, network production is seen as a solution to the constraints and limitations set forth by what a company is. It is instructive to recall here the etymology of the word. “Company” is a derivative of “companion,” from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread),⁹ literally meaning “one who eats bread with another.”¹⁰ According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was first used in the twelfth century to mean “a body of soldiers” and in the sixteenth century came to mean “business association.” It is precisely the sense of communality, mutual responsibility, and exclusivity—sedimented in the etymology of the word company—that the new ethos of network production resists, revolutionizes, and in fact wishes to wither away.

Companies therefore increasingly open up to the network of talent, intellect, and knowledge that lies outside of their boundaries and incorporate the new spirit of networks into their operation. Proctor & Gamble’s shift to a network model is a case in point. In the past, the company was characterized by an “insular” corporate culture, which won it the nickname “the Kremlin on the Ohio” (Howe 2006). It first adopted the network architecture in-house, realizing that “cross-pollination” between different departments was a good thing for creativity and productivity. Later, it had become even more open, connecting to a much larger network via InnoCentive. This, says Huston, “changed how we define the organization . . . We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks. The line between the two is hard to draw” (Howe 2006).

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From the point of view of companies and in terms of production, the line is indeed hard to draw; knowledge and labor pertinent to a particular ad hoc project or product are dispersed over the whole network of production. But from the point of view of workers, the line between themselves and the network of which they are nodes seems, in some respects, to be getting ever thicker and more impenetrable due to the redefinition of “work” and, in effect, the dismantling of this social category.

D_ISMANT_LING “W_ORK”

In the discourse on network production, workers are redefined as independent freelancers who are compensated solely for their successful accomplishment (i.e., for the end product they sell, rather than for their labor) and who bear all the costs of their work: equipment, training, unproductive time due to illness, health and other types of insurance, and so forth. In other words, they are piece workers.

All these costs are constructed in the discourse on network production as “externalities”—that is, socially necessary costs that are not accounted for in the compensation system (between workers and employers) or in the price system (between sellers and buyers). Instead, these costs are transferred to individual workers—that is, desocialized, or privatized. For example, Melcarek’s success story encapsulates—almost by construction—another story that remains latent in the article: that of all the other “solvers” who worked on that particular challenge but could not find a solution or who were too late in finding one. Had they been included in the story, we would have gotten quite a different picture. First, the amount of “brainpower” that had gone to waste (i.e., that was not directed into the accumulation process) would have undermined the universality of the argument that the network architecture marks a greater economic rationality.¹¹ It would in fact uncover the extent to which a networked mode of production such as InnoCentive is economically more rational only from the point of view of companies rather than the system, or society, as a whole.

And second, such depiction would have made clearer the transfer of risks from companies to individuals. This transfer of risks can also be conceived in terms of the privatization of the relations between companies and workers. In network production, companies meet workers at the marketplace to perform a specific task and then part ways. The neologisms that dot the digital discourse succinctly crystallize these new social relations. On the InnoCentive Web site, companies are called “seekers,” workers are called “solvers,” and work (or the problems to be solved) is referred to as a “challenge.” In the mere handful of articles on network production analyzed here, there is almost no mention of the concept of “work” or “labor.” The social category and subject formerly known as “worker” has almost completely evaporated in the digital discourse and is instead referred to by a plethora of other labels, which are themselves very revealing. They can be categorized into three fields of meaning— flexibility, democracy, and creativity and passion—all of which succinctly encapsulate the radical transformations of work entailed in network production. Table 5.1 presents a summary of these terms.

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While the digital discourse hails the lax, flexible, and ad hoc relations between employers and employees (exemplified in the formula “the strength of weak ties”; Howe 2006; emphasis mine), it suggests that network production actually further ties the relations between the company and worker. Proctor & Gamble’s Larry Huston says, “People mistake this [crowdsourcing] for outsourcing, which it most definitely is not . . . Outsourcing is when I hire someone to perform a service and they do it and that’s the end of the relationship. That’s not much different from the way employment has worked throughout the ages. We’re talking about bringingpeople infrom the outside and involving them in this broadly creative, collaborative process. That’s a whole new paradigm” (Howe 2006; emphasis mine).

