Digital technologies fundamentally change the nature and meaning of work (work).This process has gone through various stages—from the Personal Computer of the 1980s to the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the laptop in the 2000s and the ubiquitous mobile devices of today such as tablets and smartphones. With each step, the digital working tools became smaller, more affordable, more efficient, more networked, and more customizable to individual needs.
When the digital means of production and communication (i.e. a laptop and an internet connection) are available to almost anyone, new forms of labor (labor) and economic cooperation evolve.
What follows will only be able to touch on the surface of some aspects of this huge topic; in particular it focuses on three shifts or trends that digital technology helps to usher in. The first is a shift from work in hierarchical organizations to work in collaborative, self-‐organized networks. This concerns the question of how technology remodels the organization of work. Self-‐organized networks of freelancers often beat hierarchical corporations in efficiency. The second is a shift from routine tasks to creative challenges. This relates to the question of automation and its consequences. Creative tasks are on the rise whereas routine jobs are increasingly outsourced or automated. The third is a shift or spillover from the realm of the “purely digital” back to the physical. It deals with the question of how digital technologies such as 3D printing remodel the production of physical goods. DIY, fabbing and cheap 3D printers begin to democratize production.
Beyond the Cubicle: Peer-‐to-‐Peer Collaboration
Technology in general, and digital technologies in particular, are a major driver in shaping and changing work styles. There is, however, a broader cultural context to be considered: In 1956 William H. Whyte coined the famous phrase “the organization man,” also the title of his book, to describe the conformist work culture of the postwar era with its armies of gray flannel suits flocking to the offices of large corporations for a dreary routine of 9 to 5 jobs in identical cubicles, obeying strict hierarchical lines of commandand control.i “Loyalty for security” was the deal between employees and companies. The dominance of this work ethic began to wane in the 70s and 80s due to social changes, shifting value sets, the forces of globalization as well as emerging digital technologies. Today we see a very different picture: autonomy and self-‐realization (self-‐realization) in what one is doing are the main driving forces in one’s choice of work, where clear-‐cut career paths and lifelong employment at the same company have given way to a portfolio of projects, occupations, and shifting jobs.
Nowadays, more people than ever before can work wherever they want and whenever they want—as long as they have a laptop and a WiFi connection at hand. This is not only true for the growing portion of self-‐employed people—freelancers, microentrepreneurs, etc.—but also for more and more regular employees as companies increasingly give up on the traditional standard of a 9 to 5 office routine and introduce flexible models of home-‐office work, mobile work and “results-‐only work environments” (ROWE), which focus on what gets done instead of requiring office presence.
Ten years ago, former White House speechwriter Daniel H. Pink depicted the emergence of a new work landscape in his book Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, in which he succinctly describes the shift towards new forms of independent labor and freelance work.ii The publication has since become a kind of freelancer bible. With this kind of shift, more and more people have left the grid of corporate jobs and started their own business (entrepreneur). In Germany, from 1991 to the end of 2013 the number of self-‐employed people has grown from 7.3% to about 11% of the entire workforce.iii About half of these people belong to the fast-‐growing group of new freelancers and soloists, many of them working in the service sector, the creative industries and entirely new jobs which developed only with the advent of the internet, such as search engine optimization.iv In 2006 my colleagues Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo coined the term “digital bohemia” for this new life-‐and work style of the laptop freelancer, working in cafés, from home, or in one of the then-‐emerging co-‐working spaces.v
When the digital means of production and communication (i.e. a laptop and an internet connection) are available to almost anyone at affordable costs, there is much more at stake than simply independence from the cubicle. New forms of labor and economic cooperation evolve. Everyone can become a producer (at least in the Idea Economy) and participate in the market. Technology reduces and eliminates barriers of entry. Furthermore, digital technologies reduce the marginal costs of immaterial goods to zero—copies don’t cost anything.
“(…)self-‐realization in what one is doing are the main driving forces in one’s choice of work, where clear-‐cut career paths and lifelong employment at the same company have given way to a portfolio of projects, occupations, and shifting jobs.”
