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

Hence, the blurring of the distinction between work time and leisure time, and workspace and leisure space means that more and more time— at home, on the way to and from work, and on vacation—can be consumed by work. At the same time, this also means that work itself is no longer construed as the negation of leisure and freedom. This narrative comes out of a two-page advertisement for T-Mobile (2004). Here, too, the subtext seems to reveal a dialectic that the surface visual and textual presentation attempts to plaster. The left-hand page of the advertisement shows a gloomy, florescent-lit office with two rows of identical cubicles and office chairs along opposite sides of the office space. The opposite page uses an identical visual composition, only this time the chairs are substituted by two rows of trees, with a group of bikers riding on a scenic road amid a beautiful green landscape. The text reads, “Out. Brought to you by T-Mobile.”

The advertisement suggests that, thanks to mobile technology, the digerati are not anchored to the locality of the workplace and are therefore liberated from the drudgery of a bureaucratic nightmare: free from office hours and office space, from supervisors and routine, from the process of mass production, they are cogs liberated from the machine. These grievances are, of course, at the heart of the humanist critique regarding the alienating ramifications of industrial work to which the digerati’s spirit of network responds. But further contemplation reveals once again the dialectical meaning of this liberation: with network technology, it is also work itself that is now liberated from space, rendering all spaces workspaces. The blurring of the differences between the enclosed office, on the one hand, and “out,” on the other hand, also entails the surrender of personal time to corporate time—the surrender of “out” to the rationale of “in.” So it is true that one can work while enjoying the outdoors and keep a tab on business while going on vacation. But, at the same time, the very essence of what it means to be “outdoors” and “on vacation” is transformed completely.

The freedom brought about by mobility entails not only the intermingling of work time and playtime but also the freedom of work time to colonize (symbolically and practically) playtime. The advertisement initially seems to suggest that liberty from workspace also implies liberty from work itself; laying the two contrasting visual images next to each other implies that mobile technology transfers us from the world of work (represented in the left image) to the world of leisure (represented in the right image). Again, the dialectical nature of this transfer does not evade the story that the advertisement is telling: the whole point of the plot in the advertisement is that while one is away from work, work does not need to be away from one or that the opposite of “working indoors” is “working outdoors” (rather than not working at all). In that formulation, even though the two worlds—that of work and that of leisure, the indoor and the outdoor—are presented as a mirror image in the ad, they become functionally the same space: that of production. This narrative is reiterated in a myriad of other advertisements, all of which extol network technology as the centerpiece of a more mobile, flexible worker, emancipated from the constraints of time, space, and structure emblematic of the oppressive industrial, bureaucratic organization.

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The Blurred Boundaries between Worker and Capitalist

The blurring between work time and workspace, on the one hand, and leisure time and leisure space, on the other hand, is coupled with another narrative regarding the revolutionary nature of network work. Network work also entails the reconstitution of workers as individual nodes within the network, a mirror image of workers in the Fordist organization. The Fordist workers were conceived as part of a system: functionally, they were cogs in the machine; structurally, they were members of a social class. Both of these imply hierarchy and differentiation between functional levels of the organization, between management and workers, between tasks, and, ultimately, between capital and labor. The digerati embody a critique and an alternative to hierarchy and differentiation at work and in society. In the network workplace, hierarchy and differentiation are replaced by a network structure where information flows between individual nodes, with each node structurally homologous to its peer and capable of multitasking and entrepreneurship. Workers are therefore conceived in more individualized and privatized terms rather than in terms of members of a class.

The new informational worker, in fact, resents the modernist, industrial-age distinction between capitalists and proletarians, a distinction formulated at the height of industrial capitalism and deemed no longer applicable. When information technology becomes the center of the economy, says Peter Drucker, information and knowledge rather than capital, and informational workers rather than capitalists, take center stage. Since knowledge substitutes capital as “the new basis of wealth,” since information displaces “the traditional factors of production—land, labor, and capital—[which] are becoming restraints rather than driving forces,” contemporary society is better understood as “post-capitalist” (Schwartz 1993). For Drucker, the emergence of “knowledge, not capital, [as] the new basis of wealth” also signifies the downfall of the bluecollar working class, which “dominate[d] every single developed society”

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(Schwartz 1993). The ushering in of new forces of production, in the form of information, knowledge, and information technology, transforms the very basis of social class. It is noteworthy that Druker’s theorization follows in the footsteps of Daniel Bell’s thesis regarding The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1999).

