Sites like Gutterbreakz are at the frontline, having got better and better from their original mission statement and making full use of the free web publishing/file sharing tools available to them. Standards are constantly being raised - we don't want to link to sloppy sites and we are analytical in our criticisms and encomiums of cultural artefacts. And in a googlised world, those posts relying on uncorroborated research head for the trash. (Warning: it's better to connect with quality rather than strain the links, posting as frequently as possible. Another great post by Owen demonstrates this, touching on projections of utopia in Fassbinder cinema and "indie" via Adorno. The role of the indie world of micro-capitalist/cottage industry enterprise masquerading as faux-alternative culture has been rightly questioned recently, and, with the means of production now more readily available than ever one should be like Fassbinder and strive to avoid amateurism.)

And, yes, everything is free for the captive audience. Ain't no-one getting rich. In our demi-monde, no-one asks the browser to sign up for 20 notes a pop or watch an advert to get a site pass. Though there's the danger that the scene's leading lights will get siphoned off into the mediated mainstream, becoming vacuous ciphers like the rest of them.

Undoubtedly, for the younger generation, students especially, the blog is one of the best things ever with which to utilise those teenage and early twenties' years. Running a good blog is like combining a journal/zine with affiliation to all the causes you support but didn't join up to in the union. Look at Lenin's Tomb or The Wrong Side of Capitalism. Academically, it will make you a great essayist, capable of structuring exacting arguments to precise wordcounts while filtering all those hours of online research.

But it's the older peeps, availing us of their weltanschung, while holding down corporate employ, that this mostly refers to (obviously I include myself in this category; Cull is nothing if not a self-help manual; appraise yourself first). There is message and there is intent. Are we just telling people to go half-way. Is this slightly enlightened stance satisfactory? With such an avowed disinterest in the workings of the corporate machine, maybe we are doing the exploiting. "Yeh boss (pej.), I'll do the basics but you can get fucked if I'm wasting the best years of my live on interminable meetings and endless soirees schmoozing with flutes I'd wouldn't piss on if they were on fire" (Chumbawamba)," we'd argue, at least until IT checks my history and I get sacked for being an independent publishing empire. "Frankly I don't need that much money any way." Or maybe that's mere reason-as-justification.

Is it enough to work this compromise? Are we putting into practice CCRU-esque notions of flight from capital? We go beyond the market in some ways, and yet are tethered to it in others (job, broadband service, records/books). Like dreams and reality colliding, this is a dual existence.

What of politics. A blogger in a much more controlled society is probably making more of a statement than us posting in the spare time of our consumer democracy. We instinctive lefties should do more to wring real change, yet anything that emphasises the interconnectedness and coherence of the subculture is itself a positive political intervention.

"... It is free. But for how long? The machinery of government and big business is only just beginning to understand the scale of the web. The culture of common purpose that prevails today is a product of neglect as much as design. The real gold rush has barely begun. To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field. One day, the diggers will move in"

Ultimately the compromise probably doesn't go far enough. But if you are spending all the spare hours you can get tinkering with your virtual means of self-expression that at least means that you are not overconsuming, so that's good. When I say two hours of interacting at the monitor is infinitely better than two hours staring into the television (the drug of the nation) I mean it. That's how I am living my life. Eastenders can eat shit. But our virtual utopia can be much like the real world. Some will commit to the enlightenment project, most don't. Links for some are no more than a passport to a few minutes' titillation. The next big challenge is to work out how to get significant numbers of the apathetic rest on board. While we know that our personal cyberculture project is intimately bound up with thousands of others' (and so on and so on in the rhizome), we can admit there isn't the critical mass to effect real change, just yet.

If this is the web's anti-capitalist belle époque then we should be activating its potential, literally changing the emphasis in our lives even more and spreading the gospel. Corporate and state intervention is creeping up on us - Reporters Without Borders have released a Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents; some of us will cop it from the cyber police at work. The time is now.