Alley daze.

Remember all the giddy talk about the "information superhighway"? Well it never got built. At least not the way Time Warner, Microsoft, and AT&T imagined it. As recently as two years ago, the media Goliaths were spinning blue-sky fantasies about delivering 500 cable channels and personalized services to your home, while collecting access tolls for the individual use of vast corporate entertainment libraries. The fantasies are still kicking around, technologically hitched to those WebTV "dumb delivery" boxes now in stores, which will link home entertainment to the Internet, and reinforced by the deregulatory revisions of the Telecommunications Act this year (which facilitates multimedia mergers and sanctions digital over the old analog information systems). But the uninvited guest at this party is the Internet; it was not posed to be part of the plan at all. Once earmarked as a nigh-obsolete relic of the pioneer days of digital communication, the big corporate players have reluctantly come to accept the fact that the Internet now functions as the information superhighway. Microsoft's wholesale switch to Internet-oriented strategies ("Embrace and Extend" is the company motto) since last December, and the spirited entry this year of its Internet Explorer into the browser wars with Netscape, has been one massive attempt to catch up with what many had predicted would have been left sucking dust.

The explosion of multimedia features - real audio, shockwave, downloadable video clips, animated GIF files - on the graphic-intensive World Wide Web is responsible not only for the numerous traffic jams plaguing the superhighway this year but also for the rapid ascendancy of the Internet itself. After all, it was the Web that brought the shopping malls, the advertisers, the financial real estate, indeed the entire world of commercial agents in hot pursuit of good addresses from which to promote and shop their wares. Once the barbarians were on the Web, there was no looking back. While distasteful to Net purists, the new commercial presence had little difficulty, initially at least, in fitting in with the open architectural milieu of Net culture. Nothing in the religion of Net libertarianism seemed at odds with the laissez-faire ideals of the corporations. Except when it came to paying for stuff. A free market and freedom of speech are one thing, free products and shareware ethics are another. That little contradiction could be deferred when Wall Street was boosting Netscape and other Internet public offerings through the roof and venture capitalists were funding start-ups right, left, and center, but now industry pundits wonder whether profits can really be generated and sustained from a medium whose users have always taken "freedom of information" at its literal meaning - i.e., no billing, please! None of the business models - banner-based advertising, subscription, pay per use, metered bits, digital cash, microtransactions, consumer branding - used to sustain content-oriented Web sites seem to be working. While this could be viewed as a victory for the resident anarchist philosophy of the Net, it does not augur well for those who are willing to equate industry with the possibility of job creation.

Nothing better illustrates the laissez-faire ideals of the Net than this year's fight against the Communications Decency Act's ban on online indecency and offensive speech, overturned in the courts after intensive activity by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other lobby groups from the Internet community (as well as the ACLU and a number of gay/lesbian civil-rights groups). If you were a Netizen in good standing, you would have received a barrage of E-mail postings about this life-or-death crusade for free speech. By contrast, the fact that Congress threw the welfare state down the toilet this year barely registered online at all. So fierce is the Internet doctrine of untrammeled individualism that it translates into a general phobia about any government activities, and not just those directly affecting the new media. This is unfortunate because it means that the overriding commercial principle in the Web-oriented sector will be the free pursuit of profit rather than the publicly assisted creation of decent paying jobs. Like all other sectors of the economy, Internet industries have been penetrated by the low-wage revolution, from the janitors who service Silicon Valley to the graphic designers who service Silicon Alley. There are jobs in cyberspace, but they don't pay that much. No less than in the arts and education, creative work there is undercompensated because of the invisible wages that come in the form of psychological rewards for personally satisfying work. At a time when no one is immune to the plague of low-wage labor, it's important that artists, educators, writers, and designers see this informal arrangement for what it is - and speak out against the exploitation of the prestige of cultural work to keep down wages in a market where labor supply will always outstrip demand.

Take the case of Silicon Alley, the first new culture industry, nay the first new urban industry, to emerge in New York in well over a generation. Breathlessly heralded in the city's media organs as a superrush of adrenalin to the urban economy and culture alike, the Alley is customarily described as running in a thin strip from 23rd Street almost down to Wall Street itself, and as populated by creative East Coast hipsters (as opposed to Palo Alto techies and Bay Area self-styled supergeeks). The much-lionized emergence of the new media has also drawn on the human resources and skills of the downtown art world, creating some accomplished new art sites like ada 'web (http://adaweb.com) and Artnetweb (adding to older, invaluable art-world resources like Echo and The Thing and newer ones like Rhizome). Its webzines like Word (http://word.com), Feed (http://www.feedmag.com), Urban Desires (http://desires.com), and Slim (http://www.stim.com) already form an independent sector of original-content publishing, distinct in feel and opinion from industry-lifestyle-oriented Hot Wired and Microsoft's power-oriented Slate. No one yet believes that Web journalism, art, and multimedia performance have matured - the scene is often likened to early TV, when radio shows were reissued in new formats - but there is much that is promising and much more to look forward to.

