ABSTRACT
The fine art and antiques sector of the economy has long been dominated by nineteenth-century patriarchal business practices and high-end auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s. In this chapter I argue that eBay has helped effect a set of democratizing shifts in this sector. As a technological assemblage, eBay provides for a new form of commerce that opens up certain social possibilities even as it forecloses others, and I point to contradictions between democratic notions of “community” and how eBay’s language of “community” operates discursively within what is essentially a site for commercial transactions based on free-market libertarian “ethics.” eBay’s Feedback Forum system instills a form of seemingly transparent community self-governance that obviates the need for eBay the corporation to regulate and monitor transactions closely (see chapter 7). Transparency and its implied qualities of trust and social bond underwrite eBay, a setting where business transactions take place as an open expression of supply, demand, and evaluation. eBay thus exemplifies a new economic efficiency at work, one where flows of goods between buyers and sellers bypass costly intermediaries who once monopolized access, stock, and expertise.
