Timothy W. Luke

Department of Political Science

Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University

Blacksburg, VA

Presented at the annual meeting of the

International Studies Association,

March 15-18, 2000

This analysis rethinks the historically specific understandings of both structure and agency in the spaces occupied by our social, economic and cultural life as it goes "online." Consequently, these remarks also reappraise contemporary world politics to reevaluate the shifts being caused in politics by technological changes which alter what "the world" is. Because it reexamines what might be called "infopolitics," this analysis cannot avoid discussing the new chronopolitical and geopolitical implications of cybernetic time and space. There is more to world politics today than international relations, and much of it relates to the global informatic systems remaking the world.

In another time during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some among the rising bourgeoisie and a few entrepreneurial aristocrats in Europe touted the merits of republican government in the face of centralizing monarchical authorities, which were intent upon using the wealth and power made possible by modernity for their own purposes. Republican ideologies rarely cashed out in the creation of successful republics, except for a few smaller European experiments and what was to become the United States, until the French Revolution. Nonetheless, these ideas were quite important in the evolution of the modern nation-state, popular democratic rule, and mass civic activism (Walker, 1993: 26-49). At the start of the twenty-first century, many believe that this inheritance of republican ideas and institutions is acting as a fetter upon new ways of life being made possible by informatic technologies. Markets rather than governments appear to many as the driving force behind contemporary cultural, political, and social developments, and new modes of quasi-private governance seem preferable to strictly public power invested in states. Moreover, informatic networks are creating systems of communication, exchange, and production in virtual domains of interaction beyond the constraints of material embodiment in specific territorial locations on solar time (Luke, 1998). While they are still inarticulate and inchoate, certain "e-publican" credos are emerging in many discourses and practices connected to the global workings of "network society." This study reexamines some of the origins and varieties of this e-publican thinking (recognizing, of course, the more convivial history of "publican" institutions in Great Britain) in order to reflect about the political agendas expressed by e-publican ideologies and interests.

Much of this discussion centers on the United States of America, and the globally distributed networks its informatic economy is developing around the world. This focus is unavoidable inasmuch as this nation-state created the Internet, constitutes most of the Internet economy’s turnover, and remains at the leading edge of Internet innovation on many technological, organizational, and cultural fronts. Nearly half of all homes in the U.S.A. have computers compared to only a third in Japan, ten percent in Malaysia, one percent in China or .3 percent in India (Schmit, 2000: B2). There are around 175 million people using the Internet regularly anywhere in the world, over 100 million of them, for example, are in the U.S.A., while only about 9 million are in China (Pompfret, 2000: A1, A26). In the future, this will change. Two hundred thirty-eight of the two hundred fifty top level Internet domains are allocated to nations and other sovereign entities, and of those, only 33 countries, for example, have no messages in USEnet postings (Smith and Kollock, 1999: 197). Nonetheless, many of those global changes in Internet use will occur inside of informatic environments created for American users, even though the American state largely has forsaken its ownership and control of the Internet.

In fact, the legal authority and administrative effectiveness of various national and international bodies now nominally in charge of the Net, like the IAB (Internet Architecture Board), IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), ICANN (International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), or the Internet Society (ISOC) itself, are quite uncertain. As an FCC policy brief from 1997 observed,

In this power vacuum, which mostly has been created and maintained by non-statal private interests, new voices are pushing their own unique ideologies and interests.

These observations are only a preliminary account about a time of incompletion, disjunction, and abjection. What e-publics might be now is open: are they Japanese homemakers buying clothing and housewares online from L.L. Bean or Williams Sonoma to beat their country’s economic constraints; the mostly young, idealistic entrepreneurs of the Net-based "New Economy" from Intel, Microsoft or Cisco TV ads; frantic e-trading retirees hitting it big on Instinet trading; or, free-floating blocs of older, more cynical survivors from fragmented, depoliticized, and disoriented offline publics just tying into America Online in search of renewal and redirection from the Net’s bitstream? Most likely, e-publics are all of these forces, and more. Persons not of the same race, gender, class, nationality or locality all are interacting online through interfaces that typically reduce their identities to strings of text, synthesized speech or stylized graphics. Once out on the Net, they seek to leverage cyberspace to serve various offline agendas; however, their efforts to operate together and alone in the digital domain also create e-public commonalities that are getting pitched against their offline interests.

Cyberspace is essentially a metaterritorial domain, and its possibilities for the digerati, who tout its benefits, are metanational in quality and quantity. One recent study found the United States to be the most common domain source of USEnet messages, for example, in the 1990s, but "anonymous," or no territorial region of origin, was the fifteenth most common source in USEnet messages (Smith and Kollock, 1999: 197). The e-commerce, e-structures, and e-agents of cyberspace constitute e-publics; yet, their online metanational characteristics can simultaneously become tangled with, and free from, offline national properties. The metanation of cyberspace is inside of each nation, but also outside of it; for each nation, but also not for it; by each nation, but also not of it. As a "meta" factor, it shares actions and structures in common with territorial nation-states, but the telematic metanation is a deterritorialized domain of domains that always is behind, beyond or beside the nation-state system.

Moving most, if not all, of any people’s record-keeping, information-archiving, message-sending, system-controlling, purchase-making, identity-verifying, money-managing, data-transferring, wealth-generating or organization-operating functions into telematic networks--especially into the insecure, open, and free domains of the metanational Internet--can transform many things rapidly, and dangerously by deterritorializing, dematerializing, and depersonalizing how everyday social production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange occurs. Face-to-face interactions between persons become online events with digital beings; material systems with well-proven redundancies, proven safeguards, and fixed practices are supplanted by unstable clusters of code in fragile telematic networks; locatable sites in real space under identifiable, albeit perhaps not effective, governmental control are displaced by cyberspatial addresses under very little or no governmental oversight. Today the Internet, and all of the networks of networks that work beside, behind or beneath it, constitute elaborate e-structures whose e-haviors--particularly in the proliferating possibilities of e-commerce--are acquiring a sui generis metanational quiddity. Their operational venues right now are mainly supplementing offline practices, but some are meant to supplant older face-to-face practices with online alternatives. Eventually, the Nets will entirely surpass many offline practices with e-structures and e-haviors that need very little territorial, material or personal grounding offline. It is in these quadrants of change that e-publican ideologies and movements can develop. And, it is these unexpected conjunctures and unintended disjunctions that this study re-examines.

