a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s A book is never the project of an isolated individual but depends profoundly on the help and assistance of many others. I am thankful for the support of my family-Robert, Christine, Terry, Vikki, Dennis, Christopher, Jim, Leslie, Allan, Debbie, and above all Kim-without which this project would not be possible. In addition, I thank everyone at Fordham University Press, including Michael Koch, Eric Newman, Mary-Lou Peñ a, and especially Fredric Nachbaur, for their interest in and support for this project. I would also like to recognize the many scholars who, at different times during the completion of this book, have offered advice and discussed the issues raised in the book with me. In this book I have drawn material from an essay published in the e-book of the conference proceedings of the ''Transforming Culture in the Digital Age'' conference. Several texts on which I have drawn in different chatpers of this book were originally published in different versions in The Red Critique. I would like to acknowledge the editors of both publications for their intellectual support. ix The Digital Condition ''We do not live in the seemingly stable modern world our grandparents did. Their belief in inevitable, comfortable progress has been supplanted by our realization that scientific and technological innovation are relentless and quite ambiguous'' 12 ; in their self-described ''Manifesto'' entitled ''On Cultural Studies, Technology and Science,'' Stanley Aronowitz and Michael Menser argue, ''although technology and science may be everywhere, there is no determinism anywhere, if by determinism we signify a one-to-one correspondence between the causal agent and its effects.'' 13 In other words, the digital common sense is that we are entering a new stage of society more fuzzy than economically structured, more fluid than fixed by class division, and, despite tremendous technological development, more unfinished than at any other time in history. In fact, one finds this same theory of a break between culture and the economic, between knowing and understanding, even among theorists who are calling for a more ''critical'' approach to Internet culture. Geert Lovink, for instance, argues in Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture that ''nothing is as fluid, fragile-and unsustainable-as today's network landscape'' 14 and that ''the very notion of a network is in conflict with the desire to gain an overview.'' 15 In this context, Lovink writes that despite the fact that ''the contemporary worker faces more job uncertainty than her proletariat precursor,'' 16 it is time to shift away from ''soft constructivism and Ideologiekritik toward a nonjudgmental approach'' 17 called ''distributed aesthetics.'' Like Lyotard's theory of paralogy, ''distributed aesthetics'' is a postbinary, postdialectical logic. In claiming that it is time to go ''beyond poles such as real-virtual, old-new, offline-online, and global-local'' 18 and instead to ''dig into the dirty everyday doings of the network socie...

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