Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention. Mutiny in Comparative Perspective. Ed. by Jane Hathaway. Foreword by Geoffrey Parker. Praeger, Westport (Conn.) [etc.] 2001. xix, 282 pp. Maps. £56.95.

The twentieth century has been a period of rapid change in terms of production and consumption, work, and employment. Much of this change has been driven by developments in technology or the application of new technologies to existing production systems and ways of ordering and organizing work. In characterizing such change, Schumpeter popularized the term innovation. In viewing innovation as the main engine of economic growth, Schumpeter was interested in the idea of the entrepreneur as innovator, not simply in terms of an agent for the introduction of new inventions but more broadly as an organizational innovator introducing new systems of work, new products, and new forms of production.

In the decades following the development of the first electronic digital computers, the computer industry in the United States grew from nothing into an important and expansive sector of the American economy. Whereas in the early 1950s electronic computers were generally regarded as interesting but extravagant scientific curiosities, by 1963 these devices and their associated peripherals formed the basis of a billion-dollar industry. By the beginning of the 1970s, more than 165,000 computers had been installed in the United States alone, and the computer and software industries employed several hundred thousand individuals worldwide.

One of the aspects of the information revolution that has had negative implications for many workers is the erosion of the workplace as a basis for long-term security and collective solidarity. The dramatic pace of technological change, complex restructuring of firms, and continual competitive pressures for rapid innovation that are a central component of the information economy are contributing to fundamental transformations in work and employment. As part of this transformation, the trend towards the centralization of production in large enterprises that was the dominant feature of the industrial era is being superseded by production organized around smaller workplaces connected together in complex, constantly shifting networks operating at multiple spatial scales, from the local to the global. For many workers, one result is greater insecurity, as they increasingly have to update their skills, change jobs and even change careers more frequently. Some analysts have gone so far as to characterize the typical information age worker as a “free-floating individual, connected on-line to a variety of task-performing organizations, ever-competing for resources and personal support, and assuming limited responsibilities towards limited people for a limited time”.

In 1995 AOL announced that it would be converting its pricing plan from an hourly rate that ranged from $3 to $6 an hour to a flat monthly rate of $15.95. The increase in member subscription was expected to be significant, and a wave of concern swept through the large remote-staff volunteer population, whose duties included monitoring electronic bulletin boards, hosting chat-rooms, enforcing the Terms of Service agreement (TOS), guiding AOL users through the online community, and even creating content using the AOL's own program, RAINMAN (Remote Automated Information Manager), the text scripting language and the publishing tool that allows remote staffers to update and change content on AOL. Chief among remote-staff volunteer's concerns was the initiative to convert many of the volunteer accounts from overhead accounts, which had access to tools and privileges that made remote-staff volunteers' duties on par with in-house employees, to unbilled or discounted accounts. In a meeting meant to address the emerging concerns of remote-staff volunteers held over electronic chat, Bob Marean, a representative for AOL, confronted over 450 remote-staff volunteers.

As co-editor of this IRSH supplement “Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions”, I have to begin this commentary with a confession. Before I entered the world of abstract knowledge production, commodification, and consumption known as academia, I was myself a worker in a world of much more concrete information processing: I was a computer programmer in the US from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time we might now consider the nostalgic heyday of desktop-office information technology (IT). In the spirit of full disclosure, before I leap into an analysis of how we might more broadly conceptualize information technology together with information labor in different historical contexts, I have decided to work through my own historical narrative a bit. After all, if historical practice teaches us nothing else, it teaches that each of us makes sense of the world through the lens of personal experience, leaving historians (among others) with the daunting task of interpreting, translating, and finding patterns of meaning in those experiences. Thus I offer this candid admission: “I was a teenage information worker!”