Express Yourself!

"Express yourself! Output some data!'
(Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, p.41)

Individuality is *more* important in the prosumer than the consumer, where the family was the cogent unit. Individuality – supported by the art-school ideology of creativity considered as self-expression – is the source of data (biometrics, profiles) withoiut which systems like Adsense, Amazon recommendations, Ebay trust registers, iTunes Genius would not function. Consumer discipline has become far heavier in the new form of prosumer discipline, and both less and more like factory discipline. Less, because it has recruited playfulness, once the mark of leisure, as an engine of capitalist expansion; more, because the medium of expression is if anything even more alien, more of a black box, most of all to the 'net generation' who understand nothing as a result of the removal of content generation from any requirement to understand how the internet works. Their familiarity with applications masks their ignorance of what they are made of, how they work, ad who owns and governs them. Shouting for net freedom today is no longer 'free as in free speech', but free as in market (with a little free beer to oil the wheels)