In his wide-ranging analysis of the networking regimes behind "network society," Manuel Castells marches through three volumes of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, pulling together one account of everything and everyone he believes to be shaping today’s global telematic networks. He sees "a new world is taking shape" out of synergistic (con)fusions arising from

This new world, at the same time, carries much of its content from older existing worlds, which contour the shape and substance of the new, particularly to accord with capitalist exchange, nationalistic governance, and urbanized community. These enduring influences remain in play offline, but an inchoate new world order is forming around the structures of "the network society." Not everything in this society follows from the design of informatics, but all societies are increasingly subject to the operational dynamics of such networks. Castells tends to overemphasize the extraordinary aspects of these cultures of "real virtuality" in a fairly chronocentric fashion. After all, as Standage (1999) suggests, "the Victorian Internet" of global telegraphy created "the mother of all networks" in the 1850s and 1860s. Nonetheless, the density, intensity, and rapidly of computer-mediated communications in the 1990s has caused subtle shifts in the conduct of ordinary everyday life. In fact, the proliferation of informatic networks becomes Castell’s background explanation of how "real virtualities" occupy the popular imagination in a cybernetic society:

This dizzy celebration of social relations in the grip of telematic technoscience expresses the ebullient mood shared by many in network society, but how exactly are the dominant functions and values of governance organized on the bitscapes of cybernetic connectivity?

To the extent that individuals and groups now choose—-or are coerced—-to communicate, keep accounts, publish, buy products, work, access documents, or bank in the digital domains, these operational venues turn into e-public settings for conducting any human’s life (Luke, 1998). Online functionalities can define and satisfy the range of needs that frame offline forms of life as well as the ranges of conduct most appropriate for satisfying these needs (Jones, 1993). Cyberspace, on one level, is clusters of code experienced as audio, graphics, text or video out on the network, but, on another level, these digital objects constitute portals into new types of community, work, identity, sex, utility, knowledge or power in e-publican forms of life. Wilson Dizard characterizes the networks of networks as "the Meganet," or,

Unlike many celebrations of cyberspace, this view at least highlights the machinic infrastructure of boxes and wires, cables and satellites, servers and relays that underpin built networks, which, in turn, generate new, hyperreal electronic environments. Who controls whom in these environments, and through such networks, is the key political question facing e-publics as they reimagine life as "e-havior" within "e-structures."

For all of the talk about cyberspace as an egalitarian realm of free and easy access, there are very rough realities in the materiality of cyberspace (Deibert, 1997). Internet use has grown tremendously over the past decade, rising from a few hundred thousand in 1991 to 143 million in 1998, but it will only be somewhere around 700 million by 2001--still only a little over 10 percent of the world’s population. In many respects, the Net is made in America, for America, and by America. Moreover, almost 90 percent of all Net users live in rich industrial countries, 80 percent of all WWW sites are in English; yet, oddly enough, less than 10 percent of the world’s population speaks English or lives in the rich industrial countries (Washington Post, July 13, 1999: E2). Bits still travel over material systems in wired and wireless networks. Their routers, pipes, and conduits are owned by a few, but sold, leased, or rented to the many. Getting into cyberspace costs money and time; inequalities of wealth and differences in status offline are reflected directly in the real inequities of some groups compared to many others in the online environment. These digital divides represent a clear disparity in computer use and Internet access, which is seen in comparisons both of different social groups in the United States, and between various other nation-states with the U.S.A. (National Telecommunications and Information Administration [NTIA], 1999, 1998, 1995). While some believe that there are no "haves" and "have-nots" in cyberspace, and that the real distinction should be made only between the "have-nows" and "have-laters," it would appear, in fact, that not having computers and Net connections closely parallels not having other types of power, status, and wealth. Just as those who do not have many highly valued material goods now are unlikely to get them later, it is plausible that they too will not get any more computers or connectivity at some unspecified later time. The digital divide, like more enduring divisions in society between the powerful and powerless, the prestigious and the unknown, the rich and the poor, must be studied more closely to discover its causes and its effects.

In exploring the effects of informatic networks on the economy, politics, and society, one must dispute the naïve instrumentalism in which most studies of this topic typically are wrapped. That is, the Internet is simply a tool like any other, and it is used consciously, fairly, and rationally by autonomous human agents to serve the instrumental ends of its users. For those holding such views, economies, democracies, and societies online basically will be not unlike those offline except that their members will send e-mails, build webpages, and/or conduct online chats. Even though we know complex societies with newspapers, televisions, and telephones are not like those without them, the naïve instrumentalism embedded at the core of too many contemporary analyses of the Net rehash reality in this unproductive fashion because of the new mediated technocultures such informatic technics create are neither well-identified nor fully understood (Nye, 1990). By reevaluating how technologies develop "anonymous histories" (Giedion, 1948) that shape space, temper time, and package performance apart from any conscious intention of their users, a critical exploration of computer-mediated communications over information networks must ask how individual and collective subjectivity changes in digital environments to name the agents and structures making telematic history. In more fundamental ways than many now realize, digital networks do create metanational domains for economic exchange, political control, and social interaction that are far beyond the scope and method of how the territorial nation-state works (Nye, 1996).

In many respects, the idea of "netizenship" out on the Net (Hauben, 1997) must be quite distinct from the practice of "e-citizenship" inside any given country, because the Net is far more than any single city, polis or state (Mumford, 1963). At the same time, some qualities of online e-havior closely parallel offline behavior in many social and economic contexts. As the post-IPO Internet address retailer, Network Solutions, suggests in its cable television ads, the Net’s bitscapes are today’s equivalent of the Wild West -- a telematic terra nullis in which anyone can grab their "dot coms" and get rich. This commercialization of cyberspace transforms its ones-and-zeros into a new type of hyperreal estate. The old interface values of disembodied subjectivity, distributed community, and cybernetic play celebrated by early adopters during the first days of the Net in the 1970s and 1980s are being eclipsed rapidly by more familiar problems--inequalities in wealth, knowledge and power--as the virtual markets of online e-commerce proliferate wildly everyday.

The netizen increasingly is a citizen of some state and society, only now with connectivity to many other states and societies, being reimagined in less statalized and social terms: he or she is the clever professional operator who recognizes these profound shifts, leverages every potential for greater political power, and imagines how online opportunity will result in economic profit. Despite all of the agitprop in favor of living on the Internet, a U.S. Department of Commerce report recently found only 32.7 percent of all Americans are Internet users, while 67.3 percent remain entirely offline (NTIA, 1999: 2). Moreover, the online bourgeois of digital bits increasingly appears to have interests, capabilities, and goals, which appear antithetical to those commonly held by the offline citoyen of material cities, and they take e-publican forms. Indeed, the variable geometries of indefinite boundaries, open architectures, and unfixed locations online in the vast metanational netropolis of "virtual life" online starkly contradicts the fixed grids of definite boundaries, closed communities, and inflexible locations offline in every national metropolis out in "real life."

