Clifford, excuse me for getting straight to the point, but your March 1 post on poor rhetoric and Cheap Desire fits into the majority pattern among the American elite. Basically you're saying, economic inequality is no topic for this forum to debate - except if people who can't afford technology like the internet somehow use it to speak up for themselves. Cynical individualism is perfect for neoliberalism. Self-reliance is always a key theme. But today the independence of the individual is a joke.
Negative utopia is the simplest way for an intelligent mind to adjust to corporate domination.
I spent last week up in the old coal-mining regions of northern France, with mostly unemployed people, unplugged from the internet, and I come back thinking that Saskia Sassen's work on contemporary hierarchies is important. She has researched how technological change and economic deregulation have affected the balance of social power, and she's done it without neglecting the real democratic institutions, the ones still governed by the double ideal of freedom AND equality. For me, that's the right direction. Expand the public sphere. Cross class boundaries.