Folkways of the Digital Age
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
Winter Books Folkways of the Digital World By Joseph Dolman The Information Age has given birth to a looser, more egalitarian workplace. Probably its most publicized example has been...
...What a pity...
...If Razorfish workers were never quite on duty, they were never quite off duty...
...Nonetheless, like the walker trying to reach the horizon, they are discovering that the end of the route remains as far in the distance as ever...
...They sell not only their time and energy but their personalities, he said, "they sell by the week or month their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice the prompt repression of resentment and aggression...
...The fully automated battle, with battalions of cyborg soldiers, was an outdated fantasy, as redundant as the workerless factory in an age of flexible specialization...
...In addition, Ross says, "partial ownership, or stakeholding, in the form of stock options could give employees an illusory sense of power-sharing, rudely shattered when they encountered the unilateralism of executive decision-making in layoffs and office closures...
...In Our Modern Times (MIT, 126pp., $24.95) the French economist takes a look at high-tech workers and, remarkably, finds them not a whole lot better off than assembly line workers were in Henry Ford's day...
...Where is the breed headed now...
...This should not be very surprising...
...Sometimes, it seems, privacy is an absolute necessity...
...Employees continued to have projects to finish and deadlines to meet...
...and lines of authority were often blurred...
...But these nocollar workers are not like the people who broke their backs trying to scratch out a living in Kentucky coal mines in the 1920s...
...Al 1 that, though, is peripheral...
...At bottom, the Mayor has created a permissive atmosphere that acknowledges the intelligence and self-motivation of his staff, and at the same time helps the administration stay astute and lithe and ready to respond to emergencies...
...They practice "their personable crafts for hire and for the profit of others, according to rules laid down by those above them...
...He makes an illuminating and instructive foray into what he terms "the humane workplace" of a New Economy company called Razorfish...
...But what about the culture that gave rise to this innovation...
...Most of them toil in the New Economy-a term Ross applies to digital or online companies...
...Consider Bloomberg's setup: Situated in a room that once housed the old New York City Board of Estimate, the bullpen stresses openness and minimizes rank...
...But it is hard to take seriously Cohen's admonitions about modern workers who are seized with a sense of powerlessness and confusion...
...He has transferred a tiny sliver of Silicon Alley into a setting that owes a vast chunk of its management lore to Tammany Hall...
...The autonomy and the personal initiative required by the new productive world," he writes, "induce mental stress which replaces the physical fatigue of the worker's previous life of hard labor...
...Yet this did not, as one might think, constitute a workers' paradise...
...For these intimate traits are of commercial relevance....' White-collar workers are the new Machiavellians, Mills proclaimed...
...They could wander the office all morning and schmooze...
...But in truth, the scene he has created represents something far more profound...
...It developed its own rituals of open communication and self-direction, it adopted new myths of independence, and suddenly the no-collar worker was born...
...The heart of the issue discussed by Ross and Cohen is an old lesson that captures the new Information Age spirit: Better technology leads to more freedomand greater personal responsibility...
...There's more...
...The rituals and habits of deference were curtailed, if not entirely suspended, along with...
...They often worked themselves into states of exhaustion...
...They don't make anything, he lamented: "No product of craftsmanship can be [theirs] to contemplate with pleasure...
...in return, workers were supposed to give the companies their full measure of devotion and ingenuity in an eternal search for digital solutions to complex business problems...
...as they grew, Ross notes, a freewheeling mentality began to flourish in the workplace...
...In dramatic contrast to the tight-lipped, hardeyed, locked-down culture of the previous administration, Michael R. Bloomberg's top aides now hand out their cell phone numbers to journalists...
...Or it could force workers relatively low in the pecking order to shoulder too much of a company's risk...
...The new companies were not so tightly hitched to the Washington gravy train...
...Even so, it is almost impossible to look at recent labor history in the United States and not feel at least a bit optimistic...
...Not blue-collar workers, not white-collar workers, not no-collar workers...
...For his part, the Mayor is rumored to hold meetings every once in a while in his home...
...Ethereal as their labor sometimes is, the "no-collar workers" Ross describes are in many ways the opposite of white-collar workers...
...Ross points out that even the architects of President George W. Bush's "war without end" against terrorism latched onto some of the New Economy's managerial and organizational techniques: "In this 21st century war...