In certain respects, informatics are only the latest wrinkle in modernity. Once again, a fresh set cultural transformations, resting in a destructively productive new technics with its own unformed social mores, appears as the source and goal of yet another universalizing moral order, uniform vision of nature, and univocalized economic model (Jameson, 1992). Bits, like most modern things defined by commodified commercial operations, are privileged objects, which can go from anywhere to anywhere at anytime for anybody (Slouka, 1995). Yet, this potential omnipresence, first, mostly glosses over how much "anywhere" actually remains--in world-systems terms--a set of very limited venues, albeit often widely distributed geographically and, second, ignores how most movements go from somebody at one privileged site to somebody at often another special place.

The devotees of digitalization among the digerati, like Nicholas Negroponte, oversell most of the positive aspects of telematic life, while they underplay how many already existing negative social and economic tendencies will continue in cyberspace to be a lot like they are offline. Negroponte is obsessed with "being digital," which is an e-publican state of being with its own new e-public ways where making, moving, and managing "bits" will replace our many embodied forms of interaction conducted face-to-face with, by, as and through "atoms." For Negroponte, "the change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable" (1995: 4), and digitalization ultimately means dematerialization. To mark this turning point in human history, he asserts "computing is not about computers any more. It is about living" (1995: 6). While this claim is in some sense true, there are bigger concerns--living how, living where, living for whom, and by whose leave while online--that point toward the rise of e-publics.

Digitalization does much more than simply, as Negroponte (1995) argues, replace "the manipulation of atoms" with "the management of bits." To put this into terms taken from computing technology, manipulating atoms is one operating system with its own unique user interfaces, wide area networks, peripheral components, intelligent agents, and killer applications. While many forms of atom manipulation will not disappear, their workings are being displaced, disrupted, and disintegrated by the management of bits. and, this collision of a new online and an old offline machinic regime will have, and indeed is already having, tremendous implications for individual subjectivity and collective solidarity (Luke, 1998).

Some (Ohmae, 1990) celebrate this borderless world, others see it as a creative chaos (Kelly, 1994), and still others fear its inhumane/unfair/antiegalitarian qualities (Virilio, 1997). Most importantly, the older embedded public identities of territorial nationality at physical sites are being tested by newer e-publican identities of telemetrical nodality generated for, by, and of the e-haviors fostered at digital cites. While we may not stand at the end of history, we are experiencing the beginning of virtuality.

As Castells’ studies indicate, the scope, pace, and direction of change in contemporary economies and societies today can be attributed to the ever-shifting technics of networked computing. At the same time, the remediation of cultural identity and political power through human/computer interactions on networks as a virtual life is still conventionally reimagined by the digerati in spatial terms. Rushkoff, for example, typifies the millenarian reading of computer-mediated communication as a new ontological project for humanity:

Cyberspace in this rhetoric is much more than mere technical effects. It mutates into a new cultural reality with its own rules of postmodern embodiment, extraterritorial engagement, and hyperreal enlightenment. Everything allegedly changes in cyberian society, including the old rules of cultural, economic, and political interaction, so new types of human beings with their own special forms of society also believed to be emerging along with the interface. Rushkoff sees these savvy cybernetic individuals as Cyberia's inhabitants, "the cyberians, who are characterized primarily by faith in their ability to consciously rechoose their own reality--to design their experience of life" (Rushkoff, 1994: 4).

Governance of the Internet, however, is an emergent process. And, the revision of authority relations in its functionalities online has not stepped far beyond the juridical assumptions of offline sovereignty over living bodies occupying physical territories. Who rules whom, what is ruled how, and where rules begin and end are all open questions at this time in cyberspace. Much of the Net was made to work astatally, metanationally, or nonorganizationally without a powerful ruler, and to work beyond continual rulings, once the basic TCP/IP rules of packet switching are accepted. This openness, distributedness, decentralization, and interactivity creates environments bounded by connectivity, interactivity, freedom, and autonomy. The fundamental netiquettes of online cultures or network economics draw some boundary conditions of operation, but these are very weak means for governing collective activities (Smith and Kollock, 1999). Nonetheless, the proponents of Internet life, like Rushkoff, believe they are more than enough. In cyberian society, according to its advocates, the technics of computer-mediated communication are simultaneously technological and political mechanisms, and they are quite suitable for redirecting individual and collective behavior in "man’s leap out of history altogether and into the timeless dimension of Cyberia" (1994: 4). The cybertopes of cyberian living are also sites where the certainties of ordinary reality, as millions have come to know it, no longer will hold true, because they are fading into the open, multi-tasked flexible operations of the digital domain (Seabrook, 1997).

Bill Gates outlines his version of these wide-ranging changes in the built environments of contemporary economies and societies by recounting his, and supposedly everyone else’s, experience of "growing up" with computers:

For Gates, and, of course, Microsoft, computers remake built environments. Economies and societies must change as computers connect to us, computers mature with us, computers reside with us at home, computers work with us in the office, computers colonize for us many other technical artifacts, computers integrate us into networks, and computers create new multimediated ways of life. Without saying so, Gates essentially suggests that computers and networks have acquired the qualities of an environment. Networks, like the ecologies of Nature, are always beneath, behind, and beyond the political order of our civic life. This revolution, as it is made from desktops and laptops, co-evolves with, and within, a new built environment, which is fabricated out of bits, mediated over networks, and located online.

Gates (1996) looks down the cybernetic "road ahead" and finds us arriving at "friction-free" metanational marketplaces. In fact, this moment might be "the realization of Adam Smith’s perfect market, at last" (Gates, 1995: 4). When he sights this perfected "friction-free capitalism" of Adam Smith out on the Net, it is celebrated in quite exultant terms:

Under this horizon, Gates asks everyone to go online to find and fulfill their needs. Still, Gates also openly admits that there are "equity issues that will have to be addressed" (1995: 251). On the other hand, he also asserts "one of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity" (1995: 258). And, in his state of wonder, Gates makes a remarkable claim: "We are all created equal in the virtual world, and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world. The network will not eliminate barriers of prejudice or inequality, but it will be a powerful force in that direction" (1995: 258-259).

The possibility that this powerful force might not work as often or as well outside of Redmond, Washington seem utterly implausible for many at Microsoft, but their faith in friction-free markets is difficult to take seriously in light of 1998 figures on the net worth of say only three families: Bill Gates’ Microsoft holdings, the Waltons of Wal-Mart, and the Sultan of Brunei. The net worth of these three households of $135 billion now equals the GNP of the world’s 43 least developed countries. And, they along, with the world’s other 197 richest households, now hold over $1 trillion in wealth, which is more than all of the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people (Washington Post, July 13, 1999: E2).

