http://www.slsa07.com/callforpapers.html
Much of the early rhetoric surrounding the Internet has been criticized for its investment in positivist, Utopian thought. However, the Utopian character of this rhetoric is fundamentally tied to ideas of Utopia as a space, a real and existing perfect community. As various critiques (most notably Deleuze’s writing on the control society) revealed potential dangers inherent in this line of reasoning, this Utopian rhetoric was jettisoned in favor of a sober realism that resisted both the blind optimism of early cyberculture and any discussions of Utopian qualities of life online. In this paper, however, I argue that the Internet is Utopian but that these early writings draw from a non-nuanced theoretical understanding of Utopia. Instead, I foreground Fredric Jameson’s understanding of Utopia as a cognitive process as a model for thinking about online culture. By using this definition, I retain the politically and socially progressive character of early Internet writing while also maintaining the sober understanding of the rigors of late-capitalism inherent in both Jamesonian thought and later criticism. This discussion is facilitated through an analysis of Sweden’s Pirate Bay group and its recent efforts to subvert and recode copyright law. Ultimately, I conclude by suggesting that we can conceptualize the Internet as a Utopian tool whose very nature does not encode a specific political ideology or facilitate electronic instantiations of spatial utopia.