"The class of knowledge workers is just an assemblage, or, in Erik Olin Wright's important formulation, a "contradictory class." It is the class of morphs, or amorphous class..."The new class is the shapeshifter seen in the deliberately underdrawn characters of Scott Adam's Dilbert comics, where weakly individuated office workers (characterized more by occupational stereotype than personality) occupy a common, generic space of information technology" (Liu, pp. 33-34).
Since the beginning of the semester, every time I saw the Dilbert cartoon I was reminded of our class discussions: transformation of labor, culture of workplaces, hyper capitalism and labor, individuality and subjectivity, relentless surveillance, multitude, endless competition for something that is not in my interest and is not mine....
And my identity is not mine anymore, as we see in Dilbert, because I have to incessantly change or am forced to change, or need to at least disguise, my identity to be able to survive. I was pleased to find Dilbert in Liu's book. I believe there are a lot more people who get the same feelings from the cartoon, although not theoretically. So what? I need theories but they keep slipping away from my understanding :(
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