It was a heady spring for the fire-eating leaders of the business revolution. First there was Wired magazine, seeking to bring the uprising to new media shores with the launch of a book-publishing branch and simultaneously to enlist support from more conventional mercantile powers with an initial public offering. The official release that accompanied the Wired IPO will no doubt someday be remembered as one of the essential documents of the 90s: assuring investors that “none of the Company’s employees is represented by a labor union,” it credits the business with “creating compelling, branded content with attitude.” Much of the commentary on the Wired IPO to appear so far holds the idea of investing in tude, no matter how it’s branded, as something akin to a joke. But that’s just the grumbling of the Second Wave: the truly enlightened know that today tude is the realest commodity on earth, the economic lever that will never let you down.
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Fast Company’s apparent success brings into sharp focus the strange cultural-political climate of recent years. Ordinarily, of course, it’s the political left that talks “revolution” so enthusiastically. But today, with the left nearing outright extinction, the language seems to have become the province of corporate ideologues. “(Knowledge) Workers of the World Unite!” runs one Fast Company headline. Much of what this “business revolution” entails is pretty familiar: the rise of information technology, a mania for nonhierarchical language and for democratic-sounding terms like “empowerment,” the ever-advancing rationalization of corporate structures and–just incidentally–the elimination of large chunks of the workforce.
With the exception of this last detail, there’s plenty of standard “revolutionary” stuff in Fast Company. A computer scientist who’s profiled is described as “a rabble rouser, an agent provocateur, a product of the 1960s who never lost his activist fire or democratic values.” Another story offers tantalizing glimpses of a “dis-organization” (a maker of hearing aids) that inhabits an “anti-office” where “all vestiges of hierarchy have disappeared.” And another details how Levi’s, a perfectly successful trousers manufacturer, decided to implement “the most dramatic change program in American business,” rooting out “resistance” and reorganizing itself utterly because…well, because it seemed like the thing to do. The magazine’s editors sum up their own understandings of the new world of business with quotes from Hunter S. Thompson and the eternal proletarian, Bruce Springsteen.
It’s a strange but eerily predictable twist in the developing ideology of the businessman’s republic. In an age when unregulated capitalism has become the model for running everything from prisons to public schools to police forces, it was only a matter of time till someone suggested that the application of free-market theory can in fact solve all problems–that the best way to deal with the problems of business (you know, layoffs, unemployment, low wages, alienation, etc) is not organized labor or government intervention but…more business.
You don’t have to look beyond the pages of Fast Company to find similar contradictions of the magazine’s revolutionary pretenses. As article after article insists, the new world of total competition is going to be much, much more ruthless, not kinder and gentler. The true revolutionary may talk about “teams,” but he lives to make himself an uber company man, a hyperintense competitor. The magazine includes stories of enlightened businessmen who realize that the best way to climb is to reconcile yourself to the impermanence of employment and change jobs frequently; an essay in the second issue informed readers that no matter what the virtues of the revolutionary organization, “work environments” are “less secure” these days, that “knowledge-based competition will demand more of us, not less; the requirements of committed involvement in work will increase in parallel with the insecurity associated with it.”
