"it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality. this is not true

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i have seen many people spill their guts on–line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money–value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called 'the means of production.' capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.

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i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as spectacle.

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many cyber-communities are businesses that rely upon the commodification of human interaction. they market their businesses by appeal to hysterical identification and fetishism no more or less than the corporations that brought us the two hundred dollar athletic shoe

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what i am getting at here is that electronic community is a commercial enterprise that dovetails nicely with the increasing trend towards dehumanization in our society: it wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost."

http://alphavilleherald.com/2004/05/introducing_hum.html