ABSTRACT
In the late 1990s, dot.com startups and multinational corporations worked to shift the culture and discourse of the World Wide Web from eclectic communitarianism and geek libertarianism to commercial media and e-commerce. eBay was a major player in this transformation. The company was one of the first to successfully apply the principles and technologies of online community toward the dominant regime of commerce and consumption. A key element of eBay’s neoliberal business model is to attract networked individuals and train them in the precepts of eBay community members who do much of the company’s work, from marketing and selling merchandise to customer service. eBay is a hybrid commercial entity that facilitates person-to-person (P2P) commerce with minimal infrastructure and relatively few employees, and its management understands and relies on the cultural sensibilities and technical labor power of its millions of active members. As a “community” of workers and a business, eBay is a prime example of the new commercial nodes that Manuel Castells describes as characteristic of the “network society.” 1
