A Political Economy of Utopia

John Perry Barlow’s two essays capture a yearning to escape the oppressive clutches of the two most important institutional forms in modernity: the state and market society. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is explicitly against the modern state. One might say, “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”1 The Declaration reflected not only a libertarian utopia that assumed that if only the state were to back off markets will take care of it all, but also a left-anchored critique of the state as a critical site of protecting the power and privilege of elites, insistence that individual self-actualization demanded a state contained within narrow boundaries, and a deep skepticism of all forms of authority, as Fred Turner showed in From Counterculture to Cyberculture.2 Selling Wine Without Bottles is not against markets or payment as such, but rather a resistance to the totalizing vision of commodity exchange as all there is. In this, for me a telling passage was: