We might even say that those who want to clean up the Internet, who want to get rid of or zone the porn and the gambling, who want to centralize, rationalize, and organize commercial transactions in ways more beneficial to established corporations than to mom and pop shops, express as a diference on the Internet what is actually the starker diference between societies traversed and mediated through electronic communications and .financial networks and those reliant ·more on social, interpersonal, and extralegal networks. As Emesto Laclau argues, the division between the social and the nonsocial, or between society and what is other to it, external and · threatening, can only be expressed as a diference internal to society.43 If capital today traverses the globe, how can the diference between us and them be expressed? The oscilations in the Internet debates depict a diference between those who are sexualized, undisciplined, violent, irrational, lazy, excessive, and extreme and those who are civilized, mainstream, hard.:working, balanced, and normal. Put in the terms f Lacanian psychoanalysis, the other on the Internet is the Real other-not the other I imagine as like me and not the symbolic other to be recognized and respected through abstract norms and rights. Eforts to clean up the Internet target more than gambling and porn; they involve the image of the global. "Whatever disrupts the fantasy of unity on the Internet cannot be part of the global.
The particularity of the fantasies of the global animating the Internet is striking. Richard Rogers's research on linking practices on the World Wide
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