While many see some common good created out of public projects in the territorial polis of most nation-states, different metanational agendas tied to private profit and professional power sustain what can be called the "informatic subpolis." The creation and control of telematic networks lie uncomfortably somewhere between politics and non-politics. As Beck suspects, most informatic systems, like cybernetic networks, telecommunications grids, or computer applications, become,

Gates, and thousands of other much more anonymous computer people like him, are conducting a metanational revolution in governance from their desktops by designing new subpolitical spaces for cyberian society. Of course, the Web, the Wintel operating system, or the ASCII code, are often neither foreseen nor wanted before their advent; but, decisions made by technicians and traders to structure cyberian society around such "subpolitical systems of scientific, technological, and economic modernization" (Beck, 1992: 186) are changing the world on a metanational scale without much, if any, political planning, state structure or civic legitimization.

The metanational spaces of the Internet are administered very loosely by the Internet Society (ISOC), since it is the home of the Internet Engineering Force (IETF) and Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Drawing together transnational telecoms, big software houses, national scientific agencies, professional-technical groups, and media companies, ISOC is a major executive force in the management of the informatic subpolis. Its intent, however, is e-publican inasmuch as its members want to maintain the Net’s uniquely metanational qualities by safeguarding "the viability and global scaling of the Internet" in ways that "assure the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world" (http://www.isoc.org/mission).

As this metanational informatic subpolis grows, the role and stature of the traditional polis in many nation-states could well decline. Even though everyone currently remains certain within some type of face-to-face political system, their civic abilities to exercise certain practices of rule-making, rule-applying, and rule-adjudication offline do not map over to the subpolitical domains of online technics. Democracy offline may become only an engine of collective inaction or, worse, the audience for endless spectacles of quasi-theatrical scandal. In turn, decisive revolutions will be made in cyberian society, and, as Beck maintains, "under the cloak of normality" (1992: 186) thanks to agents like Microsoft and Bill Gates. Indeed, Gates’ e-publican narratives of informatic transformation simply illustrate how an on-line governmentality now operates metanationally through subpolitical conduits as Microsoft’s corporate goals become basic legislation for PC users (Madden, 1998: 64-69). "In contemporary discussions," as Beck suggests, "the ‘alternative society’ is no longer expected to come from parliamentary debates on new laws, but rather from the application of microelectronics, genetic technology, and information media" (1992: 223).

Even Gates recognizes that the rudimentary terrain of cyberian society, no longer has much objective necessity. Instead, it brims with open choices as all of its operative rules require a new pluralism tied to on-going technical revisions of past decisions. Inasmuch as all users of informatic technology collaborate with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, AOL, and others to build, maintain and then rebuild the multi-layered digital domains of the computer-mediated subpolis, network connectivity oddly becomes "your passport into ‘a new, mediated way of life’" (Gates, 1995: 5). Like cities in civilization, networks increasingly form the larger piece of where we live, and we cannot leave them behind. More than an object, not quite yet a subject, computer connectivity simultaneously provides one a pass, a port, a presence, and a place for entering into this metanation with its new e-public ways of life.

III. Ruling in Cyberia

To the degree that culture can be viewed as the acts and artifacts shared communicatively by particular human groups, Cyberia now provides new e-publican groups with alternative modes of action and types of artifacts to organize social interactions, institutionalize political movements, and advance economic demands on a deterritorialized metanational basis in 24x7 timeframes. The Web’s many diverse sites are operational venues whose assignment, sale, and use generate a new governance challenge: how to create, border, police, and use virtual spaces. Some e-publican interests now realize those spaces, and hence the legal jurisdictions, strategic alliances, cultural norms, and communal rituals which will prevail in them, is up for grabs. Cyberspace, as its emerging hacktivist and netizenship practices indicate, will be contested metanational space in so far as the operational effects of informatics can be simultaneously experienced everywhere and nowhere. If the governmentality problematic is, as Foucault claims, the challenge of conveniently arranging things and people to organize the conduct of conduct, then the Web poses tremendous new metanational challenges for governance, especially who governs whom, where, when, and how.

As Foucault portrays the arts of government, ruling interests introduce a rational economy about the management of things into the political practices of state institutions. (Foucault, 1991: 93). Individuals and groups become fully enmeshed within the tactics and strategies of complex forms of normalizing power whose institutions, procedures, analyses, and techniques loosely organize mass populations and their material environments in several different highly politicized symbolic and material economies. It provides an inexact set of bearings, but Foucault asserts:

Because governmentalizing techniques are always the central focus of political struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations with highly politicized consumer economies compel regimes to redefine what is within their administrative competence throughout the modernizing process.

To survive in the fast capitalist world of the 1990s, it is not enough for territorial states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction offline over their allegedly sovereign territories. The Net is a governmentality engine, whose subpolitical assemblies of informatic artifacts create new collective subjectivities and collections of subjects beyond the territorial polis in the flows of metanational exchange. The workings of online disciplinary practices, in turn, can be reevaluated as "the element in which are articulated, the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power" (Foucault, 1979: 29). In online governmentality, the disciplinary articulations of software packages and hardware functionalities can center upon enforcing "the right disposition of things" between humans conducting their conduct in cybernetic environments as e-publics.

Once online agency emerges as a social project for network administration, the statistical attitudes of corporate product demography diffuse into the numerical surveillance of the Net’s many layers of networked connectivity. Many agencies of national and metanational governmentality now preoccupy themselves with the conduct of conduct on informatic networks. Until the late 1990s, the offline involvement of family, community and nation as public interests mostly have guided our conduct; at this juncture, Internet economies and societies seek to be accepted as an other ethical e-public ground for normalizing any individual’s behavior. Cybernetic domains are spaces under a special kind of self-policing supervision, self-managing expertise, or self-regulating technics. By reading the Net’s communal (dis)order into the heart of digital being, one can find the ultimate meaning of its self-policing fulfilled. The prospects of informatic prosperity looming ahead on a global scale will not be possible without this new governmentality to guide "the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes" (Foucault, 1980: 141). Yet, a digital politics, which is rooted in telematic hardware, software, content, and connectivity providers, must respecify the range of governmentality, as packets of bits remediate "the methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern" (Foucault, 1980: 141).

