AbstractSebastianLuetgert

if we believe the legend, the nineties of the net have been deleuzian: roaming hordes of self-appointed nomads were critically drifting thourgh cyberspace, deterritorializing the borders and segmentations at which former vanguards had come to a halt, while at the same time a new elite of electronic entrepreneurs was joyfully surfing capital's lines of flight, celebrating the revolutionary wisdom of the digital market until the burst of the stock bubble finally announced the emergence of the body without organs.

but if we don't believe the legend, all we can learn from the deleuzian nineties is to what extent cyber-capitalism and its alleged oppositions are ideologically intertwined. the network is not - has never been and never will be - the rhizome. the network is the new mode of production in the societies of control. it is a way of interconnecting all the new forms of digital labor and leisure, of amalgamating computerized pleasure, slavery and paranoia and introducing the new world-wide 24-hour working day.

the network is constituting a digital continuum which, at the same time, is such fun and such terror. the motto at the gates of the internment camp doesn't read arbeit macht frei, as in auschwitz, but arbeit macht spass: work is fun. while electronic labor is looking more and more like an eternal holiday, immaterial leisure can be harder than work. under the conditions of the new economy, every single human life is a digitzed capitalist crisis en miniature, a desaster that bears your own ip-address.

both cyber-communists and e-entrepreneurs have filled with desire what they call the economies of attention and gifts. but these buzzwords are hiding the reality of informal and unpaid production and exchange, which is still an economy of scarcity: scarcity of time, scarcity of space. a growing number of people, over- and underemployed at the same time, can neither afford the amount of attention they are expected to pay nor accept the piles of gifts that are thrown at them. facing the unified principle of information - the combined horror of global communication and intellectual property - there is no such thing as excess.

it is the network - not empire - that is materializing before our very own eyes, and the multitudes are part of it. their only threat to the regimes of control is that they will be their mirror: merely reflecting what is still not the globe but the state of things, reterritorializing towards regions, families and tribes, reinstalling the working ethics of the 19th century, reproducing the spectacular unity of commodification and dissent and repeating a pseudo- revolutionary farce as history.

the enemy of the network is not the activist, but the passivist. passivists don't surf: they have learned to wait, and they know that when crossing a desert there is no need for a powerbook, a gps phone or a press tent. leaving the deleuzian nineties, we may be witnessing the reappearence of a weak historical power, a potential alliance of those whose answer to the global call of the new economy and its roaming opponents - to stay mobile and build networks - remains that they prefer not to, and who still insist that ne travaillez jamais was meant the other way around.


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