Cybertarians of the World Unite: You have nothing to lose but your tubes!

Miller, T. (2009) Cybertarians of the World Unite: You have nothing to lose but your tubes! In: Snickars, P. and Vondereau, P., (eds.) The Youtube Reader. National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden, pp. 424-440.

Abstract

Irresistibly enchanted by a seeming grassroots cornucopia, struck by the digital sublime, many "first-world" cybertarian technophiles attribute magical properties to today's communications and cultural technologies- which are said to obliterate geography, sovereignty and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty. A deregulated, individuated media world supposedly makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from confinement, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and competitiveness, links people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post-political Parthenon. In this Marxist/Godardian wet dream, people fish, film, fuck and finance from morning to midnight. The mass scale of the culture industries is overrun by consumer-led production, and wounds caused by the division of labor from the Industrial Age are bathed in the balm of Internet love. Cybertarianism has become holy writ, a celebrated orthodoxy that thinks "everyone is a publisher" thanks to the Internet and its emblematic incarnation in YouTube. 1 These fantasies are fueled and sometimes created by multinational marketers only too keen to stoke the fires of aesthetic and autotelic desire. Time exemplified this sovereignty of consumption in choosing "You" as its 2006 "Person of the Year" -"You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world."

Item Type:	Book Chapter
Publisher:	National Library of Sweden
URI:	http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/26705

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