I guess that I find myself agreeing with Tim on the first section, as well as stealing/modifying his metaphor: I am sailing with Lovink in a boat of vagueness and damnit, i want it to capsize...now. Lovink seems pretty chummy with fellows such as Kittler, Zielinski, Baudrillard, and others, but I could care less. Superly (that's right...superly), Lovink gets a bit more salient in successive sections.

In the Virtual Intellectual, Lovink goes in search of the, well, virtual intellectual; first he tries to define an intellectual (or determine if such a person exists), then he brings in the virtual aspect, because as he explains, other types of intellectuals are no longer effective. Lovink, however, says that civil disobedience, activism, is dead. Someone else pointed out that the protests of the Iraq war were in vain because Bush went to war anyway. Maybe. But I would argue that activism and protest and more precisely, ceaseless Bush-hounding is not at all completely ineffective. Albeit in a different form than public marches and protest, the attacks on Bush's credibility, reasons for going to war, etc. are putting him on the defense to the point where he really seems worried for the first time since taking office. His support from the public in polls has plummeted and we just might see the first tangible evidence of effective Bush-hounding come this November.