Money.

"Some people got to have it." I know this to be true. It starts like this: You have a little money, yet just enough to push around and make more. You do make more of it just by maneuvering it and having the connections to do so. You build your whole life around it. By now making money is your way of life. You spend all of your time doing it, bragging about how much you make, flaunting what you have made, plotting to make even more or negotiating its management. Making money is a 24-hour job that you’ve successfully worked. Making money monopolizes all of your time, energy and efforts. Making money consumes you and you relish in the fruits of your labor. Life looks good. And, you just can’t understand why other people just don’t work and make money like you.


Inherently, the Internet even as it exists is radical for it denies proscription of its anonymity and nationlessness. Just as inherent does this stand in direct contradiction with the global capitalist hegemony. Though threaded throughout her (the Internet), money has not yet come to dominate and demean her in the way that media has been a conscript of the global movement to incorporate to further capitalize.


"For the love of money, people will lie, they will cheat." Who is Kathryn Alvarez? How does she know me, and why is she so persistent in contacting me via e-mail peddling Vicodin and Viagra at unbelievably low prices? Money! Spam is money. Money even has its web of dreams digitally enthralling me. This cannot go on.


“People don’t let money, don’t let money change you.” Many suppose that power corrupts absolutely, and there is ample evidence to support this claim. In .34 seconds on a relatively slow connection, Googling ‘money’ gives you “about 234 billion” hits. Interestingly, ‘peace’ gave 66,500,000 results, while only 12,200,000 for ‘happiness’. Knowledge is power. Knowledge spreads through the exchange of information. The Internet is becoming the primary means of exchanging information, and therefore knowledge. The Internet enables information exchange. Money may also enable information exchange. Abused, money can easily hinder this exchange. Money, as evidenced by capitalists’ endeavors co-opting media, can therefore be used to control knowledge. In effect, with enough money, one can control what gets known.

NYU Economist Edward Wolff reports that contemporary US wealth disparities are twice that of the mid-1970’s. He further claims that 5% of the entire population monopolizes over half of US wealth. In reference to this “All mighty dollar,” this means that 95% of the populace in the most moneyed nation in the world controls less than the remaining 5% of that populace. Such a concentration of money should alarm every individual who reads these lines or knows these truths to be self-evident. The premiere means by which to gain political accolade is money.


How then, can we protect the so-called freedom of the Internet while financing it’s radical potential, and staying well ahead of those, like Kathryn Alvarez, who would do us harm? I believe that the Internet is the premiere tool of mass- and cross-communication, particularly for the expression of discursive forms of media, arts or ideas. In the case of the media, integrity and truth are lost to the whims of the capitalist endeavors. Wars are indeed fought over money and its prospects for another source of it, namely oil! How then can political initiative explicitly benefit the whole save for the benevolence of those in power? Resist. Popular uprising.


Lyrics from “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays (1973)