Re: <eyebeam><blast> Cyberpower

["richard e. spear" <rspear@ufl.edu>]

A brief comment on Brian Holmes' rich response to Tim Jordan's
Cyberpower that I also found very worthwhile reading: You may be
interpreting his talk of power through the lense of new critical
theory.  Perhaps I was influenced by his mention (in his first post) of
the Web Stalker (which had come to my attention earlier from another
source), but I perceived his point of view as more pragmatic (I saw no
mention of Foucault, unless I missed it).  It is for him to say. 
However, regarding your comments that "we should catch up with the
corporations", I am taking the liberty of quoting three introductory
paragraphs from Michael Goldhaber's website, which I just discovered and
whose point of view I find heartening:
"...Cyberspace today is a mess, yet it's going to be even more of a mess
-- like life itself. Which is no coincidence, since, more and more, this
will be the space in which life as a whole is lived.
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The move to cyberspace parallels the move from old feudal Europe to the
New World of the Americas five centuries ago. That traverse both set the
stage for and was an early indicator of the rise of the new
market-based/ money-based/ industrial/ mass-production economy. Yet
leaders of old feudalism didn't see that. They thought the new space,
the new world, was for them; so they set up dukes and earls and
viscounts to govern it for them, until they all fell.

Likewise the grand panjandrums of the money economy think the new space
today, this space, cyberspace is for them, that it will just be part and
parcel of that now-old system. But the parallel is that cyberspace is
really arising for different reasons; to give birth to a completely new
economy -- an economy that is like feudalism in one way: it has little
to do with money. (Though it is unlike feudalism as can be in most other
respects.)"
 
Athena Tacha
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