What substitutes the blue-collar working class in the digital discourse on network work is a new persona, no longer tied to the traditional industrialist conceptions of a proletariat or working class. At the phenomenological level, work relations have been dehierarchized to such an extent that the differentiation between mangers and workers, employers and employees, is blurred. In the fictional story “Microserfs,” the narrator refers to his superior at work as “my ‘boss’” (Coupland 1994); the quotation marks around “boss” indicate the term is actually a misnomer, a relic of power relations that no longer exist. Power structures, he insists, are now completely flattened and dehierarchized: “The person with the most information pertinent to any decision is the one who makes that decision” (Coupland 1994). Upholding the meritocratic ethos of the digerati (to which I return later in this chapter), power in the network workplace is presented in the digital discourse as a corollary of knowledge and expertise, not of capital.

Indeed, money and even capital (i.e., money diverted to further capital accumulation, rather than for consumption) seems an ill-fitting variable to distinguish employers from employees according to the digital discourse. The protagonist of “Microserfs,” while nominally a worker, constantly checks his “WinQuotes” on his computer screen to follow Microsoft’s NASDAQ price. “It was Saturday,” he recounts, “and there was never any change, but I kept forgetting. Habit. Maybe the Tokyo or Hong Kong exchanges might cause a fluctuation?” Workers are also stakeholders in the company; in the case of “Microserfs,” they are actually shareholders. “Most staffers,” he continues, “peek at WinQuote a few times a day. I mean, if you have 10,000 shares . . . and the stock goes up a buck, you’ve just made ten grand!” (Coupland 1994). Such positioning of the digerati—not quite capitalists, not quite proletarians—undermines previous notions of class. Should they be better understood as workers or as owners? Or is the very distinction nothing more than an industrial-era relic that has been blurred beyond distinction and does not hold for the digerati? Let us look more closely at the narratives regarding the two sides of the coin: the digerati entrepreneurs and the digerati workers.

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THE DIGERATI ENTREPRENEUR

On one side of the informational coin are the digerati entrepreneurs. Just as the working digerati try to distance themselves as far away as possible from industrial workers, so does the entrepreneur digerati construct their identities as a reverse image of the persona of the industrial capitalist. The industrial capitalist is characterized by his passion to accumulate capital; digerati entrepreneurs, in contrast, are characterized by their passion for network technology. The former sees technology as a means of production, that is, as a means to another end. The latter see the development of technology as an end unto itself. Even the one criterion that might have put the old industrial capitalist and the new digerati entrepreneur in the same social category—their wealth—is seen in the digital discourse as qualitatively different. Referring to the founders of Microsoft, the narrator in “Microserfs” argues that “Microsoft’s millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth” (Coupland 1994), distinguishing their “nerd” wealth from that of previous, industrial-age moguls. Not unlike the way “old money” (based on inheritance) was distinguished at the beginning of the industrial era from the “nouveau riches” (based on entrepreneurship).

According to the digital discourse, digerati entrepreneurs are different from industrial-age capitalists because for the digerati, business does not all revolve around profit but on contributing to technological progress; their success is measured not only in terms of material gains but also in terms of their technological skill, or of how “techie,” “geek,” and “nerd” they are. The August 2004 cover of Wired, for example, is adorned by a teaser that reads “The Top 100 Geeks”; two out of the four geeks mentioned on the cover are iconic digerati entrepreneurs: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (Cover 2004). It is precisely the dehierarchized conception of network work that makes it plausible to describe two of the most powerful and rich people on the planet as underdogs, an idea I will return to later in this chapter.

In the digital discourse, reverence is directed toward the entrepreneurcum-technological nerd. The real incentive for the new informational entrepreneur to engage in business, according to the digital discourse, is not making more money but making a real social contribution: discovering new opportunities for network technology and opening up new frontiers for the network society. In more theoretical terms, technology, as a means of production, takes center stage, while ownership over these means, the component of power in the technological nexus—that which distinguishes classes—recedes to the background, leaving only vague traces.

