Thus the entire thrust of Negri's recent work is to emphasise the capacities that an intensively technological environment bestows on the socialised worker. As Negri puts it, whereas the mechanised hell of the mass worker encouraged the rejection of science, for the socialised worker the issue is rather the 'control of science' - the 'attempt to break the connection between knowledge and power and establish alternative controls' (Negri 1989, 86).
What makes this shift in emphasis possible is the organic familiarity which contemporary workers have with computers and communications. To grasp this new aspect of the work situation, Negri refers to the techno-scientific production systems as an 'ecological machine', a habitat in which astounding technological devices have become so quotidian as to assume the aspect of a 'second nature' - and hence to be no longer a unilateral instrument of domination, but susceptible to constant deviations and micro-appropriations, to unexpected quarryings and harvestings. (Negri 1989, 93).28 This concept of the 'ecological machine' bears comparison with Haraway's (1985) provocative appropriation of the figure of the human-machine 'cyborg' as a useful image for socialist-feminist activism. Both metaphors break with the consolidated left legacy which sees in science and technology only the 'one dimensional' logic of capital (Marcuse 1964).
https://libcom.org/library/autonomist-marxism-information-society-nick-witheford
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