Those who invent and control the technologies of the Net also are building the metanational subpolis, and telecratic rule is exerted through, within, and because of the technics comprising this subpolis. No one better represents the e-publican telecrat to offline publics at this point than Bill Gates, and no enterprise captures some of the qualities of e-public power more fully than Microsoft. A conflict of one territorial polis over control in a deterritorialized subpolis, in turn, is at the heart of the ongoing U.S. Department of Justice proceedings against Microsoft for allegedly committing serious anti-trust violations in its software design and sales strategies (Hirsh, 1998: 42-43). Telecrats whose powers can be separated and balanced are more palatable than those whose authority is undisputed and power concentrated, but Bill Gates’ business has been very adept at consolidating functions and bundling capabilities that constrain one to behave in certain Microsoft-approved ways from the boot-up screen to the shut-down command. Because Bill Gates’ "road ahead" is one that Microsoft still wants to own and control, the issue of how it might rule over and through bits assumes considerable importance. The Department of Justice anti-trust suit against Gates and his corporation recognizes this fact in its wide-ranging finding many monopolistic practices in the ways that the Redmond, Washington based firm packaged and sold its Windows software package. Microsoft has enjoyed a virtual fifteen year monopoly over in the Wintel/PC operating system markets worth billions of income every year. Despite the best efforts of Apple, ATT/Lucent, DEC, Oracle, and SUN, Microsoft’s software applications still dominate the world’s PCs, occupying over 90 percent of all desktops (Wilke and Bank, 1998: B1).

At this conjuncture, e-publican experimentation is caught within existing corporate, organizational or territorial systems of spatial order. It is now possible to vote online in some shareholder elections, a few professional societies, and a handful of governmental jurisdictions. The cost savings of such e-citizenship practices are moving many netizens to tout the virtues of electronic campaigning, fundraising, polling, and petitioning in their current electoral regime. Similarly, some law-makers are engaged in Internet-mediated discussions with the constituents and colleagues in ways that call into question the institutional practices, architectural spaces, and personal expectations that now carry representative governments on their daily routines of governance. In this spirit, some states are "reinventing government," integrating services at one physical site, creating new private sector partnerships, building citizen self-service systems, outsourcing more services from corporations, not-for-profits, and universities, organizing 24x7 means of access, and seeking greater public feedback, participation, and coproduction. All of these institutional innovations by governments, however, will, ironically, make it more feasible for states to deterritorialize access to their services by giving new informatic tools to their more mobile clients, constituents, and citizens to use as a transnational, 24x7 utility.

Still, the digerati’s vision of netizenship is essentially a naïve instrumentalist one that imagines connectivity alone creates some sort of common interests, shared goals or communal values. This assumption is rarely made about all of the residents in any given city, except for the fact that they enjoy urban life in that particular setting, so one should not make this assumption about netizens. Everyone on the Net wants connectivity, and connectivity to something, but sharing access to, and the use of, a set of telematic tools does not automatically create a universal fraternity for metanationals. In fact, there seem to be many different varieties of netizens and netizenship which are entangled in the dictates of the online interface and the expectations of the offline user. The Net is not one system with a single set of functionalities; it is instead a collective of many things, diverse sites, and varying capabilities promising multiple possibilities for both online and offline communities.

Inasmuch as the online environment frames operational venues for e-haviors in a cyberian society wherein the one and the many might define and satisfy material needs and ethical ideals, then we should perhaps recognize the metanational realities of "e-publics." Here the res publica of "things with of ourness" mutates into e-public domains in which, through which, by which electronic communication, commerce, and community can govern the conduct of conduct--both online and offline. This sense of shared goals and interests is still in many ways inchoate and incomplete, because the typical sources of its definition--a common economic life in shared markets or a common political life under a single sovereign authority to realize material security and physical safety--are not yet widely recognized. For all of the dot coms' bluster since the mid-1990s, only 1.2 percent of all retail sales in the U.S.A. occur over the Net (Harmon, 2000: 25), and even the most sustained cybervandalism incidents of February 7-12, 2000 on the big names in web portal and e-commerce provision for the U.S.A. disrupted service only for a few hours in most cases (Hamilton and Cloud, 2000: B1, B6). Nonetheless, these episodes should not be dismissed as more telematic tomfoolery by black hat hackers. When one’s financial life is mostly nested with something like E*Trade, one’s commercial survival to tied to eBay, one’s mass media consumption is dependent upon Yahoo, one’s family ties are maintained through AOL, and one’s business affairs are conducted through Commerce One.com, then an e-public foundation exists for discrete, diverse, and divided e-publican politics to develop in opposition to offline political interests as well as in conflict with other online political forces.

Metanational space in the Nets, then, can open up, as well as close out, a nation-state to disruptive denials of service. Attacks on e-commerce, telematically managed power grids, online civic infrastructure or informatic command-and-control systems are the form that bitskrieg will take by disrupting e-haviors or destroying e-structures. Moreover, bitskrieg will come to nations in rapid surprise assaults through the metanational realms of networks. Cybercriminals and infovandals now recognize these realities, but major foreign powers also may exploit the cybernetic metanation in state-on-state, state-on-organization, or state-on-individual cyberstrikes (Adams, 1998). Bordering software and hardware exist; but, digital secession from the global metanation, or even digital boundary enforcement, degrades the value-added qualities of completely open digital space. And, e-publican pressure groups push the Internet’s governance structures and national governments to never condone digital boundary-building.

Right now almost all e-publican social movements are captured within existing territorial divisions and political jurisdictions as rearticulations of citizenship in electronic terms. Consequently, a few Net-ready states are putting up official websites for citizens to research government documents, renew existing state-provided licenses, and contact elected officials. Such "dot gov" domains, however, are still essentially territorial entities whose old social formations are entirely embedded in drawing, defining, and defending boundaries offline. The political parties, pressure groups, and partisan candidates of offline democracies are going online to recruit members, popularize their message, and raise funds. These "territorial service providers" are exploiting the capabilities presented by "internet service providers" to digitalize their functions; yet, there are fewer and fewer barriers standing in the way of deterritorialized service providers using the Net’s ISPs to organize metanational e-publican entities to partially displace, or perhaps even largely replace, many smaller, weaker national states as online service providers to state clients and constituents in many different offline territorial locations.

The nascent powers of e-publican interests are recognized in the U.S.A.’s Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998. While the United States of America is arguably the world’s strongest surviving nation-state, this "hyperpower" status has not rendered it immune from interests on the overdeveloped side of the digital divide in California, Texas, Virginia, and Washington winning a three year moratorium on federal taxation for sales over the Net that directly harms other interests on the underdeveloped side of the digital divide elsewhere in the U.S.A. Many politicians celebrate this decision as shrewd anti-tax, anti-government, anti-bureaucratic conservatism, but this suspension of sovereignty over e-commerce coupled with free speech libertarianism with regard to regulating Internet content perhaps lays the groundwork for a new political rupture: an e-publican identity and community online that first resents and then will resist offline governmental efforts to tax, regulate or rule its members.