The digital discourse’s portrayal of the new digerati entrepreneurs— industry moguls like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or dot-com millionaires of a more modest caliber—usually follows this narrative. Here is one example from Wired. Josh Harris is a thirty-nine-year-old dot-com millionaire who now invests his fortune in a new revolutionary media project that is unlikely, according to his own estimates, to yield much, if any, profit. Harris assesses that he “could have gone into anything after Jupiter [where he made his fortune]. I could have been an industrial titan . . . But I didn’t want to be like those guys” (Platt 2000; emphasis mine). What are “those guys” like? According to Harris, “Most wealthy people just waste their time making more and more money.” In contrast, he says about himself, “I’m one of the few who actually know how to spend it.” The author of the article concurs: “Making money . . . is not Harris’ primary goal these days. He’s too busy spending it” on unprofitable, but technologically revolutionary, projects (Platt 2000). Harris, like Weber before him, laments the iron cage of capitalism with its internal drive for the endless accumulation of capital. However, he not only criticizes it but also posits an alternative to this spirit of capitalism, one where the entrepreneur is motivated by the endless progress of technology.

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With such new spirit, it is hardly a surprise that the new informational entrepreneur—committed to creativity and discovery—is at severe odds with the strict, profit-driven, industrial-age corporation. Hence, the digital entrepreneur is also a rebellious character, a contrarian. Describing his experiences while running a small research and development lab, Harris recalls the clash of his new digerati spirit and the old corporate mentality: “At first I made it [the lab] a pure art house . . . I mean, why not? How often do you get the chance to do that kind of thing? The price I paid was that I had to deal with the corporate people at Prodigy . . . Executives at [Prodigy] . . . understood that they were dealing with a loose cannon who had little respect for their corporate culture” (Platt 2000; emphasis mine). The persona of the digerati represents a break with previous corporate culture. In the digital discourse on network work, the digerati are constructed as reverse images of the industrial man, indeed as an embodiment of a critique and a repudiation of him.

It is also worth pointing out precisely the depth at which the new spirit breaks with the old and where the two are actually agreeable. If Harris was so subversive to Prodigy’s “corporate culture,” one might wonder why they nevertheless put up with him. According to Harris, “They didn’t want to fuck with me because I was accounting for 25 percent of the total hourly traffic on their service” (Platt 2000). Hence, the divide between new and old capitalists that Harris was referring to seems to be located at a cultural and stylistic, rather than a structural, level. Notwithstanding the presence of the “old-fashioned” bottom line in Harris’s narrative of the new digerati entrepreneur, the façade is casual and subversive, decidedly antiestablishment, an establishment of which he is (perhaps grudgingly) a part.

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This opposition between the old corporate culture and the new digerati culture is reiterated in the article when the author describes Harris’s current workspace as the opposite of what one might expect a corporation to look like: “an open-plan office that looks like it was furnished by hyperactive children turned loose in a thrift store. Miscellaneous desks and tables are crammed together,” and so forth (Platt 2000). The digerati entrepreneur embodies this tension between, on the one hand, a disorganized, creative, impulsive attitude (“Harris once again became bored with the grind of managing a company . . . [and] surrendered his position as CEO”) and, on the other hand, a business-oriented mindset committed to capitalism after all. This tension is, according to Harris’s assistant, part of who Harris is, an emblem of the new entrepreneurial digerati: “Josh is totally disorganized,” says his assistant, “but he chooses to be disorganized, to free his creative mind. Underneath, there is a solid core ofbusiness sense” (Platt 2000; emphasis mine). Strong personal expression, disorganization, a mischievous attitude, and creativity—all that the old corporate culture asked to check in at the entrance to the office and that were more appropriate to entertain during leisure time—are not just tolerated in the digerati culture but embraced and unleashed as new forces of production.

The persona of the digerati entrepreneur blurs the distinction between the capitalist and the worker in another way: by mimicking the worker and standing shoulder to shoulder with him. The digerati entrepreneurs no longer see themselves as a representative of the system; quite the contrary, the digerati entrepreneurs grasp themselves as antagonist to the system. They are antistatist, antiestablishment, antibureaucracy, and anticorporation, just as the informational worker is. They are ontologically the little guys, the underdogs, the counterculturists, and the tramps, mobilizing their individual faculties to fight the oppressiveness of the powers that be.

