Introduction Is there an informational quality that defines twenty-first century culture – a quality that makes such culture unique, that gives it, so to speak, its most characteristic and peculiar trait? Such a question would appear to be based on two problematic assumptions: in the first place that there is something like a culture that defines a century; and, above all, that we do know what such informational quality is about – that is, that we do know the ‘meaning of information’. If the notion of a culture raises important questions about the relationship between the heterogeneous and the homogeneous, the idea that we do not know what information is might appear as less of an issue. After all, information has become such a common word and is used so freely and with such ease that we should have no problem at all in defining it. We know at least two things about information: that it is the content of a communication act; and that there is something less than material about it – at least judging from the ease with which it goes from mouth to ear and ear to mouth. This immateriality of information has been further amplified by technical developments that have made possible the instant transmittal and multiple distribution of any type of information at all (images, sound, music, words, software, statistics, projections, etc.). It is this ease of copying, it has been argued, that makes of information such a shifty and yet valuable commodity. We know that information can be sold and bought and that a good deal of the world economy is driven by an emphasis on the informational content of specific commodities and we are also aware that information itself can be valuable (when it is used for example to make a profit in the stock market). We know that anybody is always potentially an information-source or even an information-storage device and that science suggests that information constitutes the very basis of our biological existence (in as much as, we are told, we contain information that can be decoded within our very cells). In all these cases, information emerges as a Content, as some kind of ‘thing’ or ‘object’ but one that possesses abnormal properties (ease of copying and propagation, intangibility, volatility, etc.) that contemporary technological developments have exacerbated and amplified. .We are no longer mostly dealing with information that is transmitted from a source to a receiver, but increasingly also with informational dynamics – that is with the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuations and microvariations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes. If there is an informational quality to contemporary culture, then it might be not so much because we exchange more information than before, or even because we buy, sell or copy informational commodities, but because cultural processes are taking on the attributes of information – they are increasingly grasped and conceived in terms of their informational dynamics. Network Dynamics Machines, the reality constructed by capitalism, are not phantasms of modernity after which life can run unscathed – they are, on the contrary, the concrete forms according to which reality organizes itself, and the material connections with ihich subjectivity is produced. Ordo et connexio rerum idem est ac ordo et connexio idearum. Free Labour The real not-capital is labour. Working in the digital media industry was never as mu