Most existing systems of territorial governance are stationary engines for regulation, taxation, and administration. Their rules and structures rely upon location--where people live, where companies operate, where income is earned, where money is spent, where investment is made, where property is positioned--to function. Yet, the nets of the Internet are simultaneously everywhere, nowhere, and somewhere else. Servers, network conduits, and access hardware must be located in particular physical locations, but they might be purposely positioned in low-tax or no tax jurisdictions with an additional promise of low or no regulation. So sales taxes on e-commerce, income taxes on e-lancing web workers, property taxes on virtual corporate entities, and inheritance taxes on online stock portfolios all begin to pose problems for offline regimes witnessing the byte flight of taxable transactions from locatable face-to-face markets, properties, and individuals offline into less locatable online e-structures and e-haviors that cover themselves with offline regulatory alibis in odd offshore venues (Luke, 1998).

In the United States, this issue is becoming a major problem in the sphere of state and municipal finance. The 7,000 plus taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.A. are highly dependent upon sales taxes. In 1970, for example, American states derived 32 percent of their tax revenues from sales taxes; by 1996, this figure rose to 49 percent, and in 2000, as more and more states reduce real estate, property, and business taxes, it could rise to nearly 55 percent (Washington Post, February 20, 2000: B2). A 1992 Supreme Court ruling, Quill v. North Dakota, held that mail-order companies cannot be required to collect state sales taxes, and this holds true today for them and e-commerce concerns unless firms have a considerable physical presence in any given state or follow strict rules on "in-state" sales. State laws often require individuals to track their out-of-state purchases, and remit the proper sales tax receipts to their state tax offices, but these regulations are routinely ignored in telephone, mail catalogue, and Internet sales. As the clock runs out on the 1998 federal moratorium on new taxes on Net purchases, a national advisory committee headed by Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore seems to favor continuing the Net’s tax holiday, while the National Governor’s Association has proposed creating a telematic parastatal agency to collect taxes on all remotely-made sales. This "zero-burden" system would mobilize special software to calculate, collect, and remit sales taxes to the states from any remote vendor--either offline or online" (Washington Post, February 20, 2000: B2), creating a metanational agency to collect and distribute national taxes.

Here the Net’s evolution parallels the troubling "secession of the successful," recognized as a plus by Robert Reich in 1991, and condemned as a minus by Martin and Schumann in 1998. The Net can operate as a hetertopian anarchy whose allure and excitement is available 24x7 anywhere to anybody, but it also can operate all plutopian preserve for the prosperous who have special access to much more closed domains out on the bitscape. Compared to the 5.98 billion people still disconnected offline, all the world’s 200 ± million netizens are a very small and privileged digital class. And, there are smaller cliques of even more powerful and prosperous persons in this small cadre of digital beings whose access to information and services is truly real-time with no lag, totally top-level with no constraints, and thoroughly complete in scope with no loss of coverage.

As metanational realities, e-publican interests are often transnational in vision, multinational in operation, and postnational in loyalty. Hence, they are beginning to push governments to think far less like classical states--or extractive/redistributive entities--and much more like contemporary dot coms--or attractive/productive enterprises. Consequently, governments are being re-rated in terms of their service provisions, tax efficiencies, and material benefits for citizens as consumers rather than as great powers ranked by military power or territorial expanse for their subjects. Government as a dot com, then is expected to have, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg (1997) argue, low or no taxes, moderate personal security safeguards, and friendly hands-off civic expectations for the "sovereign individuals" who choose to live under or by their rulings.

Asking basic questions, like whether Microsoft is an evil empire or not, illustrates how worried people are becoming about the metanational governance issues that arise from subpolitical choices, like "the lock-in" for informatic goods, because "what we do not see and do not want is changing the world" (Beck, 1992: 187). The informatic subpolis further develops with each new corporate move made by e-publicans, like Gates, and their rule from afar can change the most mundane details of how the conduct of everyday life is conducted online and offline. By fabricating digital domains, and then continuously struggling to master their informatic terrain, e-public interests seem to fulfill Jean-Francois Lyotard’s prophecies about "the postmodern condition." That is, "knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power." In fact, the struggle over cyberspace—both intranationally and transnationally—illustrates how fully the residents of civil society in nation-states must fight interests from the nascent cyberian society against e-publican interests for "control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor" (1984: 5). On-line governance now works through protocols for the processing and reprocessing of data, information, and knowledge in its telematic forms. On-line and off-line, information "is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange" (Lyotard, 1984: 4). Becoming digital, as Lyotard observes, also implies that everything in society and the marketplace

The social pragmatics of metanational performativity, or means-ends cost efficiency, slowly supplant more deeply embedded narratives of national meaning, like those imagined to be essential human rights, elegant moral duties, enduring social contracts. As loosely defined just-in-time protocols for building fluid temporary arrangements begin to prevail in governance, more impermanent understandings of personal rights and social obligations will come further into vogue for e-public life because of their "greater flexibility, lower cost, and the creative turmoil of its accompanying motivations—all of these factors contribute to increased operativity" (Lyotard, 1984: 66).

The Internet, then, is evolving increasingly into a transnational domain of domains whose many constituent networks are not indivisible, with liberty, and justice for all. On the contrary, there are very clear divisions in the Net’s operativity between those who have and those who have not, those who have now and those who will have later, those who have a great deal and those who have very little, and those who have the latest and those who have the outmoded. These transnational online inequalities often parallel international offline inequities, but they also constitute an entirely new set leading and lagging relations of metanational e-publican inequality. While it developed as a type of anarchy outside of ordinary time and space, and many still seek to preserve its anarchical qualities, the explosive growth of e-commerce--in both the "e-tailing" consumer and "B2B" business markets--is drawing regulatory attention of governmental and nongovernmental agencies as they seek to augment their power and performativity.

Many citizens of the United States of America see these trends in global informationalization as well and good, but many non-Americans regard the Net as a new cybercolonial domain of the world’s new hyperpower. In many ways, the metanation of cyberspace can be mistaken as an electronic enclave economy for the U.S.A. Non-Americans offline are welcome in America Online, because it is another way to keep non-Americans in line. Because "America’s prosperity has been harnessed to the Internet," as Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-Texas) claims in defense of a new cybercrime bill, "punishment of those who disrupt our Internet economy must reflect this new reality" (Vise, 2000: E7). The true e-publicans might bristle at such jurisdictive pronouncements offline to "our Internet economy" and "America" in one statement. Bristle as they may, the United States already has 21 government agencies, commissions, and panels dealing with some aspect of computer network security, and President Clinton has proposed spending over $2 billion more in the next year to cope with new cybercriminal or infowar attacks on "American" interests (Roanoke Times, February 20, 2000: A15). If prosperity depends on network security, then Washington still has resolve to act, as it did in the face of the Y2K crisis from 1995 to 2000, to keep the Nets highly performative for "the American economy." The ideological take on the telematic transformation in the U.S.A. usually is nothing less than irrational exuberance. So a new kind of national security apparatus is seeking to draw and defend digital borders/around the wealth it generates.