This duality within the digerati entrepreneurs—capitalists-businessmenbosses, on the one hand, counterculturalists-radicals-hackers, on the other—surfaces in an interview with another digerati entrepreneur— Tom Jennings. His central characteristic is exclaimed in the title of his Wired portrait, “The Anarchist” (Borsook 1996). Jennings is described as having a shrewd business sense, technological savvy and creativity, and radical views about both business and technology. The article portrays the business side and the technology side of the high-tech industry as if they were utterly conflicting and contradictory to each other. In this dichotomous framework—business and capital versus creativity and technology—the digerati are associated with the latter and virtually alienated from the former. Right from the outset, “doing business” in general is portrayed in the article as fundamentally different from “doing digital technology-related business”: “It seems these days,” the author laments, “that to succeed as an anarchist”—Jennings’s central characteristic—“you have to succeed as a businessman.” Jennings explains that in the founding days of the high-tech industry it was not as business-oriented as it is nowadays: “With early microcomputers, it was more exciting—everyone was a weirdo. Then it got boring, all suits. The suits in the Internet business now are taking chances, and even the worst of them have some interest in what’s going on. But in a few years . . . they’ll be terrible” (Borsook 1996). Like Harris, Jennings—notwithstanding his riches, his involvement with business, and his position of power—self-identifies in contrast with all of these, indeed in defiance of them. The author sums up his contrarian demeanor this way: Jennings, he writes, “never relinquished his lifelong irreverence toward TPTB—The Powers That Be. He’s an anarchist, pure and simple—which means he professes to no ideological purity of any kind. He espouses no doctrine . . . about left or right, or about the marketplace” (Borsook 1996).

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Jennings, like Harris and Gates, is portrayed as a heroic figure, an ideal type for the digital age. They are all “great men,” in the words of Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, 112): they define, embody, and champion the qualities of those who are at the forefront of capitalism and are the ones up to whom all other actors look. Jennings’s prowess and greatness is traced back to technology rather than capital, to machines rather than social relations; technology, and engagement with technology, becomes an axis of social power, and structural class power is neutralized and recedes to the background. “Probably without ever meaning to,” the author writes, “[Jennings] always lands on the cutting edge of what’s considered cool and now and happening . . . because he’s so damn technosmart and blessed with such sound instincts” (Borsook 1996). The new company he now runs focuses, according to the author, on “technological savvy, and Jennings adds, “We terrify people because we’re so technically astute” (Borsook 1996). Being “technosmart,” “technological savvy,” and “technically astute”—all highlight the direct engagement of the digerati with network technology—concurrently imply the underplaying of power and class that is entailed by business ownership and business management; in the digital discourse, “techiness” topples class.

The flattened hierarchy of the new network workplace and its embodiment in the persona of the digerati entrepreneur are succinctly summarized in two images that accompany Wired’s profile of Andy Grove (Heilemann 2001). We should perhaps recall here the stature of Andy Grove in the digital industry. Andy Grove is the legendary founder and longtime president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Intel, the largest processor maker in the world with an annual revenue of 38.8 billion in 2005, for which it was rated forty-ninth in the Fortune 500. In 1997, Grove was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.” He is certainly a “great man” in the new capitalism. Notwithstanding Grove’s heroic and superstar position in the new capitalism, he is portrayed in the digital discourse as an Everyman, a little guy; even Andy Grove is a node in the flattened network workplace.

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The first image features Grove, at a conference at Stanford Business School, behaving in a manner that would clearly be atypical for an industrial-era tycoon but that typifies the new digerati entrepreneur: he is casually sitting on the floor, suit jacket off, relaxed and listening. The second image is even more explicit, since it depicts not just a fleeting moment at a conference but rather a more permanent reality: Grove’s workspace. The photo carefully captures a wide-angle perspective of Intel’s workspace: a multiplicity of cubicles in a shared work floor. Andy Grove, this “great man,” is visually rendered as small, photographed from above, and as part of the hive of workers in the network work. The title of the photo tells that this is “Grove’s 8’ by 9’ cubicle at Intel,” implying that Grove is treated like any other worker (Heilemann 2001). The flattened, dehierarchized network workplace is perceived as an emblem of a new social structure that is better defined in terms of the network than in terms of class. (Little surprise, then, that in this workplace without differentiation, a quick entrepreneur is marketing a new line of clothing to fit the new persona of the digerati, described as “fashion for the no-collar workforce” [Glickman 1999]).

But while the structural tension (or even the personal animosity) between employers and employees is presented as a thing of the past, there are still reminders in the text of the relational positions of these two categories within the company and within society at-large. At these moments, the elasticity of the narrative of a new network-cum-classless society seems to fail, and the persistence of class in the information society and the high-tech company surfaces. One indication of that is the harsh language used by the protagonist of “Microserfs” to refer to work. He tells, for example, of how the group “slaved until 1:00 a.m.” Of course, there is the very use of the term “Microserfs” (Coupland 1994; emphasis mine), which evokes both the highly advanced Microsoft Corporation and the highly regressed system of medieval feudalism.

