Software culture - need to investigate the idea of 'culture' in this regard. Cultural Capital v Economic Capital The theory of Cultural Capital emphasises that everyone has a "cultural history", accumulated through the primary and secondary socialisation process, which includes anything that gives you an advantage or disadvantage in certain situations. For example, something as simple as your biological sex or skin colour can, under certain circumstances, be advantageous or disadvantages for your life chances. Cultural Capital, therefore, can be considered to be anything in your personal / social background that helps or hinders you during your life. It can, for example, be things like family background and status (Prince Charles, for example, because of his membership of the Royal Family, has greater cultural capital than you or I), income, wealth, educational qualifications or whatever. The theory was originally developed by Bourdieu and Passeron (in 'Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction', 1973). Bourdieu in particular developed the idea of situational constraints by using the concept of cultural capital to demonstrate how the working classes are systematically blamed for their relative failure within the education system and to understand the theory a little more we need to understand the concept of cultural reproduction. -- Culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept (notes from Dick Hebdige (1993) 'From Culture to Hegemony', in, Simon During, ed., _The Cultural Studies Reader_, London: Routledge, pp. 358-367.) Even as a scientific term, 'culture' refers both to a process (artificial development of microscopic organisms) and a product (organisms so produced). Excerpts from Raymond Williams, Keywords: Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus 'inhabit developed through colonus, L to colony. 'Honor with worship developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with subsidiary medieval meanings of honor and worship (cf. in English culture as 'worship in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, OF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth. Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter -- ploughshare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L -- ploughshare, culter, OE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eCl7 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: 'hot burning cultures). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eCl6 the tending of natural growth was extended to process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until lC18 and eC19. Thus More: 'to the culture and profit of their minds; Bacon: 'the culture and manurance of minds (1605); Hobbes: 'a culture of their minds (1651); Johnson: 'she neglected the culture of her understanding (1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C18 and is not common before mCl9. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): 'spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea, Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected. Here the metaphorical sense ('natural heat) still appears to be present, and civility (cf. CIVILIZATION)is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read 'government and culture in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C15 England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century)which has this clear sense: 'it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the Church. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: '... nor purple state nor culture can bestow. Wordsworth wrote 'where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) 'every advantage of discipline and culture. It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in lC18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German. In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (lC18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming 'civilized or 'cultivated; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784--9 1) he wrote of Cultur: 'nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that 'civilization or culture -- the historical self-development of humanity -- was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what be called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote: Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of 'cultures in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant 'civilization. It was first used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the 'inhumanity of current Industrial development. It was used to distinguish between 'human and 'material development. Politically, as so often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both. (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between 'material and 'spiritual development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.) On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemms Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit -- 'General Cultural History of Mankind (1843-52)-- which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used 'Ancient Society, with a culmination in Civilization, Klemms sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture (1870). It is along this line of reference that the dominant sense in modern social sciences has to be traced. The complexity of the modern development of the word, and of its modern usage, can then be appreciated. We can easily distinguish the sense which depends on a literal continuity of physical process as now in 'sugar-beet culture or, in the specialized physical application in bacteriology since the 1880s, 'germ culture. But once we go beyond the physical reference, we have to recognize three broad active categories of usage. The sources of two of these we have already discussed: (i) the independent and abstract noun which describes a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development, from C18; (ii) the independent noun, whether used generally or specifically, which indicates a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general, from Herder and Klemm. But we have also to recognize (iii) the independent and abstract noun which describes the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity. This seems often now the most widespread use: culture is music, literature, painting and sculpture, theater and film. A Ministry of Culture refers to these specific activities, sometimes with the addition of philosophy, scholarship, history. This use, (iii), is in fact relatively late. It is difficult to date precisely because it is in origin an applied form of sense (i): the idea of a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development was applied and effectively transferred to the works and practices which represent and sustain it. But it also developed from the earlier sense of process; cf. 