Rhetorics about the openness, equality, and freedom of cyberian society are fairly cynical. To get to these telematic sites, read their content, and participate in online events, the user can use a public access terminal at a local library or cybercafe. At home, however, he or she must invest $1,000 to $4,000 (USD) in a personal computer, network connections, and software. In addition, the user must maintain net connections, which cost anywhere from $20 to $100 (USD) a month plus telephone, hardwiring or cable costs. To speak plainly, the subpolitical qualities of informatics impose high entry costs in the form of machine ownership, network connectivity, software mastery, and sufficient time to attain e-havioral proficiencies. While the rhetoric recasts open participation at on-line sites as a return to truly popular sovereignty, the reality is much darker, namely, such domains often become the ultimate gated community. And, their creators, supporters, and users rarely underscore this reality in their operations.

On the one hand, the NTIA has suggested that the core of American telecommunications policy is "the goal of ‘universal service’--the idea that all Americans should have access" to affordable internet, cable television, and telephone service (NTIA, 1995: 2). Yet, on the other hand, computer use, Net connectivity, and household Internet access are unequally distributed in the early 2000s everywhere in the U.S.A. and the world at large. "A government by the entire citizenry, electronically assembled," assumes everyone is equipped, able, and ready assemble electronically in the territorial polis when we know that barely 50 percent of all U.S. households own PCs, not even 40 percent have Internet access anywhere, less than 25 percent have home Internet access, and fewer than 5 percent enjoy high speed/high-bandwidth connectivity. Utopian pronouncements about the "death of distance" might prove to be true in the long run (Cairncross, 1997). At this time, however, the technical dictates of the subpolis guarantee that connectivity is not evenly distributed, easily accessible, or effortlessly installed. Consequently, deep digital divides separate areas with cheap, reliable, and flexible connectivity from those with expensive, unflexible, slow, and inflexible connectivity options, not to mention many places with no connectivity whatsoever.

The quest for greater, faster or more complete individual connectivity at the heart of informational society is recasting the norms of personal and social agency for e-publican living in hyperindividuated terms . With the pull of browsers, one can build their own quasi-social, ultra-selfish pastiche of fragments from the metanational public sphere in which Lycos, AOL, Netscape or The Wall Street Journal will connect you only with the information that you have pre-selected as what you want to see. Nets assume the emergence of netizens, who work as e-publican free-lancers amidst social instability, perhaps beyond strong national ties, but laced together continuously just-in-time with other metanational e-publics all over the world by telematic networks. Whereas nations still mandate certain modes of civic behavior and thought, telematic nodes presume a flexible individual who operates "as actor, designer, juggler and stage director of his own biography, identity, social networks, commitments and convictions. Put in plain terms, ‘individualization’ means the disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them" (Beck, 1997: 95). In some sense, informatics force everyone to become an electronic existentialist as the more standard biographies of older industrial societies become chosen biographies, DIY histories, autogenic experiences out in the flows of capital, data, labor, and product. Beck observes, "to use Sartre’s term, people are condemned to individualization....whatever a man or woman was and is, whatever he or she thinks or does, constitutes the individuality of that particular person" (1997: 96).

The acceptance of methodological individualism in online e-public action is now one of the more deeply embedded practices of this standardized metanational technoculture. At the cybernetic interface, personal workstations, mainframe accounts, and network addresses all methodically individuate online interactions, and these realities are reflected back in everyday rhetorics of netizenship. Compaq sells itself as a new economy of scope standing by on-line 7x24x52, waiting to fill each individual’s "custom-built" machine order. "Get the technology," Compaq promises, "YOU WANT any way you want TO GET IT" (Businessweek, August 10, 1998: 14). Gateway 2000 matches Compaq’s pledge to individuals with its even more comprehensive "Your:)Ware" packaged suite of computer products, ranging from custom-made machines and software bundles to ISP connections and guaranteed trade-up programs (http://www.gateway2000.com). PeopleSoft realizes individuals must construct their own private enterprises, capital assets, and business communities, and now do it also increasingly on-line. Hence, it promises them continuous rationalization support for "your supply chain," because it is PeopleSoft’s promise: "We work in your world."™ (Businessweek, June 22, 1998: 83).

As these individualized commercial ideologies suggest, e-publics can do much more that merely pre-select those media services they want to consume. "In the online world," as Carter notes, "users may tailor not only facts but entire communities to fit their preferences" (1998: 195). On the one hand, strongly centered nation-states can fragment into many decentered nodal webs, which might reorder the national character of homogenous political communities, and any given individual is condemned to constitute himself or herself out of activities, accesses, and assets opened to them online, which reshapes individual biographies increasingly around commercialized cybernetic consumption. And, on the other hand, real individuals lacking connectivity offline become relatively more immobile, geographically more emplaced, and psychosocially more confined within boundaries that online e-haviors ignore. The welfare state’s experiments in conditioning people, as Beck claims, for "ego-centered ways of life" (1997: 97) pays off big online as particular persons morph their way through the day as multiple personalities for different e-publics.

The waning stability of uniform national identities in offline places is captured by Turkle’s endorsement of pluralized nodal identities online:

Virtual e-public groups anchored to the e-haviors of online interaction provide Turkle with the new normative models to enforce these normalizing expectations. Stable points of subjectivity are remixed as fluidized objects of ones-and-zeros. As De Kerckhove observes, all of these e-havioral traces are signs of e-publican ideas reshaping practices once defined by territory:

The recalibration of psychosocial normalization to suit the flexibility and plurality of metanational networks moves Turkle to see such e-havior "as a space for growth" (1997: 263). She recognizes, like Robert Jay Lifton (1993), the worth of a "protean self" for avoiding either "a dogmatic insistence on unity" or a "return to systems of belief, such as religious fundamentalism, that enforce conformity" (Turkle, 1997: 258). Popularizing these new ways of life--tied to online e-haviors--essentially turns offline subjectivity, taken in more common modes of conventional liberalism, traditional nationalism or religious fundamentalism, into a monopersonality disorder. The e-publican netizen’s digital being, which emerges in real life from virtual life, "is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and moral outlook. Turkle finds the new bottomline for metanational online e-havior: "You can have a sense of self without being one self" (1997: 258). Unfortunately, this situation leaves many web-minded individuals, because they may lack horizons and boundaries, unable to disconnect from the networks or connect with real people, as a 2000 Stanford Institute study maintains (Markoff, 2000: A3, A18; Streitfeld, 2000: A1, A11).