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The new paradigm, according to Huston, is a tighter, more meaningful collaboration between company and workers. But such collaboration is based on the reconstitution of both company and workers as two independent and autonomous nodes of network production. Paradoxically, the atomization and privatization of work and the worker are presented as preconditions for a new paradigm of production relations, a paradigm that is ultimately more intimate and satisfying. In other words, a process of separation and clear demarcation is needed in order to then build healthier relations. The collaboration of these independent nodes in the new capitalism’s network production substitutes the symbiotic relations between company and workers in the old capitalism—a paradigm that had proved, according to the digital discourse, to be no longer viable, if not completely dysfunctional.

PASSION AND PARTICIPATION

Another important case study of network production is that of Lego. Its story is told in the article “Geeks in Toyland” (Koerner 2006), which tells of how the Lego company is using network technology in order to harness individuals to help in the development and design of its products. Since this is a cover story, the cover image features a sea of Lego figurines, fading into the horizon. The figurines are all identical; their faces wear an expression of resolute determination (see Figure 5.2). The teaser reads, “The Lego Army wants you: How obsessed fans are helping Lego reinvent the world’s coolest toy” (Cover 2006). While the image shows Lego figurines and the title refers to “The Lego Army,” both the figurines and the army refer not to something that Lego possesses, but to something Lego can tap into precisely without possessing. The cover art seems to resonate with the fantasy of employers regarding the network: that the network promises a sea of fans, enthusiasts, amateurs, and hobbyists—in short, nonorganized, atomized, and docile units of labor power—eager to be given the privilege to harness their creativity and passion and participate in a business project.

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The means by which the crowd is being mobilized for production purposes through network production are varied. Increasingly, these means have become so dominant as to be almost invisible. For example, it has become a commonplace for software companies to release “unfinished” products to the market. This is sometimes done implicitly (such as the case with many Microsoft products, released knowingly with undetected defects, or “bugs”) or explicitly (such as the case with “lab” and beta products of Google). In both cases, consumers take an active part (either consciously or unconsciously) in the production process by serving as testers or quality control workers, or even by actively correcting problems and offering improvements. Prosumption in this case entails the transference of part of the production costs on to consumers.

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In the case of Lego, the involvement of consumers was prompted at a much earlier stage. When it wanted to upgrade its robot kit Mindstorms, “Lego didn’t even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design” (Koerner 2006). As one of the fans/engineers who was mobilized for the MUP reveals, “I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too . . . We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined” (Koerner 2006). In this case, Lego was pushing the envelope in terms of how much of the production process was transferred to consumers.

The digital discourse tells not only of the obvious benefits of network production for producers but also of the newfound opportunities for individuals to collaborate and take a meaningful part in a creative process (as the last quote from one of the MUPers reveals). As the production process becomes networked—that is, more democratic and participatory—people have greater opportunity to take part in shaping the material world they live in: in this case, their toys. As the story continues, it oscillates between the narrative of prosumption as a source of profit and the narrative of prosumption as a new mode of collaboration and individual opportunities. It is instructive to follow how those two narratives are interwoven in the story of Lego’s Mindstorms.

To develop Mindstorms, Lego recruited four engineers—who are also “obsessed fans” of Lego—who for eleven months “were de facto Lego employees” with “one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck” (Koerner 2006). Not only were they not getting paid, they even paid some of the expenses related to their work, such as airfare for meetings in Lego’s headquarters in Denmark. The four panelists, however, saw no problem with that: “They [Lego] actually want our opinion?” enthuses one of them. “It doesn’t get much better than that.” The satisfaction that comes from taking a significant role in a creative process substitutes more traditional forms of compensation; to be part of the productive network is taken to be compensatory enough in the digital discourse.

This enthusiasm translates into consumption practices as well. As the article reports, “such loyalty isn’t unusual among the fanboys” of Mindstorms, who also made it Lego’s all-time bestselling product (Koerner 2006). The spirit of network production no longer follows the traditional separation between producers who labor hard to create a fun toy and consumers who play joyously with it; now it is the fun and playfulness of consumers that are mobilized and fed back into the production process. In this move, the toil of tedious, unsatisfactory work clears way for work as fun. And because it is fun—because it is about satisfaction, self-fulfillment, and creativity—traditional pay is cleared out of the way as well.

