Secrecy and the Electronic Agora

The point of reading Jodi Dean right after Rheingold was to provide a slightly different spin on the relationship between publicity, democracy, and interactive/digital media technologies. How might you apply Dean's analysis to Rheingold (and his "ilk")? How convincing to you find her diagnosis? Yet again the central role played by capitalism crops up ("recognizing the new configurations of power brought about by the technocultural materialization of publicity and struggling within and against them may well entail a political choice to view communicative captialism as the hegemonic formation to be registered today" 7): although the claim is made that a totalizing formation doesn't necessarily constitute a totality (it may fall short of the very totality to which it aspires). One of the lurking charges here is that the emphasis on "plurality and multiplicity" we have encountered in various guises in class works to "naturalize" communicative capitalism. Which of her arguments do you find most convincing regarding the relationship between communicative capitalism and the "technoculture" -- which are most vulnerable?