[iDC] Autonomous spaces online?

[Trebor Scholz]

Thanks Andrea for the reference to "digital world autonomy."

"To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are
self-governing agents."

This reminds me of battles over the networked public sphere with early
90s projects like Digitale Stad. It also relates to the Habermasian
notion of occupying the public sphere around us with things that matter
to us instead of an attention economy that creates revenue for big
business.  

How can social online tools become locations of any kind of resistance
if any potentially interesting tool turns corporate the moment it gets
vaguely successful? 

Temptations that are brought forth are often bandwidth, ease of use,
convenience, and the show a fairly wide range of free services. But
these "free" offers come at a cost. The enclaves of the online gift
economy  have vast landscapes that are taken over by the gift industry
(Spehr, 2006).   

GoogleVideo is less used than YouTube because it only allows you to
watch uploaded material in the Google window. YouTube gives you the
option of seeing your video in a neutral, ad-free frame. 

A few days ago YouTube was bought by MTV.
MySpace is now in Rupert Murdoch's hands. 
ICQ was obtained by AOL.
Google acquired Writely as part of their online vision. 
Blogger is of course in Google's pocket for a long time. 
Del.icio.us and Flickr are now owned by Yahoo. 

Perhaps our alternative economies and social web media need to be
hybrid? Perhaps autonomous zones are really an illusion (in the long
run).  

Trebor