This does not mean that old media do not draw on free Labor. On the contrary, television and print media, for example, make abundant use of the free labor of their audiences/readers, but they also tend to structure the latter's contribution much more strictly, both in terms of economic organization and moralistic judgment. The price to pay for all those real-life-TV experiences is usually a heavy dose of moralistic scaremongering: criminals are running amok on the freeways and must be stopped by tough police action; wild teenagers lack self-esteem and need tough love; and selfish and two-faced reality TV contestants will eventually get their comeuppance. If this does not happen on the Internet, why is it, then, that the Internet is not the happy islandofdecentered, dispersed, and pleasurable cultural production that its apologists claimed it to be?
The most obvious answer to such questions came spontaneously to the early Internet users, who blamed it on the commercialization of the Internet. E-commerce and progressive privatization were blamed for disrupting the free economy of the Internet, an economy of exchange that Richard Barbrook described as a gift economy.43Indeed, maybe the Internet could have been a different place than what it is now. However, it is almost unthinkable that capitalism could stay forever outside of the network, a mode of communication that is fundamental to its own organizational structure.
The outcome of the explicit interface between capital and the Internet is a digital economy that manifests all the signs of an acceleration of the capitalist logic ofproduction. It might be that the Internet has not stabilized yet, but it seems undeniable that the digital economy is the fastest and most visible zone of production within late capitalist societies. New products and new trends succeed each other at an anxiety-inducing pace. After all, this is a business where you need to replace your equipment/knowledges and possibly staff every year or so.
At some point, the speed of the digital economy, its accelerated rhythms of obsolescence, and its reliance on (mostly) immaterial products seemed to fit in with the postmodern intuition about the changed status of the commodities whose essence was said to be meaning (or lack of) rather than labor (as if the two could be separable).44 The recurrent complaint that the Internet contributes to the disappearance of reality is then based both in humanistic concerns about real life and in the postmodern nihilism of the recombinant commodity.4⁵ Hyperreality confirms the humanist nightmare of a society without humanity, the culmination of a progressive taking over of the realmofrepresentation. Commodities on the net are not material and are excessive (there is too much of it, too many websites, too much clutter and noise) with relation to the limits of real social needs.
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The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets