(Originally posted on 26 February 2002 and here republished from my currently unserviced personal website, "The Last Post".)

The digital communication revolution requires individual users of the internet to attach themselves to the dominant economic order and, effectively, to "rent" their digital existence in timeslices. The gatekeepers of the global economy have, it would appear, a strategy whose aim is the commodification of everything. Like "selling air", the internet has provided the means by which we might be sold our life by the fractional second. These may be pre-paid or billed monthly, bulk-purchased or metered, but to have a digital existence we are required to have an account with, at the very least, a telco and an ISP. This is nearly impossible without also an account with a bank. To transact business on-line we need an account with a credit card company. All these accounts, of course, come with their shoals of attendant marketing plays: everything from Omaha Steaks to travel insurance to double glazing.
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What you have to imagine is a world where small personal computing devices are connected not to central services but to one another in a vast peer-to-peer network, as fast as anything we now have, carrying all kinds of data: audio (music, phone calls, etc), video, text, graphics, etc but bypassing wires, telcos and ISPs - everyone routing for everyone else.
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