V. E-Publics and Performativity

At the e-public intersections of network places and connectivity spaces, Gergen claims, "our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness" (1991: 15-16). Whether or not these e-haviors are postmodern perhaps is less clear, but sharply bounded personal identities and clearly bordered social communities of offline territorial citizenship, as they have been imagined in the past (Anderson, 1991), are increasingly in doubt online. The multimediations of the e-publican digital domain, as Deibert argues, carry a functional bias toward decentered and fragmented identities, "and away from modern conceptions of the autonomous sovereign individual," because metanational cyberspace allows many opportunities to generate "a plurality of ‘worlds’ and multiple ‘realities,’ each of which is contingent on social constructions, or ‘language-games’ that constitute and orient the field of experience" (1997: 187). Offline nationality is not going away, especially for the immobile, pre-informational, poor. Online nodality, however, is arriving, particularly for the relatively mobile, informational, rich. Here is where new e-haviors displayed by netizens enter the stage. Collective goods, civic ideals, common aims may flag online, particularly in their historic offline forms, and e-publican thinking will probably stress good service over serving the good. As Carter (1998: 193) claims, "the rise of cyberspace is the apotheosis of the ideal (if it an ideal) of individualized experience ... the appeal of the cyberspace is to autonomy: we can choose our own experiences."

Slipping online, this plurality of worlds assures everyone that he or she will be remade by globalizing/networking/computing practices. The e-publican rhetorics of everyday life online promise netizens a modernized mode of living beyond ordinary politics:

Such metanational visions of a more authentic autonomy on the Net are precisely what most e-publican advocates celebrate: citizens of the world, not single nations; everyone is a compatriot, nobody is a foe; physical residents of one place, virtual fraternity in all places; not cultural paralysis, social revitalization everywhere; more democracy becomes possible, new tyranny is unlikely.

These foundational changes, as Turkle suggests, point toward e-publican netizens "taking things at their interface value" in which "people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the real" (1997: 23). Therefore, on-line emulations of community, once had offline through shared territoriality or common sovereignty, are now going to be generated out of computer-mediated metanational communications. In these domains, e-public life becomes platform-dependent and bandwidth-directed: "programs are treated as social actors we can do business with, provided that they work" (Turkle, 1997: 104). When people treat computers "in ways that blur the boundary between things and people" (Turkle, 1997: 102), then those things and people, which once were regarded as having fixed locations, settled boundaries and defined distinctions, will begin to blur into online e-publican projects where there are few historical traditions, ethical boundaries or institutional precedents. So far, they are not more democratic, more fraternal or more open, but they are more metanational. Telematic networks, while not quite political entities, are increasingly taken simplistically at their interface values as omnipolitan, apolitan, and postpolitan formations whose e-havioral containments of what is "the real" sets the groundrules of online agency and structure for types of e-public living in networks.

Technologies, however, never fall fully formed from the sky. They instead must be made ready for business by enrolling users and advocates in new social movements to promote their utility, tout their necessity, herald their inevitability (Adas, 1989). Advocates of e-publican values out on the Net, for the Net, and by the Net reaffirm these truths. Thirty years ago, ARPANet went live, linking only a handful of university research centers (Abbate, 1999: 44-81). Twenty-five years ago few believed every home should have a "personal computer." The technocultures of those times confined the Net to small conversations conducted between defense labs, and home computing existed in little kits for electronics hobbyists. Other technologies sustained many different cultures for processing words, archiving texts, sending messages, copying images, playing games, generating sounds, sharing discourses. All of those technics produced, and then reproduced, peculiar cultural communities around particular technological devices as systems, which, in turn, constituted many of yesterday’s today’s equally new social movements of resistance against the further spread of computer-mediated communication (Nye, 1996). Television, radio, cinema, telegraphy, and print all fostered certain transnational/extrastatal/nonterritorial forms of community in their emergent phases, but the mostly national infrastructures constructed for their use, coupled with existing linguistic barriers, rarely tested individual identity or political citizenship in the ways that the Net can (Harvey, 1989; Luke, 1989; Jones, 1995). Technics do redefine the acts and artifacts shared collectively in the life of specific human groups and communities (Ihde, 1990), and telematic networks are now promoting very disruptive, wide-ranging, and rapid forms of redefinition in their e-havioral forms for a digital technoculture of metanational e-publics.

Only a decade ago, the Internet was regarded as a truly free space open to anyone. As a place for all to express personal messages to would-be soulmates or political manifestos for like-minded activists, the Net’s few hundred thousand users believed they had a workable anarchy that served humanity as a vast digital library, an online meeting place, a cybernetic speakers’ corner, and a free postal system (Seabrook, 1997). With the working experience of many USEnet groups and IRC sessions, the noncommercial collaborative qualities of the Net fostered small subcultures of acceptable use and unacceptable abuse, which neither drew much outside attention nor raised many serious concerns (Abbate, 1999: 181-220). Silly pranks by hackers occasionally provided a bit of amusement, some telecom firms lost a bit of revenue from phreakers tricking their billing systems, and crackers would infrequently get past a few security firewalls in the Department of Defense, major university or big bank computer systems to create mischief. The move toward more widely distributed, and ultimately what will be ubiquitous, computing regimes with the privatization and commercialization of the Internet in 1995, however, shifted the net effects of informatics on economy and society.

Living in new telematic spaces organized around digital networks requires a facility from e-publican netizens for coping with many different language games nested amidst new technocultures in which everything, including one’s own personal identity and social position, becomes represented as ones-and-zeros. This struggle to reduce heterogeneous social, political, and cultural offline elements to fit the online logics of techno-economic performativity is the new form taken by domination today. Everyone is not equally prepared to manage,

The digital divides open where these e-publican operational conformities start or stop in economies and societies all over the world today. Politics in networked places, economics for connectivity spaces, and society in digital domains, as Lyotard suggests, continue to be shaped by the answers to one question: "who decides what knowledge is and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government" (1984: 9). Whose government, for whom, where, when, and how are all intriguing questions for e-public living, and their answers mark the raw boundaries of inequality--both in power and knowledge--out on the digital divides of the Net as new hyperpowers exercised by a few nation-states remake pieces of the real world to fit the many metanational forms of an e-public manner of living.

References