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Government plays an enormous role in manufacturing cyberspace magic because much of its legitimacy today is based on identification with this future wave. This is certainly understandable. The transfer of power from government to the private sector in the last 30 or so years and the spread of free trade, deregulation, and the creation of global trading blocs administered by private-sector-controlled bodies has diminished the authority of national governments substantially. [...] One of the few areas left for it to establish a genuine, universally recognized allure is with the new technology. [...]
[...] For Fukuyama, the freedom in liberalism and the choice in politics do not include the freedom to choose to oppose the singularity of a global market system, even to the meager extent of opposing by strengthening the nation state, let alone by daring to choose something other than capitalism. His is the freedom to choose after all the major political, economic, and social decisions have already been made.
[...] Even as myths of cyberspace reveal the unique power that people attribute to this age, these myths also mask the continuities that make the power we observe today, for example in the global market and in globe-spanning companies like Microsoft and IBM, very much a deepening and extension of old forms of power. These patterns of mutual constitution between culture and political economy, specifically between myth and power, suggest not a mythic radical disjunction from history, but a strengthening, albeit in a different mythic client, of old forms of power.
Looking at the history of technology literally puts us in our place by suggesting that rather than ending time, space, and social relations as we have known them, the rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools. They are potentially very profound extensions, but not enough to warrant claims about the end of anything, other than the end of a chapter in a seemingly never ending story. [...]
Digitization takes place along with the process of commodification or the transformation of use to exchange or market value. The expansion of the commodity form provides what amounts to the material embodiment for digitization. It is used first and foremost to expand the commodification of information and entertainment content, enlarge markets in the audiences that take in and make use of digitized communication, and deepen the commodification of labor involved in the production, distribution and exchange of communication. Digitization takes place in the context of powerful commercial forces and also serves the advance the overall process of commodification worldwide. In other words, commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography, and politics. But from a political economic perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitization and commodification.
Digitization expands the commodification of content by extending opportunities to measure and monitor, package and repackage entertainment and information. [...] Initially, commodification was based on a relatively inflexible system of delivering a batch of channels into the home and having viewers pay for the receiver and for a markup on products advertised over the air. The system did not account for different use of the medium; nor did it make any clear connection between viewing and purchasing. It amounted to a Fordist system of delivering general programming to a mass audience which was marketed to advertisers for a price per thousand viewers. Each step along the way to the digitzation of television has refined the commmodification of content, allowing for the flow to be "captured" or, more precisely, for the commodity to be measured, monitored and packaged in increasingly more specific and customised ways. [...]
really excellent
[...] Nortel's product also reflects a fundamental contradiction besetting the business of cyberspace, i.e., the conflict between he goals of building consumer confidence to turn the Internet and its users into a universal market and commodifying without government intervention whatever moves over the Internet, including personal identity [...]
basically sold consumer internet behaviour tracking software. privacy activists shut it down. its behaviour was totally sensible - it needed to "expand the commodification of its major resource, the Internet"
Useful as it is to recognize the lie in the myth, it is important to state at the outset that myths mean more than falsehoods or cons; indeed, they matter greatly. Myths are stories that animate individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of the banality of everyday life. They offer an entrance to another reality, a reality once characterized by the promise of the sublime.
[...] Critically examining myths of cyberspace may help us to loosen the powerful grip of myths of the future on the present. It may lead us to question the naturalized tendency to see the future as the pure extension of logic, technical rationality, and linear progress, and other bulwarks against the primitive forces of instinct and intellectual poverty that have historically weighed against human accomplishment. In this view, cyberspace is a mythic gloss on individual achievement and genuine community against the ostensibly backward Others who would undermine both.
[...] But myths are more than fabrications of the truth. [...] myths are stories that help people deal with contradictions in social life that ca never be fully resolved. They are one response to the inevitable failure of our minds to overcome their cognitive or categorical limits to understanding the world. [...]
citing Levi-Strauss
'Myth' is not merely an anthropological term that one might equate with human values. It is also a political term that inflects human values with ideology. By denying the fullness of the political, myth naturalizes its narrative and raises it to the level of a near impregnable fortress unassailable by ordinary mortals. Myths are what is and there is not much that can be done about them. [...]
i just like the way this is written