Oh to have the privelege of being exploited in a job.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment.

 It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege,

The unemployed are like blank spaces on ancient maps

The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps

Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. We must remember that Marx, like us all, was historiically constrained; a victin of his times, like us all,  with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency.
Marxist theory (and practice), remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution,
What effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution.

It helps to understand how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. Marxists  underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).