MORE ON CORPORATE COOPTING OF THE COUNTERCULTURE: Dave Tepper directs me to this Salon piece by Wagner James Au on State Of Emergency, a video game where you get to fight the faceless evil Corporation in the guise of a street protestor. Says Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray:

"If there's one message you can take away from SoE," says Wolpaw of Old Man Murray, "I think it's that capitalism has finally, irrevocably won. Using advanced technology developed in Japan and financed by a publishing company in the U.S., a group of smart people in Scotland has created what's possibly the most useless consumer product of all time ... Playing State of Emergency is like spiking the ball in the end zone of competing ideologies. Feel the burn, Marxism!"

Au also picks up on the corporate funding of anti-globalization angle. It's funny, back in the day I would've read Salon first thing in the morning but now I read a bunch of blogs --so I need Dave Tepper or somebody to tell me to go read Salon. Perhaps the quality of Salon has fallen off as much as people say it has, but maybe, now that the Internet hype is gone, there's less of an intimidation factor at work here where you don't feel like you need a big flashtacular site or have delusions of dotcom big bucks to get yourself yammering on the Internet and there's an inverse relationship between the dotcom bust and the blog explosion. It might be true for me, anyway.