...Modern men and women are liberated from the subservience of necessity in many domains," he says...
...They could work a bit and rest a bit...
...The change will not be seamless...
...Cohen frequently sounds close to despair in his slim, densely written book...
...Bloomberg, after all, is an information technology entrepreneur...
...troops were notmass industrialized Army units but decentralized teams of specialized operatives, with self-directed goals and strategies...
...It marks the emergence of a New Economy work environment in the Pleistocene heart of New York's musty City Hall...
...Firms with tiny managerial structures typically offered few chances for advancement...
...Until the Philistines of Wall Street began to grow dyspeptic in the face of the dot-com bust, many of Silicon Alley's no-collar workers thought the rules of market discipline had been happily suspended on their behalf...
...Without a doubt, the white-collar world Mills described with great horror is slowly evolving into one that is less rigid, more tolerant of individuals and more dependent than ever on personal initiative...
...It is obvious, however, that the emergence of the New Economy has left an indelible mark on the American workplace...
...his open and more flexible style is a direct import from the digital world he used to inhabit...
...The only sensible reply to this is that no one gets a free-or even easy-ride...
...At Razorfish, a survivor of the dot-com bust, management has taken to making it clear that all employees are expected to muster into the office each morning by 9 o'clock...
...Ideas of openness and self-management were hardly compatible with Cold War values, and the largest corporations made their biggest bucks from defense contracts...
...The one thing they apparently couldn't do was goof off-because no one recognized that concept...
...What's more, he observed, because white-collar workers are alienated from the products of their labor and year after year go through the same paper routine, they turn in a frenzy to the "ersatz diversion" that is sold to them in their leisure time...
...Who can get excited about their travails...
...They had to pull all-nighters in offices full of high-tech toys...
...Leisure time and work time, for example, tended to melt into an indecipherable mass...
...In 1951 Mills made white-collar workers sound like prisoners in a gulag...
...Ross offers a readable and perceptive account of the Razorfish journey...
...From the Bloomberg bullpen one hears about the large number of cell phone conversations mayoral insiders prefer to conduct from nearby benches in City Hall Park...
...It is designed to enable fast decisionmaking among high-energy folks whose days begin painfully early and end frightfully late...
...Still, the culture shock is extreme...
...It is a tale of hubris as well as invention...
...Only a masochist would not prefer a job that rewards personal initiative to a job that rewards monotonous brute labor...
...As these changes take root, I think the workplace will increasingly reflect quintessential American values that better allow workers to shape their own destiny...
...Those enterprises were designed to give workers maximum freedom and autonomy...
...They were shocked when the hammer fell on digital companies, and even more stunned when their workplace-for all its freedoms-started to feel more like an old garment trade sweatshop than a rumpus room...
...other protocols of rank that serve to remind white-collar workers of their subordinate place in an organization...
...Almost everyone I interviewed for this book believed that employees had come to exercise a surprisingly large share of control over their work...
...Surely most people would choose worrying about, say, finding a new team approach to increased productivity in a plant where robots do the dirty work, over struggling in a physically dangerous job...
...I thought of Mills' concerns while reading No Collar (Basic, 288 pp., $27.00) by Andrew Ross, director of American Studies at New York University...
...Americans will need to get accustomed to such changes...
...Probably its most publicized example has been provided by the new Mayor of New York City, who labors away not in a gracious office filled with Persian carpets or mahogany furnishings but in a cavernous "bullpen"amid scurrying assistants, flickering computer screens, noisy telephones, a tropical fish tank, and a table of regularly replenished snacks...
...In fact, contemporary humans are discovering that a society which is seven times richer more closely resembles an automobile capable of going seven times faster than it resembles someone strolling along with all the time in the world...
...Authority and responsibility were more evenly distributed, self-management was the norm, and honesty and frankness in personal communication were accepted behavior...
...One also wonders how well the bullpen layout might work if the Mayor ever had to conduct a wholesale massacre of his staff...
...Not even its founder could easily explain what Razorfish produces...
...They could zone out on music...
...The answer may have been unwittingly suggested a half-century ago by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who worried with great foreboding about America's growing army of white-collar workers...
