Though the basic network of a factory is a hierarchical one, with the capitalist at the head, it also contains within it a multitude of networks – between workers, between machines, and between the two – that operate in the most productive capacity by utilizing multi-directional connectivity. A factory full of machines is a proto-network that achieves perfection in the computers of today, wherein all activity between enter and return is communicated to, truncated, processed, and run by the computer instantaneously, so much so that even the functions of “enter” and “return” are unified on a single key. These computational actions are obscured from view, mystified, then produced and distributed throughout an individual computer’s system and/or its associated network, a network that, like the machines of the industrial revolution, extends back outward to the human operator.
[Notes]
[1] Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Ernest Mandel. Capital. a Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin in Association with New Left Review, 1990. Print., 289.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Though we are speaking on an industrial production - having the character of manufacturing material goods for mass consumption within a traditional labor-capital relation of a standardized working day and waged factory labor - the ideal does not shift much going forward.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 492.
[6] Ibid., 502.
[7] They also exert mental energy, all through pre-planning and execution, which increases in value and importance as skill becomes less critical and production more mechanically automated.
[8] Ibid., 503.