Relating the leisure pursuits of a small minority of educated and highly networked early adopters to the prospect of far broader social empowerment seems to imply that being able to make a lolcat is a step towards taking control back from the structural constraints of everyday life.... The notion of ‘cognitive surplus’ in leisure time actually risks taking capitalism’s productivity and efficiency imperatives to new extremes, part of the pernicious influence of the Getting Things Done industry as it enters the private sphere. But the complicity of Web 2.0 celebrities with capitalist logic is worth a book rather than a blogpost.

Also via her blog, The Digital Given – 10 Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter:

Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the  exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms – how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ’social’ qualities: the network is the message. What is created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.
 

Phrased another way, the prosperity of the 1980s enabled Japanese society to forget superficially the existence of its complex towards the United States, which we have examined. “Now the United States has been defeated! We no longer have to speak about the penetration of Americanization in Japan but rather must consider the advancement of Japanism in America!” The rise of postmodernism as an intellectual fad was supported by a climate that produced such claims. This same set of factors in turn aided the spread of otaku culture. The image of Japan that obsesses otaku is in fact no more than a U.S.-produced imitation, yet the atmosphere described above was the very thing that conveniently allowed people to forget about these origins.