...But they wind up never leaving the office and quickly deteriorate into walking-zombie burnout cases...
...Once the tech start-ups multiplied in Silicon Valley, changes could be felt...
...What about all the loosey-goosey high-tech shops from Manhattan to San Jose that appeared like meteorites in the late 1990s-just before they fell to Earth in a great glob of confusion, pain and anger...
...But to say that Razorfish adopted the ideals of the humane workplace at the height of the dot-com craze does not quite do justice to the point...
...Employees could play Ping-Pong on company time...
...They get permission to treat office as home-so long as they do projects on time...
...Suffice it to say that establishing a climate of antiauthoritarian egalitarianism was not high on the agenda at IBM or RCA or General Electric...
...After an uncomfortable pause, bis partner finally blurted two words into the mike: "Business strategy...
...While everyone expects it to put the pieces back together someday, no one knows when that day will come or how intensive the recovery will be...
...At Razorfish, work was play and play was work...
...Nevertheless, that seems a step up...
...When the reporter pressed for an elaboration, he announced: "We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them...
...Joseph Dolman, a longtime contributor to The New Leader, is a New York City-based columnist and editorialist for Newsday...
...The new permissiveness also contained some nasty hooks...
...It allows bosses and assistants and gofers to communicate spontaneously, with a minimum of awkwardness...
...They expected the Internet to remain free to all users, and never bothered to wonder who was going to pay for it...
...And the boss, who is rarely more than a few desks away, trusts his lieutenants to chat (judiciously) with whomever they choose...
...When it comes to how we work, the folkways of the digital world have much to teach us...
...The high-tech industries of that era, of course, were no better than other firms...
...Indeed, the "golden children of Razorfish," as Ross calls them, wound up spending vast portions of their lives in the office...
...The question is, how much should we care about these privileged kids with their solipsistic dreams and inevitable disappointments...
...Nor are they like the textile workers of North Carolina who were forced to sell a lifetime of labor, dirt cheap, in return for a case of brown lung disease...
...Technology is there for just this result, but it is not a 'neutral' assistant...
...He cites approvingly two authors who believe that the "new ideas of autonomy, initiative and cooperation' have as their counterparts "suffering, confusion, uneasiness, powerlessness, stress and fear...
...The labor market had delivered practically all Americans from a world of farms and factories and shops and small businesses to a life of frightening conformity-where people smile alike, dress alike and, with impeccably shined shoes, march in lockstep toward a gold watch and the grave...
...They are "bored at work and restless at play" and miserable pretty much all of the time, he reckoned...
...They are creative employees of an antiauthoritarian bent who believe, with an almost religious fervor, in the values of open communication, independence and self-direction...
...They did not grasp the viciousness and whimsy of market cycles...
...The scenario begins to sound like the script from an old Twilight Zone episode: Workers win total freedom...
...When frontline cohorts were needed on a large scale, they would be subcontracted from allies...
...Employee self-management could allow real managers to shirk their duties...
...In response to a question from a reporter at a press conference, the founder tried to define its purpose this way: "We've recontextualized what it is to be a service business...
...They took the lavish outside investment in their company for granted...
...Could a tradeoff so intenseimplicit in the very structure of many New Economy firmsremain viable indefinitely without producing ugly side effects...
...Apparently Daniel Cohen can...
...Highskilled labor was needed to program and operate ever-smarter technology...
...Some jobs are better than others, of course, but the way of the world these days is to rely on workers with more brainpower...
...Their hopes for an Internet society free from Wall Street's crass manipulation were grimly dashed...
...Ross goes on to stress that there continues to be much to like about the New Economy's innovations in a place such as Razorf ish: "Among the features that consistently rated as the people's choice was the absence of chains of command between employees and managers...
...Yet Cohen goes on: "In paying workers seven times more today than yesterday, capitalism expects a worker to accomplish seven times more...
...The dot-com world, having already taken heavy hits, was sent reeling after September 11,2001...
...they could never fully relax...
...No setup is perfect...
...For the vast majority of workers, I think, conditions have grown infinitely better...
...The press has tended to portray the mosh-pit atmosphere of the bullpen as a lark-a lovable eccentricity of billionaire Bloomberg...
Vol. 85 • November 2002 • No. 6
