Even the much-lauded "consumer as producer" fails to attack private property. On the one hand, large commercial sites like Amazon claim ownership rights to all content-book reviews, lists-placed on their site. On the other, production is always and necessarily a kind of consumption, whether of raw materials or labor power. 33 Joshua Gamson's point about the legacy of Internet-phila is appropriate here: wildly displaced enthusiasm over the political impact of a specific technological practice results in a tendency "to bracket institutions and ownership, to research and theorize uses and users of new media outside of those brackets, and to allow . 'newness' to overshadow historical continuitY:'34
Napster is a technological fetish onto which al sorts of fantasies of political action were projected. In this instance, the fantasy is one deeply held by music fans: music can change the world. Armed with networked personal computers, the weapons of choice for American college students in a not-so-radical oh-so-consumerist entertainment culture, the wired revolutionaries can think they are changing the world, comforted all the while that nothing really changes (except the price of compact discs).
The technological fetish covers over and sustains a lack on the part of the subject. It protects the fantasy of an active, engaged subject by acting in the subject's stead. The technological fetish "is political" for us, enabling us to go about the rest of our lives relieved of the guilt that we might not be doing our part and secure in the belief that we are, after all, informed, engaged citizens. The paradox of the technological fetish is that the technology acting in our stead actually enables us to remain politically passive. We don't have to assume political responsibility because, again, the technology is doing it for us.
TECHNOLOGY
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