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MOBI_LIZING N_ETWORK Q_UA_LITI_ES TO PROD_UCTION

From the point of view of Lego, outsourcing the development of Mindstorms had nothing to do with economic gains, according to the article, but rather was a more radical attempt to take advantage of the new and promising qualities of networks. “The boldest part of the Mindstorms overhaul,” the article argues, “is Lego’s decision to outsource its innovation to a panel of citizen developers” (Koerner 2006; emphasis mine). In this language, workers, professionals, and engineers are deemed citizen developers. The use of the word “citizen” distinguishes them from the bureaucratized ranks of Lego employees. Their identity as citizens, rather than the rank and file of the Lego organization, supposedly unfetters in them some quality (Creativity? Joy?) that is deemed missing from Lego employees. For Lego, network production is likened to bringing in a breath of fresh air (with “citizens”) and ventilating the stultifying closed ranks of a military-like institution. Like the aforementioned “white lab coat” (Howe 2006), “citizen developers” also connotes the army as the archetypical bureaucratic organization.

Network production, according to the digital discourse, offers a revitalization of a dead-end production process, reigniting it with enthusiasm and fresh creativity. The article even recommends that this production strategy be imported to other Lego products: “Who,” it asks rhetorically, “would know better how to improve the company’s building systems than the people who spend hundreds of hours preparing for Brickfest [a convention of Lego fans] every year?” (Koerner 2006). Play, creativity, fun, enthusiasm, and leisure—features associated with the consumption of Lego products—are rendered forces of production in the digital discourse. Instead of wasting them, network production allows for their commodification and introduction into the production process of knowledge-intensive components, and in turn increases their value. The move, therefore, is complementary: network production accommodates the “libidinal” energies of workers, and these energies, in turn become new forces of production.

Concurrently, underlying this model is the assumption that since such play is done anyway, it requires no compensation. The rationalization is similar to other cases of nonpaid labor, such as child care and housework, which are perceived to be done by women “anyway,” or even “naturally,”

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and are therefore not regarded as demanding monetary incentives and compensations. The article makes this assumption more explicit by theorizing the phenomenon using Eric von Hippel’s thesis (put forth in his book Democratizing Innovation [2006]), which argues that “the joy of the learning associated with membership in creative communities drives people to generously share their time” (Koerner 2006). Indeed, the relations between consumers and producers brought about by network production are described not with a vocabulary of economic rationality but with terms belonging to the irrational and the erotic; they are based not on interests but on love. “The MUPers,” the reporter says, “weren’t getting paid. But they were playing a vital role in shaping a product they loved.” And one of the MUPers readily admits, “If it had been any company other than Lego, I wouldn’t be here” (Koerner 2006).

Prosumption, and more generally network production, therefore, not only reduces the cost of production and taps into the talent of amateurs, or highly skilled individuals, or into the smartness of the network. In addition, it allows the creation of a circular feedback channel—or cybernetics, in Norbert Wiener’s terms (1965)—between people’s deepest feelings about products on the one hand and the process of their making on the other. Network production—in this case of a Lego product—is able to mobilize a force of production that becomes increasingly significant in the new economy: knowledge. What is more, it is knowledge that seems to be decreasingly that of books and theories (i.e., abstract, universal, rational, and conscious) and increasingly that of the everyday experience (i.e., practical, particular, emotional, concrete, and unconscious). It is knowledge that is made concrete, for example, through playful engagement with a Lego product in one’s leisure time.

Whatever it is that “citizen developers” have and Lego employees do not, it is clear that network production is seen as a mechanism of extracting new forces of production from consumers and integrating them into the production process. Forces of production that can in fact only be materialized in the very act of consumption: wants, desires, joy, and so forth. Network production is seen as a mechanism to mobilize this kind of dispersed and intangible knowledge that solely consumers possess. In fact, according to the analysis presented in the article, the incentive for Lego to move to an open network model of production was that its products were beginning to be too cut off from consumer’s demands; they began to be too abstract and theoretical.

But what is mobilized from consumers for the process of production is not just their creativity, ideas, and labor power but also their commitment and loyalty as consumers. It is quite ironic that while networks are presumed in the digital discourse to require and predicate an ethic of flexible, ad hoc, noncommitted relations between employers and workers, when it come to the relations between producers and consumers the network is seen as facilitating an ethic of stronger intimacy and tighter relations. As the article suggests, “relying on the MUP is a gamble that Lego hopes will lead not only to a better product but also to a tighter, more trusting bond between corporation and customer” (Koerner 2006; emphasis mine). The open source model can help not only in the production process but also in marketing: “Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates a buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products like Mindstorms that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism.” In the spirit of democratization, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, hopes that in the future every Mindstorms customer will “be able to have an effect on how Mindstorms is used and designed.” This participation, he further presumes, would have positive effect on sales (Koerner 2006).

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According to the digital discourse network production allows for a tighter bond between corporations and customers. The process of how Lego transformed its corporate culture is in fact described precisely as a shift from a company that is too insular and detached from customers’ demands to one that reconnects with them through network production in order to make better, more profitable products. The idea of adopting an open source model for the production of Mindstorms came after Lego had its worst year ever in sales. The reason for this downturn is that Lego was coming up with “designs that puzzled rather than entertained [customers].” A Lego executive explains, “We had started to make fire trucks that look like spaceships, building systems that no customer could truly appreciate . . . We had to clean that up” (Koerner 2006). The diagnosis was that something was rotten in the Danish firm; the prognosis called for opening the company up to the outside world, to the network. They decided “to connect customers to the company” (Koerner 2006).

Lego realized Mindstorms needed a more user-friendly programming language. Since “Lego didn’t have the expertise to write more intuitive software in house,” it outsourced the work. Further down the line of development, when the “Mindstorms team had several mock-ups of new programmable bricks . . . the executives wanted a fresh perspective. And that’s when they decided to bring in the Mindstorms users—a community of fanatics who as of 2004 have done far more to add value to Lego’s robotics kit than the company itself” (Koerner 2006).

These Mindstorms fans started tinkering with the product and posting their work online. At first, Lego feared of the consequences this might have for its intellectual property rights. Finally, the company “concluded that limiting creativity was contrary to its mission of encouraging exploration and ingenuity.” There was another reason as well: “The hackers were providing a valuable service” (Koerner 2006). The ethics of “exploration and ingenuity,” then, sat well with the notion of network production as a new source of wealth creation and drove Lego further down the road of openness to the network. The article sums up the shift in corporate culture toward the network thus: “Until recently companies were skittish about customer innovation, fearing that outsiders might leak trade secrets or that they simply lacked the necessary technical skills. But Lego has warmed to the power of the open source ethos. It’s clear to the Lego execs that Mindstorms . . . would be a lesser product without the MUPers’ input” (Koerner 2006).

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Lego not only tolerated the hacking of Mindstorms but actively encouraged it, and the company “wrote a ‘right to hack’ into the Mindstorms software license, giving hobbyists explicit permission to let their imaginations run wild.” As one executive explains, “We came to understand that this is a great way to make the product more exciting. It’s a totally different business paradigm—although they don’t get paid for it, they enhance the experience you can have with the basic Mindstorms set” (Koerner 2006; emphasis mine). Network production then is conceived in the digital discourse to extract from users a new source of value and incorporate it into its products. The value produced can be conceived both as “exchange value” (money) and “use-value” (fun and creativity) (Marx 1990, 125–31); while much of the exchange value is produced by consumers, it is transferred almost in its entirety to Lego. Admittedly, the use-value of the product for consumers is enhanced.

NETWORKS HAVE CENTERS_, TOO

While the digital discourse constructs each and every node in the network as ontologically or qualitatively equivalent to any other node, network architecture is not necessarily flat and decentralized and can also work to exacerbate the power of one node at the expense of others. In fact, power differentials between nodes can be conceived as relational and dialectical (Bauman 1998; Castells 1996; Sassen 2001). Hence, even thought the narrative is one of mutuality between corporations and individuals as simply two nodes on the network of production, a closer reading highlights the asymmetry between the two—an asymmetry that seems to lie at the heart of network production.

The asymmetry between Lego as a strong node in the network of production and the MUPers as creative and skillful individuals that Lego is able to harness for its production process is reflected in the photographs of the main protagonists of the article (Koerner 2006). The photo of the Lego executives is a group photo; they are all copresent at the same time and in the same place.¹³ The place is unmistakably a workplace: a large conference table in a large conference room (cutely decorated, naturally, given the nature of Lego’s products). In fact, the location can almost definitely be identified as Billund, Denmark, Lego’s global headquarters. This corporate photo can be contrasted with the photos of the four MUPers featured in the following page.¹⁴ These are four individual photos taken at different times and in different places. The mies-en-scène in all of them is quite evidently not a work environment or an office but the MUPers private residences or private labs. The exact locations cannot be identified and could indeed be anywhere around the globe.

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