{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","id":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","uuid":"2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title":"Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics","normalized_title":"democracyandotherneoliberalfantasiescommunicativecapitalismandleftpolitics","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":229,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Democracy%20and%20Other%20Neoliberal%20Fantasies%20Communicative%20Capitalism%20and%20Left%20Politics","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/2619284f-c364-4de3-bdf4-82f768dbc1c5/search"},"page":{"printed_page":43,"pdf_page":53,"physical_index":53,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"62a591ac797450a981edfbcbad18bfc724bc535950b43ffd02e0b2a90b740fbf"},"chapter":"Comunicative Capitalism & Left Politics","content":"In light of the nation's failing capacity to stand symbolicaly for institutionality, the Internet has emerged as the zero institution of communicative capitalism. It enables myriad constituencies to understand themselves as part of the same global structure even as they radically disagree, fail to co-link, and inhabit fragmented and disconnected network spaces. The Internet is not a wide-open space with nodes and links to nodes distributed in random fashion such that any one site is equaly as likely to get hits as any other site. This open, smooth, virtual world of endless and equal opportunity is a fantasy (and not simply because some countries censor and block). Barabasi's research on directedness in scale-free networks demonstrates that the World Wide Web is broken into four major \"continents\" with their own navigational requirements (161-78 ). Folowing links on one continent may never bring a user to another continent; likewise, folowing links in one direction does not mean that a user can retrace these links back to her starting point. Despite the fact that its very architecture (like al directed networks) entails fragmentation into separate spaces, the Internet presents itself as the unity and fulness of the global. Here, through our communicative interactions, the global is imagined and realized. The Internet thus functions as a particularly powerful zero institution precisely because it is animated by the fantasy of global unity.\n\nThe Internet provides an imaginary site of action and belonging. Celebrated for its freedoms and lack of boundaries, this imagined totality serves as a kind of presencing of the global. On the one hand, the Internet imagines, stages, and enacts the \"global\" of global capitalism. But on the other, this global is nothing like the \"world\" -as if such an entity were possible, as if one could designate an objective reality undisturbed by the external perspective observing it or a fuly consistent essential totality unruptured by antagonism.42\n\nThe oscillations in the 1990s debate over the character of the Internet can clarify this point. In the debate, Internet users appeared either as engaged citizens eager to participate in electronic town hals and regularly communicate with their elected representatives, or they appeared as Websurfing waste-of-lives in dark, dirty rooms downloading porn, betting on obscure Internet stocks, or collecting evidence of the U.S. government's work with extraterrestrials at Area 51. In other versions of this same matrix, users were either innocent children or dreadful war-game-playing teenage boys. Good interactions were on Amazon. Bad interactions were underground and involved drugs, kiddie porn, LSD, and plutonium. These familiar oscillations remind us the Internet has always been particular and struggles over its regulation have been struggles·over what kind of particularity would and should be installed. Rather than far-reaching, engaging, and accessible, the Internet has been constituted in and through conflict over specific practices and subjectivities. Not everything goes.\n\nTECHNOLO GY\n\n43","previous_page":42,"next_page":44}