A note in response to comments on commodities and communication.

Pit and Alexei have made great statements. Things that stand between
people as blockages are:

1. commodities (relationships posing as things)
2. institutions (things posing as relationships, e.g. art)

Things that are more fundamental than these, which are fundamentally
human, and which link human beings as social animals:

1. communication (community, communion, commune)
2. media (mediating, mediated, in medias res)

Media and language which try to describe or represent are machines for
producing the idea of things, and they fail because what is interesting
about language and media is that they *are* relationships, not things.
Representation is dead: it is no longer interesting or fun even to point
out that it is dead. It just ain't relevant anymore.

What we have is communication. The old idea of art is about:

1. property, ownership, copyright
2. private contemplation, private accumulation of cultural status,
intimate musing, the inner self, privacy.

But in the age of network communications, privacy is a thing of the past
– give up the attempt to cling to a notion that only emerged in the
last 200 years, among a tiny elite in the West, and has scarcely even
reached the urban poor in Europe and N America. It is over before it
became universal. Open up your innermost being – you cannot hide it
anyway.

And property is meaningless out here. Who owns the ideas on RHIZOME? Who
would think of claiming intellectual property rights? How could you
police copyright on the net? Can't be done. The endless search for a
safe and secure form of e-cash is impossible, because private ownership
of wealth is utterly at odds with the openness of the network.