'progressive culture of fine arts, Millar, Historical View of the English Government, IV, 314 (1812). In English (i) and (iii) are still close; at times, for internal reasons, they are indistinguishable as in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1867); while sense (ii) was decisively introduced into English by Tylor, Primitive Culture (1870), following Klemm. The decisive development of sense (iii) in English was in lC19 and eC2O. Faced by this complex and still active history of the word, it is easy to react by selecting one 'true or 'proper or 'scientific sense and dismissing other senses as loose or confused. There is evidence of this reaction even in the excellent study by Kroeber and Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, where usage in North American anthropology is in effect taken as a norm. It is clear that, within a discipline, conceptual usage has to be clarified. But in general it is the range and overlap of meanings that is significant. The complex of senses indicates a complex argument about the relations between general human development and a particular way of life, and between both and the works and practices of art and intelligence. It is especially interesting that in archaeology and in cultural anthropology the reference to culture or a culture isprimarily to material production, while in history and cultural studies the reference is primarily to signifying or symbolic systems. This often confuses but even more often conceals the central question of the relations between 'material and 'symbolic production, which in some recent argument -- cf. my own Culture -- have always to be related rather than contrasted. Within this complex argument there are fundamentally opposed as well as effectively overlapping positions; there are also, understandably, many unresolved questions and confused answers. But these arguments and questions cannot be resolved by reducing the complexity of actual usage. This point is relevant also to uses of forms of the word in languages other than English, where there is considerable variation. The anthropological use is common in the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, but it is distinctly subordinate to the senses of art and learning, or of a general process of human development, in Italian and French. Between languages as within a language, the range and complexity of sense and reference indicate both difference of intellectual position and some blurring or overlapping. These variations, of whatever kind, necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate. It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19 distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): 'the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization. The noun in this sense has effectively disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. Hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnolds views. It gathered force in lC19 and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti-German association) has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun INTELLECTUAL),refinement (culchah) and distinctions between 'high art (culture) and popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility. Raymond Williams in 'Culture and Society' (1961) points to two main definitions: 1. that emphasises the dream of an 'organic society' - integrated into a whole, a notion of past community, harmonious perfection. 2. future socialist utopia where the distinction between labour and leisure is undermined. 1. rather conservative, representing culture in terms of a standard of aesthetic excellence. (opera, ballet, literature, art) - the best that has been expressed. 2. rooted in anthropology, referring to a particular way of life expressing certain meanings and values, not only in the arts but in other institutions and ordinary behaviour. Documentary tradition and real life, everyday life Grierson and general post office GPO film unit Humphrey Jennings' spare time (1939) and Mass observation movement (marketing techniques) - combining marxism and surrealism Thus culture takes on a wider interpretation, according to T.S. Eliot: 'all the characteristic activities and interests of a people', and in turn described by Raymond Williams as the 'study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life' (1958). Here the emphasis is on the (theoretical) analysis of particular meanings and values. Raymond Williams developed an approach which he named 'cultural materialism' in a series of influential books - Culture and Society (1958), the Long Revolution (1961), Marxism and Literature (1977). Cultural materialism was always, for Williams, a Marxist theory - an elaboration of historical materialism. 'Latent within historical materialism is ... a way of understanding the diverse social and material production ... of works to which the connected but also changing categories of art have been historically applied. I call this position cultural materialism.' Cultural production is itself material, as much as any other sector of human activity; culture must be understood both in its own terms and as part of its society. Williams' conception of cultural materialism went further, however. The key question was how the relationship between society and culture was understood. In his 1958 essay 'Culture is Ordinary' Williams cited the Marxist tenet that 'a culture must finally be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production' and glossed it as follows: 'a culture is a whole way of life, and the arts are part of a social organisation which economic change clearly radically affects.' The second part of this statement indicates Williams' resistance to the classical Marxist idea of culture as a 'superstructure' which echoes an economic 'base'. The first part suggests how he would bridge the gap: culture was "a whole way of life". This Williams counterposed to 'high culture' - "this extraordinary decision to call certain things culture and then separate them, as with a park wall, from ordinary people and ordinary work". Hence, culture is always political. This is not to say that the crimes of the ruling class can be read off from a film or an advertisement, any more than they can from a party political broadcast. Still less does it imply that work which aims for that level of explicitness is the best or most important. Rather, culture is political because the social process addressed by political analysis is always embedded in culture. Williams reversed the terms of the usual analysis. Rather than being a specialised area in which we see reflections of the political processes governing society, culture is the "whole way of life" which makes up human society; political analysis is a specialised framework which can be used to understand it. Mass media was tentatively endorsed but a moral and aesthetic overtones - in distinguishing 'good' and 'trash' cultural forms. Williams called jazz 'a real musical form' and football 'a wonderful game' (in contrast to Adorno's views). Mass or Pop culture High or elite culture The 'culture wars' (Dylan v Keats) Digital culture? Both Williams and Hoggart portray the working class 'culture' sympathetically and with a strong bias to literature and literacy (again expanding the categories of literacy in particular - in Hoggart's 'The Uses of Literacy' 1966?). In this way, it was thought possible to 'read' society. Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1972) sets out to examine the hidden rules, codes and conventions that are particular to specific groups are rendered universal for the whole of society. Not concerned with value judgement but how all signs are converted to 'myth'. Barthes combined a literary or linguistic perspective with a Marxist perspective - and in particular 'ideology' that lies behind surface appearances, beneath consciousness. For Marx, it is the basis of the economic structure (surplus vale) that lies hidden from the consciousness of the agents of production - often referred to as 'false consciousness' (although Althusser confirms that ideology works at an unconscious level). Ideology saturates everyday discourse in the form of common-sense. 'The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.' (Marx and Engels) Hegemony refers to the ways in which 'total social authority' is exerted not simply by coercion or direct imposition but by winning and shaping consent in such a way that power seems legitimate and natural. 'Hegemony' -- the willing acceptance of one social group's dominance and control by another and the dominating group's main vehicle of control -- can be seen in terms of the more complex view of social structure, elaborated for the analysis of popular culture, developed in recent years within the Gramscian tradition and articulated by theorists such as Stuart Hall. However, an understanding of the more fundamental use of the term is also important. While it is difficult to find an adequate definition for hegemony, Todd Gitlin gives a sense of how the concept works: '[H]egemony is a ruling class's (or alliance's) domination of subordinate classes and groups through the elaboration and penetration of ideology (ideas and assumptions) into their common sense and everyday practice; it is the systematic (but not necessarily or even usually deliberate) engineering of mass consent to the established order. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the mechanisms of hegemony and the mechanisms of coercion. . . . In any given society, hegemony and coercion are interwoven.' See Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching, 253. Ideology is thus seen to be permanent, natural and outside history. Hegemony according to Gramsci is a '"moving equilibrium" containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency' (Stuart Hall, 1976) . In other words, even opposition is part of the way that dominance is exerted. This is important but is neither fixed nor guaranteed. Stuart Hall has also developed reception theory -- an approach to textual analysis which allows for a measure of "negotiated" or "oppositional" readings of the text by the audience (see 'Encoding-Decoding'). This means that audiences/readers don't simply take in a TV show, newspaper, etc., dumbly, accepting the textual meaning intended by the producer or editor. Instead, they negotiate meaning in the media text, that is, they take in some of the meaning supposedly embedded in the text, but they also infer some of their own meaning into the text. Depending on their cultural backgrounds, some people might accept most of the media text's message, while others reject it almost entirely, preferring an oppositional reading of the text. Commodities can be symbolically 'repossessed' in everyday life, and endowed with implicitly oppositional meanings, by the very groups who originally produced them... The consensus can be fractured, challenged, overruled, and resistance to the groups in dominance cannot be lightly dismissed or automatically incorporated. It is these objections and contradictions that find expression in subculture (Lefebvre in 'The Practices of Everyday Life'). For Hebdige, style in subculture is hugely significant - as its transformations go against 'nature', interrupting the process of 'normalisation'. Moreover, political struggle itself takes cultural forms. Does this hold? Adorno (On Popular Music) meets Textz.com (on Napster) [1] Popular music, which produces the stimuli we are here investigating, is usually characterized by its difference from serious music. This difference is generally taken for granted and is looked upon as a difference of levels considered so well defined that most people regard the values within them as totally independent of one another. We deem it necessary, however, first of all to translate these so-called levels into more precise terms, musical as well as social, which not only delimit them unequivocally but throw light upon the whole setting of the two musical spheres as well. [2] One possible method of achieving this clarification would be a historical analysis of the division as it occurred in music production and of the roots of the two main spheres. Since, however, the present study is concerned with the actual function of popular music in its present status, it is more advisable to follow the line of characterization of the phenomenon itself as it is given today than to trace it back to its origins. This is the more justified as the division into the two spheres of music took place in Europe long before American popular music arose. American music from its inception accepted the division as something pre-given, and therefore the historical background of the division applies to it only indirectly. Hence we seek, first of all, an insight into the fundamental characteristics of popular music in the broadest sense. [3] A clear judgment concerning the relation of serious music to popular music can be arrived at only by strict attention to the fundamental characteristic of popular music: standardization. The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit--the beginning and the end of each part--must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. [28] In order to understand why this whole type of music (i.e., popular music in general) maintains its hold on the masses, some considerations of a general kind may be appropriate. [29] The frame of mind to which popular music originally appealed, on