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The late capitalist machine that is the Internet has made possible entirely new ways of engaging in consumer transactions. By following a certain virtual path, we can view and compare merchandise that is not physically in front of us, select as many items as we like for purchase, enter shipping and billing information, and an object will mysteriously appear at our door in the hands of the same man who delivers to us our personal mail. It is the capacity to translate digital activity into ownership of a physical product that makes the Internet a revolutionary marketplace. We can now reproduce our conditions of life by interacting solely with machines. For most users, it is easier, that is, it requires less physical and mental energy, to engage in commerce online. And anything that lubricates the capitalist productive machine preserves the bourgeoisie ideology, accelerating the speed of consumption and the growth of profit by exponential margins.

In addition to those places of Internet commerce that sell physical goods, we have more recently seen the emergence of merchants who sell digital commodities. From these merchants we receive no physical goods, only a specific, copyrighted set of zeros and ones. The Internet has produced for capitalism a society that will spend money on products that, due to technical restrictions, can never exist as anything other than digital code. We buy media — software, music, video, etc. — without even the legal right to reproduce it. This is the perfected capitalist purpose of the machine: To create a consumer so dependent upon the machine that she will spend the money she earns by selling her labor on products she cannot use without the aid of the machine. So she must always own a computer, she must continue to buy digital memory in order to preserve her purchased media, and she will use these products as the interface necessary to purchase more code. At what point in the cycle does the consumer relinquish the last vestige of her continued physical existence to the machine? When does every product of her labor exist only in digital memory? Later, or perhaps sooner: it remains to be seen.