N. Open end (a ligature)

2. The word value should remain elemental here— value of all kinds— value as the process of creating distance and then overcoming it, in Simmel's terms, for instance, in the Philosophy of Money, Chapters 1 and 2, Analytical Part [Simmel78].

3. Arendt differentiates between work and labor with reference to the contempt held for the latter by almost all commentators since Aristotle. Labor represents the necessary activity of satisfying wants, its place is the household, not the polis. Such a distinction lacks any lapidary quality in this case, because of the mix of household, firm, labor as job, and work as production of things. Only in the context of a more complete reading of The Human Condition,[Arendt58] could the present situation be made to make sense. But that would be hard work.

4. In particular, the work of Thomas Frank and the writers for The Baffler magazine have begun such a comparison, though under a kind of repetitive, spiralling self-reflection that insists that the rebellion is both already commodified, and thus (this does not necessarily follow) controlled by media interests, and that resistance is still necessary and possible, though without offering an alternative to the alternatives of alternative rock and anti-corporatism that they begin by attacking. Such a position is not unrelated to Lessig's identification of a crisis of value ("we" no longer...) and later in this section, of Charles Sabel's identification of a constitutional and democratic crisis. It is worth noting that music producer Steve Albini's article in Commodify your Dissent is the only one to ignore the assumed difference between culture and political economy and head straight for the technical and political suggestions, his article warns young bands not to let hubris interfere with business sense, or be savaged by ruthless record labels, and his disdain for digital technology against high quality solid state and analog equipment is unparalleled, and damn funny. See Conquest of Cool [Frank97a], The Baffler Magazine, and Commodify Your Dissent [Frank97b].

5. Bill Readings' The University in Ruins charts the university's course from a German Idealist-Nationalist site for the actualization of Reason, (according to Lyotard's master narrative of speculation) to the Anglo-American liberal tradition of the University as the means of actualizing liberal bearers of national culture through a nationalization of literatures, philosophies and arts to the present age of the University as a trans-national corporation whose product (I would say service, since this directly on the subject of contracts and property and their relationship to the production of value) is Excellence. [Readings96].