which it feeds, and which it perpetually reinforces, is simultaneously one of distraction and inattention. Listeners are distracted from the demands of reality by entertainment which does not demand attention either. [40] Yet, if one looks at the serious compositions which correspond to this category of mass listening, one finds one very characteristic feature: that of disillusion. All these composers, among them Stravinsky and Hindemith, have expressed an "anti romantic" feeling. They aimed at musical adaptation to reality--a reality understood by them in terms of the "machine age." The renunciation of dreaming by these composers is an index that listeners are ready to replace dreaming by adjustment to raw reality, that they reap new pleasure from their acceptance of the unpleasant. They are disillusioned about any possibility of realizing their own dreams in the world in which they live, and consequently adapt themselves to this world. They take what is called a realistic attitude and attempt to harvest consolation by identifying themselves with the external social forces which they think constitute the "machine age." Yet the very disillusion upon which their coordination is based is there to mar their pleasure. The cult of the machine which is represented by unabating jazz beats involves a self-renunciation that cannot but take root in the form of a fluctuating uneasiness somewhere in the personality of the obedient. For the machine is an end in itself only under given social conditions--where men are appendages of the machines on which they work. The adaptation to machine music necessarily implies a renunciation of one's own human feelings and at the same time a fetishism of the machine such that its instrumental character becomes obscured thereby. In contrast: Textz.com concept: a spectre is haunting the corporate world--the spectre of organized world-wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common synonym for the becoming-distributor of millions of former customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are much more driven by people and popular protocols than they are determined by legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the corporate-political. napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of a whole industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and absolute obsolescence. today more than ever, the nets are zones of excess, immune against the business model of electronic scarcity. the transnational companies that are trying to break up the file-sharing networks have declared a war they will never be able to stop. there are going to be thousands of napsters. textz.com is not even zero-point-five of them. we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are we the minus in e-book. the future of online publishing sits right next to your computer: it's a $50 scanner and a $50 printer, both connected to the internet. we are the & in copy & paste, and plain ascii is still the format of our choice. it shouldn't require a plug-in to read a book on the net, nor should it require a credit card. the text industry is a paper tiger. along with the mass erosion of their proprietary rights goes the vanishing of their digital watermarks. packed today, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic gadgets they will come up with--they are all going to be dead media on their very release day. forget about your brand new kafka dvd. i already got it via sms. one shouldn't expect the 50 million former users of napster to be digitally illiterate: they won't judge an e-book by its cover. this is not project gutenberg. it is neither about constituting a canonical body of historical texts (by authors so classical that they've all been watching the grass from below for almost a century of posthumous copyright), nor is it about htmlifying freely available books into unreadable sub-chapterized hyper-chunks. texts relate to texts by other means than a href. just go to your local bookstore and find out yourself. the net is not a rhizome, and a digital library should not be an interactive nirvana. the conceptual poverty of today's post-academic, post-corporate public online services--and we haven't seen dot-museum yet--is not and has never been a desirable alternative to the dystopic vision of a future controlled by the super-pervasive data-streams of the emerging military-entertainment complex. there are still other options. nostalgia is slavery. stay home, read a book. information does not want to be free. in fact it is absolutely free of will, a constant flow of signs of lives which are permanently being turned into commodities and transformed into commercial content. textz.com is not part of the information business. they say there was a time when content was king, but we have seen his head rolling. our week beats their year. ever since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as executables--something that is able to change your life. this is not promotional material. facing the unified principles of information--the combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing--there is no more need for media theory or cultural studies. the resistance against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical. we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the penguin, mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectual, digital and biological property--cornerstones of the new regimes of control--are the direct result of organized corporate piracy. they are not only replacing such dubious and obsolete notions as freedom, democracy, human rights and technological progress. all these new forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts to expropriate people's work, data and bodies--just as the they begin to acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to organize them in a radically different way. today's global media and communication conglomerates are mafias, and we shouldn't count on what's left of the national governments when it comes to fighting back. "humanity won't be happy until the last copyright holder is hung by the guts of the last patent lawyer." napster was only the beginning. the nineties of the net are over. let's move on. -- justification of approach to examine net art in this seemingly 'out-moded' manner I agree with Richard Barbrook that Birmingham-style cultural studies lost something in its move away from 'economism'. Mind you, there has already been a partial reaction to this in the form of cultural policy studies, which does address institutional issues. But on the whole, cultural studies has not been well equipped to deal with the rise of new media technologies and the issue of class and property that flow from the commodification of digital information.