I am not claiming networked communications never facilitate political resistance. One of the most visible examples to the contrary is the experience of B92 in Serbia. Radio B92 used the Internet to circumvent governmental censorship and disseminate news of massive demonstrations against the Milosevic regime. <sup>8</sup> My point is that the political eficacy of networked media depends on the setting. Under conditions of intensive and extensive proliferation of media, conditions wherein everyone is pre• sulied to be a producer as wel .as a consumer of content, messages get lost. They become mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinion, and information, to the bilions of nuggets of information and afect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another. What in one context enhances the potential of political change, in another submerges politics in a deluge of circulating, disintegrated spectacles and opinions. Diferently put, the intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism occludes the antagonism necessary for politics; multiplying antagonism into myriad minor iss es and events.9 In relatively closed societies, that antagonism is not only already clear but also apparent at and as the very frontier between open and closed.
Communicative capitalism is a political-economic formation ·in which there is talk without response, in which the very practices associated with governance by the people consolidate and support the most brutal inequities of corporate-controlled capitalism. One way to unde'rstand the hold of communicative capitalism is to consider its animating fantasies, fantasies that, for many on the left, are inextricable from their faith in democracy. This chapter takes up three such fantasies, those of abundance, participation, and wholeness. The hold of these fantasies on the political imaginary, the promises and aspirations they inscribe in the ideological structure of our most basic communicative activities, helps account for the persistence of belief in democracy in the face of knowledge of the way that the democratic form continues to strengthen the place and power of the wealthy and diminish the lives and opportunities of the poor.
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