The Hands and Brains of Digital Culture: Arguments for an Inclusive Approach to Cultural Labour

Abstract

Since the early 1970s theories of the “information revolution” (Dyer-Witheford 1999) have celebrated techno-scientific development as an essential driving force of fundamental socio-economic transformations, allegedly leading to a new society that overcomes the negative features of industrial capitalism. Peter Drucker’s “age of discontinuity” (1969), Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “technetronic era” (1970), Daniel Bell’s “post-industrial society” (1974), Marc Porat’s “information economy” (1977) and Alvin Toffler’s “third wave” (1980) put forward a vision of a society organized around knowledge and information in which creativity, equality and the prevalence of high-skilled knowledge work would replace alienated and exploited labour (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 25). More recently, Richard Florida has continued these debates, arguing that based on technology, talent and tolerance the “creative class” would be “the mobilising force today — the leading force at the beachhead of social, cultural, and economic change” (Florida 2012, xv) bringing in its wake a clean and green, sustainable, open and tolerant “creative economy” (Florida 2012, x).