But after reading "PARTY LIFE.COM," it appears the joke's on us. Most work-hard party-harder dot-commers who rake in in excess of 60 or 70 grand a year (even if they never see promised stock options) are acutely aware that the start-ups they work for provide nothing of social worth, are being kept afloat strictly by means of speculative infusions of capital, and will be bankrupt or swallowed up within a year or two. Muckraking exposes which reveal the fundamental parisitism of the dot-coms means nothing to the dot-commer -- ironically and cynically celebrating the scam-like nature of the temporary windfall is the whole point !!! Post-modern irony and cynicism are the bedrock legitimating ideologies of dot-com capitalism. In this completely amoral universe of decadent galas cash-flow crises are simply signifiers of what passes as virtue.
As critical theorists have been pointing out for more than three decades (from the Frankfurt School to Habermas to early Baudrillard), the bourgeoisie and their servants have long ceased believing that the accumulation of capital represents an advance for humanity. While this used to be a dirty little secret kept behind closed doors, it is now openly proclaimed -- and the joke's on us !!! When the NASDAQ finally tanks, all but the most wet-behind-the-ears dot-commers will be hundreds of thousands of dollars richer (unless they've seriously maxed out their credit cards), while those of us excluded from the game (or who could have but refused to play the game) will be stuck right where we've been all along -- paying super-inflated rents on meager wages and salaries. Dot-com speculative amoralism is even more insidious than 1980's leveraged buyout/arbitrage/merger mania speculative amoralism because it's all so tongue-in-cheek, "wink, wink," "nod, nod." Self-professed libertarians and anarchists can get quite rich on the dot-com roulette wheel (whereas less clever podunks in the heartlands must content themselves with being contestants on "So You Want To Be a Millionaire"). In this atmosphere of rampant narcissism and cooptation, oppositional politics is reduced to ethical outrage -- one can barely suppress the urge to line these folks up against the wall and execute them, like a vigilante mob stomping out the life of a recidivist child molester (i.e. someone who is rightly or wrongly seen as totally amoral and beyond rehabilitation).
Hunting and gathering, anyone ?
John Gulick