With this subtle choice of wording, the author seems to point out the complexity of what is presented throughout much of the digital discourse as an unproblematic blurring of the dichotomy between workers and employers. While indeed far removed from the terminology of industrial working relations, the reference to slavery and serfdom also connotes feudal relations with its blurring—indeed, annihilation—of the distinction between work and leisure, between private and public life. Perhaps, these terms suggest, these new working arrangements and work ethics are taking us back, not forward. But such moments of critical reflection are relatively rare–slips of the tongue. For the most part, the digital discourse narrates the transformations of network work quite uncritically.

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TH_E DIG_ERATI WORK_ER

Just as capitalists assume the role of workers, workers, too, perceive themselves more like capitalists and entrepreneurs. As we have seen in Chapter 3, market flux and instability render work more flexible and dynamic. Work for the digerati no longer follows the industrial-age model of a stable career path, which entails a lasting time commitment between workers and companies and opportunities for advancement within the firm. According to Kevin Kelly, the decreasing ratio of companies to workers in the market reveals a trend in which more and more individuals become involved with more than one workplace, or job: “So many workers double- or triple-dip, moonlighting, part-timing, consulting, or running a startup in their garage.” This signifies a qualitative transformation in the world of work from the old employment model to what Kelly calls “polyemployment” (Kelly 1999). Work is redefined in terms that are more individualized and privatized, virtually eliminating the distinction between worker and company, employment and entrepreneurship, and—as a corollary—the distinction between classes. After all, workers can freelance as consultants and, on top of that, be entrepreneurs running their own start-up.

These new conditions inevitably make the experience of a career more liquid, precarious, insecure, and fragmented. The fictional story “Microserfs” reveals the digerati’s anxieties that stem from unpredictable career prospects in the new economy. While being comparatively well paid (with a compensation packet that often includes stocks and options) and enjoying a high social status, the digerati are threatened by no less (perhaps even more) job insecurity than wage laborers in other sectors. Thus, at some moment in the story, the protagonist of “Microserfs” laments the ageism prevalent in the digital sector. After a visit to the Nintendo headquarters, located right across from Microsoft’s, he comments, “It’s like the year 1311, where everyone over 35 is dead or maimed.” Elsewhere he makes the same observation about Microsoft, saying that there are “maybe twelve fortysomethings on the Campus” (Coupland 1994). Another article describes one Matthew Clark, who left Microsoft, following “a severe case of corporate burnout” (Glickman 1999), when he was only twenty-seven years old.

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Thus, anxiety about old age and about the future begins almost at the outset of the digerati’s careers. Referring to a group of new employees at Microsoft, the protagonist of “Microserfs” says,

[We] were wondering last week what’s going to happen when this new crop of workers reaches its inevitable Seven Year Programmer’s Burnout. At the end of it they won’t have two million dollars to move to Hilo and start up a bait shop with, the way the Microsoft old-timers did. Not everyone can move into management. Discarded. Face it: You’re always just a breath away from a job in telemarketing. Everybody I know at the company has an estimated time departure and they’re all within five years. It must have been so weird—living the way my Dad did—thinking your company was going to care for you forever. (Coupland 1994)

Under such circumstances, the digerati worker is required to assume the mindset of an entrepreneur. If the undertone in “Microserfs” is one of lament, this critical edge is completely silenced in another piece, which more forcefully asserts the emergence of the worker-cum-entrepreneur and the concurrent demise of the distinction between workers and capitalists. Here, Tom Campbell, a former politician and the current dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California–Berkeley, reflects on the golden age of Silicon Valley:

The paradigm was creative destruction, or cannibalistic capitalism. To survive here, everyone needed to be mentally prepared to jump ship at a moment’s notice. The basic building block ofthe economy was the entrepreneur, and every individual needed to think more like an entrepreneur and less like an employee . . . Jazzed by this new ethic, laid-back Generation X turned into the self-determinist Generation Equity. Average job tenure in 1999 was 15 months. We assumed that Moore’s law applied to far more than chips. It applied to everything—bandwidth, user bases, even the Nasdaq doubled every 18 months . . . Silicon Valley was an argument in the form of a place. It argued for a new way to live, a new relationship between owners and employees, a new bond between work and play. (Bronson 2003; emphasis mine except “everything,” emphasis in the original)⁴

For Campbell, the new dynamics of the high-tech sector have made workers into entrepreneurs, work into play, and wage laborers into shareholders, effectively rendering these distinctions obsolete. According to

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