2.4: Conclusion

Cybertarian mythology not only rests on a flawed, albeit touching, account of the person as a ratiocinative, atomistic individual who can exist outside politics and society. It equally assumes that the Internet—which in reality was born of warfare consultancies and “big science,” has spread through large institutions, and is rapidly moving toward comprehensive corporate control—can be claimed for the wild children of geekdom. In place of this sweet-natured technophilic dreaming, activists, citizens, and scholars alike need fewer smiley faces; they must be displaced by quizzical ones that will turn their and our heads in the direction of our real material conditions of existence.

Despite the technocentric projections of both Cold War futurists and contemporary web dreamers, the wider culture industries largely remain controlled by media and communications conglomerates, which frequently seek to impose artist-like conditions on their workforces. They gobble up smaller companies that invent products and services, “recycling audio-visual cultural material created by the grassroots genius, exploiting their intellectual property and generating a standardized business sector that excludes, and even distorts, its very source of business,” to quote the Hindu.⁵⁰ In other words, the cognitariat—interns, volunteers, contestants, and so on—creates “cool stuff” whose primary beneficiaries are corporations.⁵¹

There is some very competent research into the lived conditions of folks setting up alternative forms of collaborative work inside the cognitariat that have the potential for a more exciting way forward than the tired cybertarian rhetoric that so unthinkingly repeats and repeats and repeats ideas that belong to Reaganite dreamers.⁵² When linked to the political-economic and ethnographic work outlined earlier, and the equally path-breaking research undertaken by nongovernment organizations, the future can be reinterpreted and remade by a realistic analytic frame that takes its inspiration from lived experience, in opposition to futuristic fantasy. Then the scholarship melting into air will have served its cybertarian time. Good riddance.