Terrains of E-War

The similarities and differences in the cases of etoy and Leonardo reveal the agendas that the capital is inscribing upon the landscape of the digital domain. In the case of etoy, an American company has sued for identity rights against an Austrian concern and has seemingly secured that intellectual property for the moment. This is regardless of the fact that Etoys has dropped its suit, as NSI has hesitated at the release of any freeze of the domain until its receipt of an additional court order. Conversely, the entities related to Leonardo are largely US-based, although the Association Leonardo is based in France, and are in addition non-profit. The prosecution of electronic identity adds the temporal primacy of the brand name, as the suit requires the erasure of the Leonardo name from the Internet's search engine cultural memory. The dominance of American interests is evident in the Internet, which creates certain ironies when contrasted with the popular media image promulgated of the Internet as McLuhan's 'Global Village'. The underlying power relations begin to suggest a "New World Order" of American technocratic control of intellectual/cultural capital in the electronic sphere. Actions such as those exercised by Etoys and Transasia illustrate the homogenizing effect of capital, and the reification of agendas of temporal legitimacy through the superceding and/or erasure of entities which disrupt the flow of capital or resources. And lastly, these events make visible the finiteness of the Internet's intellectual terrain, and at this time controlling entities are fighting with increasing frequency for scarcity of symbolic and intellectual property. The issues of control that arise from the intersection between the economy of signs and capital herald a time when the promise of endless expanses of digital prairie are vanishing, and cyberspace begins to resemble a cyberspatial analogue of Gibsonian Sprawl. The development of this aspect of the infocultural terrain is reminiscent of Hardin's The Tragedy of the Commons, and is oddly fitting if the model of translating the agendas of materialist culture to electronic space is applied to this milieu.