KTub8

Digital Solidarity
Structural Transformations
We live in turbulent times, and the winds are blowing
from all directions. We need to learn to distinguish them.
There are several deep structural transformations that
fuel the winds pushing forward the social character
of production: the transformation of work, new
subjectivities and the availability of new infrastructures.
First, the character of work has been changing for the
last 30 years. This is most visible in the most advanced
sectors of the ‘information economy’ but not limited
to there only. Work, most generally, is becoming more
social, more communicative, more complex and more
networked. Social skills, such as teamwork, identification
and empathy, are becoming more central to work as
an ever growing share of workplace tasks consists of
communication and coordination. More and more time is
devoted to checking on others, understanding where they
are at and adapting plans accordingly. The more equal
the relationships within teams are, the more explicit
the experience that one cannot work against, or even
without the others. 16 Doing it alone is not an option, not
least since the complexity of the issues that are addressed
has been rising steadily. The personal experience of the
knowledge economy or knowledge society is, to a large
degree, the experience of not-knowing, of not being able
to solve a problem oneself. Nobody, even in the most
narrow of specialisations, can think of him/herself as
truly mastering the field, let alone all the neighbouring
fields necessary to make one’s own domain meaningful
in some way. This is accentuated because complexity
within each field is coupled with continuous changes,
in the practice itself, but also in the way it is embedded
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