Michael Heim (2000), 'The Cyberspace Dialectic', in, Lunenfeld, ed., The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

As one expect of someone who is a consultant for the computer industry, Michael Heim is keen to distance himself from the dialectical materialist interpretation of dialectics, instead employing an earlier description that preserves the 'joke or paradox that propels all dialectical thinking' (2000: 26). He sees analytical potential in using dialectical thinking to analyse what he calls the new reality layer, characterising two positions: 'naive realists' and 'network optimists' that both belong to the cyberspace dialectic (2000: 38). Despite citing Leibniz's rationality and Hegel's idealism and even Plato's dialogues (that included a concept of the dialectic), the essay has little to offer. He simply argues that an ongoing exchange between competing positions is a useful analytical strategy, and rejects out of hand deeper antagonisms related to power. He posits a safe middle ground to his crude distinction between na•ve realism and network optimists as that of 'virtual realism' (2000: 41). He is careful to not call this a synthesis but instead wishes to continue the oscillation between realism and idealism assuming some kind of equivalence and ignoring politics altogether. 

That these oppositions have more to them is evident in Carol Gigliotti's contribution to the same book (Lunenfled, 2002). She quotes Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic to describe the dialectical relation between opposites: 'All "oppositional" identities are in part the function of oppression, as well as of resistance to that oppression; and in this sense what one might become cannot be simply read off from what one is now.' (2002: 52).
Social transformation is only possible under these terms. Without an understanding of this, the oppressed simply remain oppressed but under the illusion of free choice - just like the readers of Heim's essay imagine themselves to be learning something (I am being antagonistic to prove my point). A clearer example might be the essay in which Heath Bunting's position in relation to the art world was considered na•ve. It was argued that he was clearly implicated in the culture that he wished to distance himself from: 
'Bunting is best known among the digeratti for his intended subversive actions and attacks on corporate and consumer culture. [...] Bunting's na•ve stance revealed his ignorance of the hard lessons learned 20 years ago [...] Had he been paying attention, he could have learned sooner that there is no outside to corporate culture or more importantly, that 'outside' is just another target market.' (in Stallabrass, 2003: 88). 
The wonderful irony of this is that this nettime posting allegedly by Timothy Druckery 'Heath Bunting: Wired or Tired' (1997) was not written by Druckery at all and possibly was posted by Bunting himself. That artists need to work, to do commerce, is simply a reality - it is a question of how these relationships are pitched and understood in terms of social relations that remains in question.