	N. Open end (a ligature) A second connecting interlude flexes — Ellen Ullman cynicises — some arguments are recapitulated — the reader is warned of the author's attitudes — Amicas is reintroduced — Amicas's values posed as question — culture avoided in favor of story. The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe it's only revolution we're addicted to. Maybe the form never matters— socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic commerce— who cares, as long as its the edgy thing that's happening in one's own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people who want change— change in its most drastic form. And socialism, with its quaint decades of guerilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"— is all to hopelessly pokey for us now. Everything goes faster these days. Electronic product sycles are six moneths long; commerce thinks in quarters. Is patience still a virtue? Why wait? Why not make ten million in five years at a softweare company, then create your own personal private world on a hill atop Seattle? Then everything you want, the entire world, will be just a click away. And maybe, when I think of it, it's not such a great distance from communist cadre to software engineer. I may have joined the party to further social justice, but a deeperattraction could have been to a process, a system, a program. I'm inclined to think I always believed in the machine. For what was Marx's "dialectic" of history in all its inevitability but a mechanism surely rolling towards the future? What were his "stages" of capitalism but the algorithm of a program that no one could ever quite get to run? — from Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine, p. 29. "If we do not read the deadly poetry of political economy, we cannot make sense of American culture; for Americans have typically derived political meanings and moral significance from the distribution of property and the production of value through work." [1] With the primitives of scale and convention firmly in hand, I hope that the preceding chapters have provided enough detail to motivate a return to Amicas and the problem of value that their existence signals. The difference between the technical standards of the internet (implementations, "it works!") and other more bureaucratic and hierarchical modes of standardizing, especially those of healthcare, should be clear enough to provide the necessary background to understand why Amicas, and internet healthcare in general, represent a significant change in both healthcare and international market economies. In addition, the significance of free software, and the importance of a particular kind of legal regime to that 'movement' should also add color to this portrait of Amicas. Finally, the discovery that in the world of internet hacking and free software, that the source of value is mysterious— resting sometimes in things, and sometimes in reputations— is not unrelated to the kind of work that Amicas proposes to do for healthcare. I hope that the following sections make this clear. In addition, I hope that it is obvious that I often agree with Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle's views. Neither their decisions nor their justifications are above criticism, but I also want to point to the problematic fact that I have had to go through the words and lives of my "informants" to understand my "own" culture. I could not have discerned it on my own. It is frustrating to have arrived at a situation with the tools of Anthroplogy as Cultural Critique, only to realize that I could find no culture, and did not know what to critique. Such a task must then give way temporarily to a more elemental anthropology that simply asks "what is going on?" By no means are the two modes mutually exclusive, and I have attempted to critique where critique is due, but I have also used this "fieldwork" as a tool to uncover certain important questions about how economies, politics, democracy, and justice relate to language, programming, telecommunications, and government in late twentieth century America, with the intention that any subsequent critique will be all the more informed. The answers are incomplete, but the questions are much clearer. That said, understanding Amicas needs more than a description of its 'world.' The experience of various Amicas employees, competitors or customers may be obscure, but as with all experience, triangulation is the only trick of comprehension. Amicas is more than a way of making money, and more than a way of improving healthcare (both of which are tall orders and still delayed). Amicas represents an investigation into the possibility of creating value more than it does any crass version of the firm maximizing profit [2]. That this may not be explicit in the words of the Amici is only an indication that I need some other way of organizing it, representing it, or communicating it. For no one in Amicas, is the experience of participating 'just a job.' By itself, this speaks volumes about what people value: value is not now, if it ever was, easily identified with labor, especially since the better part of the labor involved in Amicas is not directed primarily at the creation of anything, least of all, something recognizably— and more importantly, tangibly— valuable. Amicas makes software, but it makes money by supporting people who use it, not by selling it, per se. It is not quite product, not quite service. In the desperate and often vague language of the "new economy", it could be a "solution." This of course begs the question of where the problems emerged, and why companies seem ready to "solve" them with such alacrity. Of course, there is no denying that what Amicas does (or is it 'makes'— even this is unclear) is valuable to many people, and were this investigation into the nature of value to yield profit, then the members of Amicas might consider their job done. Yet this still does not imply that the goal of Amimcas is simply the maximization of profit, and herein is sought the difference between value and profit. There is even less denying that the people at Amicas work longer, and perhaps harder, than anyone has before— that value is found in work itself where once work only produced value[3]. What remains intriguing is that these things are not simple, and that somehow, and with great risk, this group of people, and thousands like them around the world, are engaging in this investigation, because, in the end, it is worth it. Amicas is American. There should be little resistence here, even though the headquarters is called "World Wide Headquarters" and server installations include Istanbul, Athens, and Sydney. Amicas is based in America and has no crises over its identity as an American company, as important to an American economy. What America is to Amicas, however is an interesting historical question. Saskia Sassen [Sassen98], dissenting from the chorus of scholars heralsing the arrival of "globalization" and the death of the nation-state, insists that nations are as powerful as ever, especially in their capacity to create new legal regimes for the creation and transfer of capital (or to refuse to create new legal regimes for other things, such as the transnationalization of labor). These legal regimes made in and between national governemnts constitute a de facto international government— and a differential in power that allows American companies certain advantages at home and abroad. Amicas is a citizen of the world, even if its members aren't. We have already seen some examples of the relationship that the internet has to America and to the world (cf. Lessig on speaking for the world, and the relation between the ITU/ISO and ISOC), but it is not the internet that makes new legal regimes possible or even necessary. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine some of the historical, economic, and legal changes in twentieth century America that are consistent with the emergence and success of the internet and that make possible a company like Amicas. A brief digression on culture. Something called 'culture' still demands to be referenced here, as some kind of given, some totality of experience that transcends the mean of political economy. In this vein, one might ask about the legacy of the sixties and a certain cultural custom of rebellion and revolution that is both persistent in an older generation and transmitted to the current one. A comparison of start-up companies and rock bands might yield results [4]. Anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism, some kind of "cultural logic" that orders the meanings "attributed" to actions and things, that grants interpretation a wish to see through things. And yet, the very triumph of the category of "culture" as a kind of catch-all term for humanistic scholarship should give pause. Is it possible to continue studying the "culture of X," "the cultural logic of y," "the cultural history of z" in an era when, to take Bill Readings lead [5], culture has been forsaken in the univeristy in favor of "excellence" (and outside the univeristy continues to be the most profitable sector of the economy short of finance)? I have no answer here but plead for excusal, in order to insist that the difference that makes a difference, to reference yet another version of culture, is the political economy of information and the anthropological question of the source and destination of value. I would dare say that 'culture' is epiphenomenal to this. Nonetheless, the question of culture as the repository of meaning is still essential, and meaning may yet yield to interpretation, but there is also a material story to be told, a historically specific world of words and things that is not a 'cultural' story, but simply, a story.
1. James Livingston Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution [Livingston94] 2. The word value should remain elemental here— value of all kinds— value as the process of creating distance and then overcoming it, in Simmel's terms, for instance, in the Philosophy of Money, Chapters 1 and 2, Analytical Part [Simmel78]. 3. Arendt differentiates between work and labor with reference to the contempt held for the latter by almost all commentators since Aristotle. Labor represents the necessary activity of satisfying wants, its place is the household, not the polis. Such a distinction lacks any lapidary quality in this case, because of the mix of household, firm, labor as job, and work as production of things. Only in the context of a more complete reading of The Human Condition,[Arendt58] could the present situation be made to make sense. But that would be hard work. 4. In particular, the work of Thomas Frank and the writers for The Baffler magazine have begun such a comparison, though under a kind of repetitive, spiralling self-reflection that insists that the rebellion is both already commodified, and thus (this does not necessarily follow) controlled by media interests, and that resistance is still necessary and possible, though without offering an alternative to the alternatives of alternative rock and anti-corporatism that they begin by attacking. Such a position is not unrelated to Lessig's identification of a crisis of value ("we" no longer...) and later in this section, of Charles Sabel's identification of a constitutional and democratic crisis. It is worth noting that music producer Steve Albini's article in Commodify your Dissent is the only one to ignore the assumed difference between culture and political economy and head straight for the technical and political suggestions, his article warns young bands not to let hubris interfere with business sense, or be savaged by ruthless record labels, and his disdain for digital technology against high quality solid state and analog equipment is unparalleled, and damn funny. See Conquest of Cool [Frank97a], The Baffler Magazine, and Commodify Your Dissent [Frank97b]. 5. Bill Readings' The University in Ruins charts the university's course from a German Idealist-Nationalist site for the actualization of Reason, (according to Lyotard's master narrative of speculation) to the Anglo-American liberal tradition of the University as the means of actualizing liberal bearers of national culture through a nationalization of literatures, philosophies and arts to the present age of the University as a trans-national corporation whose product (I would say service, since this directly on the subject of contracts and property and their relationship to the production of value) is Excellence. [Readings96].
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