Maybe most importantly, digital technologies radically lower transaction costs—those costs needed to allocate and coordinate resources and people. According to economist Ronald Coase, transaction costs were the raison d’être of hierarchical companies.vi The era of industrial production required large amounts of capital, space, resources and tools, which could be organized most efficiently by hierarchical firms. Today people coordinate themselvesand their work through the internet, in some cases on a very large scale which, for example, Wikipedia and open source projects like Linux and Firefox have demonstrated. Another example of how digital cooperation remakes even traditional industries is Local Motors: a co-‐creation community of several thousand designers and engineers developed, via open online design contests, the Rally Fighter, a completely new car model that is individually assembled with the help of customers in local micro-‐factories.
One of the major economic impacts of digital technologies then is that it marks a shift in organizations from vertical hierarchies to lateral networks. This paradigm shift has been noted by many observers. Charles Leadbeater speaks of “mass innovation instead of mass production,”vii Clay Shirky called it “the power of organizing without organizations,”viii and Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams coined the term “Wikinomics” for this new mode of mass collaboration.ix
Beyond Routine: The Automation of Knowledge Work
The issue of automation and its consequences for the labor market and human labor in general is certainly not new and can be traced back to the early days of the First Industrial Revolution. But ever more powerful computers, robotics, new sensors, smart algorithms, and the pervasive digitization of objects around us push the question of automation to a whole new level. Advanced robotics and artificial intelligence will make more and more human tasks and jobs “superfluous.”
In his latest book, Drive, which explores the sources and powers of intrinsic motivation, Daniel H. Pink distinguishes between two types of work tasks: algorithmic tasks and heuristic tasks.x An algorithmic task (algorithm) follows a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. In contrast, a heuristic task involves experimenting with possibilities and devising a novel solution. Pink cites a study that found that in the U.S. “only 30% of job growth comes from algorithmic work, while 70% comes from heuristic work. A key reason: routine work can be outsourced or automated, while artistic, empathic, non-‐routine work generally cannot.”xi
More and more human tasks become algorithmic in the strict sense that they can be performed equally well by computers: for example, driving a car is about to become an algorithmic activity as the driverless Google car has demonstrated. Developed by the Google X laboratory, by August 2012 these computer-‐guided vehicles had a track record of over 300,000 autonomous-‐driving miles without accidents.xii In May 2012, Nevada issued the first license for such an autonomous car. Second example: algorithms beat humans in playing Jeopardy! as IBM’s artificial intelligence computer system Watson demonstrated in early 2011, when the machine won against the world’s top Jeopardy! players.xiii Third example: finding relevant semantic information in a huge stack of documents or discerning recurring patterns in (digitally recorded) activities is an algorithmic service offered by companies such as Cataphora—which for example is used to perform tasks previously done by law-‐educated researchers, who used to browse such data for evidence in law cases.
Today, not only jobs in industrial production are automated and taken over by robots and machines. Cloud computing, semantic search, big data analysis, software agents, collaborative filtering and augmented intelligence will automate knowledge- based tasks—and may even kill skilled service jobs. As John Markoff, technology journalist at the New York Times, noted: “Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.”xiv
Is automation a good thing or a bad thing? Accounts of automation are often filled with either utopian desires or dystopian anxieties. For example, in the early 1990s in one of his last works, “Vom Subjekt zum Projekt” (“From Subject to Project”), media philosopher Vilém Flusser envisioned a bright future in which automation completely frees humanity from labor and workand allows for a life of creative contemplation and playful experimentation.xv
But will computers really put all of us out of work? That is unlikely as new technologies have not always simply destroyed jobs, but created new ones too. Whether the balance sheet will be positive or negative remains to be seen. And what will these new jobs look like? The answer is, probably more heuristic.
Recently, Frank Rieger, a spokesperson of the influential German hacker group Chaos Computer Club, voiced the idea that if robots and algorithms replace us in the labor market, they should also substitute us as taxpayers. Indirect taxation of non-‐human work could pay a basic income under the form of an automation dividend.xvi
Beyond Mass Production: The Fabbing Revolution
For a while it seemed that computers and the internet would virtualize or immaterialize our lives and make more and more physical objects increasingly obsolete (digital vs. material). As it turns out now, one of the biggest potentials of digitization might be its disruptive influence on how we produce physical objects. The First Industrial Revolution with its mechanized“Spinning Jennys”
and steam-‐powered machinery brought division of labor (and a dependent proletariat), the Second Industrial Revolution with Taylorism and Henry Ford’s assembly line expanded this model to industrial mass production that dominated the 20th century. Now, we are about to experience a Third Industrial Revolution. It individualizes and decentralizes production. Affordable universal digital tools make it easy to build small factories or workshops for individuals and small networks of people.
The signature gadget of this development is the personal fabricator: cheap 3D printers (3D printing) that print out three-‐dimensional objects. The 3D printer turns a digital model designed with computer software into a physical object, building it up from successive layers of liquid plastic that solidifies. Thus, objects of any shape, only limited in size and material, can be produced: from replacement parts to sculptures. Because it is comparatively cheap and fast, 3D printing is often used for rapid prototyping.
“As it turns out now, one of the biggest potentials of digitization might be its disruptive influence on how we produce physical objects. The First Industrial Revolution with its mechanized “Spinning Jennys”
RepRap, MakerBot, Printrbot—these are the names of various models of 3D printers. The market for these consumer-oriented devices with prices between $500 and $2,000 is thriving. A lot of these projects are open source and people can exchange their designs in the form of CAD files— the data that models the objects to be printed—on platforms such as thingiverse.com. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, wrote in 2010: “Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content—all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.”xvii In the eyes of its proponents, 3D printing has the potential to democratize production, much like the personal computer did with office tasks in the 1980s. That’s why the slogan of the so-‐called Fabbing (Fabbing) or Maker Movement is “Atoms are the new bits.”
Fabbing probably will not completely displace mass production in the short or even in bthe long run, but it already offers an alternative and opens up a market of distributed manufacturing for a large range of various specialized products. Production becomes individual, flexible, and smaller-sized. Neil Gershenfeld from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms created a number of so-called FabLabs around the world: small workshops for the production, maintenance, and repair of everyday goods as well as high-tech products, which are open to individuals and communities. The renaissance of crafting, small manufacturing, DIY (DIY) and hardhacking marks a subtle shift away from streamlined mass production towards a truly postindustrial mode of production.
[i] William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
[ii] Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working
for Yourself (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
[iii] Statistisches Bundesamt, ed.. Statistisches Jahrbuch 2013,
(Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt, 2013), https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikatione/StatistischesJahrbuch/StatistischesJahrbuch.html.
[iv] Statistisches Bundesamt, ed.. Statistisches Jahrbuch 2013,
(Wiesbaden: Statistisches Bundesamt, 2013), https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikatione/StatistischesJahrbuch/StatistischesJahrbuch.html”>https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikatione/StatistischesJahrbuch/StatistischesJahrbuch.html
[v] Holm Friebe and Sascha Lobo, Wir nennen es Arbeit. Die digitale Bohème oder intelligentes Leben jenseits der Festanstellung ( München: Heyne, 2006).
[vi] Ronald H. Coase, “The Nature of the Firm,” Economica 4.16 (1937): 386-405.
[vii] Charlie Leadbeater, We-Think. Mass Innovation Not Mass Production (London: Profile Books, 2008).
[viii] Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008).
[ix] Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006).
[x] Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).
[xi] Pink, Drive, 30.
[xii] Chris Urmson, “The Self-‐Driving Car Logs More Miles on New Wheels,” Google Official Blog (blog), August 7, 2012, accessed February 28, 2014, http://googleblog.blogspot.nl/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-logs-more-miles-on.html.
[xiii] John Markoff, “Computer Wins on Jeopardy!:
Trivial, It’s Not,” New York Times, February 16, 2011, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-‐watson.html.
[xiv] John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,”
New York Times, March 4, 2011,
accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science /05legal.html.
[xv] Vilém Flusser, Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Menschwerdung, eds. Stefan Bollmann and Edith Flusser (Bensheim and Düsseldorf: Bollmann, 1994).
[xvi] Frank Rieger, “Automatisierungsdividende für alle: Roboter müssen unsere Rente sichern.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 18, 2012, accessed October 23, 2013,
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/automatisierungsdividende-fuer-alle-roboter-muessen-unsere-rente-‐sichern-11754772.html.
[xvii] Chris Anderson, “In the Next Industrial Revolution,
Atoms Are the New Bits,” Wired Magazine, January 25, 2010, accessed October 23, 2013, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution.
Written by Philip Albers
OFluxo © 2018