Silicon Alley was in part the creation of city politicians and real-estate investors looking for a way to revive an ailing downtown economy with its alarming building vacancy rates; the response to an immediate need for WWW content providers and designers directed at the huge labor pool of creative workers (a.k.a. artists); the entrepreneurial outcropping of the self-publishing movement driving the great WWW boom; and the result of a new wave of twenty-something trust funds looking for a glamorous outlet, much like the collectors who frequented the East Village gallery scene in the '80s (indeed, much of the wealth that fueled that scene was no doubt amassed on Wall Street during that same decade). For those who hold that postindustrialism is a contradiction in terms, it's not clear that this neo-boho dot.com corridor constitutes anything like an industry, in the sense of producing and distributing a product far beyond its borders - among other things, it's a service developer for corporate website promotion, a subcontractor of "HTML slave" labor (high school kids will labor for cappuccinos because website work is cool), a low-overhead R&D test bed for software tools and applications, and a welcome, if underpaying, nonunion employer of a generational cohort that might otherwise have ended up being "warehoused" in graduate seminars. Earlier this year, a Coopers & Lybrand study showed more New Yorkers working in new media than in television and almost as many as in magazine publishing, and growing at a rate that outstrips any other business in the city. Ironically, the report appeared at a moment when some companies were going under, and over the course of the year many of the surviving webshops would make deals with the likes of Microsoft, Omnicom, Sun, Time Warner, and Viacom. When the smoke clears, the roads to sustainability may be more starkly defined, and the prospects for a critical, Indie-Net culture may be thinner and more circumscribed. Battles are currently being fought, for example, in the hometown listings wars - exactly the same wars being waged by alternative newspapers (the most recent grassroots attempt to create an independent publishing medium) - in cities all over the country. It all boils down to cornering the block advertising revenue of the big entertainment conglomerates, but how many information sources do we really need to tell us that First Wives Club is playing in the theater down the street?

If Silicon Alley gives birth to a new kind of culture industry, it is not likely to be a mass-media industry, nor will its impact necessarily lie in the realm of leisure or entertainment. Ironically enough, unlike radio, film, TV, recording, fashion, and advertising, which had their start in the Age of the Machine, the work environment of new media is entirely machine-based and labor-intensive in ways that are now legendary. The fact is, new media have already transformed our work patterns much more radically than they are ever likely to affect our leisure hours, already playing a massive role in the restructuring of labor and income in the new global economy - reorganizing time, space, and work for nearly everyone in the developed world. The Net hosts a gazillion functions and activities that are utopian in character and that you can find lavishly celebrated in the pages of Wired, but let's not forget that for every one of us who wants our PCs and software to go faster, there are 500 who want them to go slower - to stall the breakneck workplace regimes governed by computerized schedules, with their keyboard quotas and software surveillance techniques and monitored bathroom visits.

The difference in these attitudes to computing speed speaks volumes about how new media straddle the division of labor, and should remind us why it is necessary to make links between work cultures that are ordinarily kept apart. Silicon Alley is currently being showcased as an urban enclave for whiz kids, a chunk of some future utopia of cooperative work in the virtual city, and, in this respect, its work culture is philosophically akin to the creative, hard-technology sectors of Northern California and the Massachusetts corridor. But it is also industrially connected to sites of very cheap labor - electronic-chip production and circuit assembly in Asia and the Caribbean, the armies of word processing and data-entry clerks in Ireland and India. Contrary to the belief that "symbolic analysts" are the fastest-growing and most lucrative middle-class sector of employment, data show that unemployment and low-wage labor in any location appear to swell in direct proportion to the growth of select information-intensive industries.

Many artists, writers, educators, and cultural workers continue to believe they live in a detached world, sequestered from the direct influence of these economic patterns. Such is the powerful legacy of romantic traditions that venerate artistic creativity and intellectual activity as an alternative to 'trade." Indeed, the government debate about public assistance for art continues to be marked by appeals to traditional creative freedoms, on one side, and by open contempt for welfare handouts to the privileged effete, on the other. But these perspectives are really two sides of the same devalued coin. Arguments about creativity are always invitations to underpayment (one striking proof is successful artists' encouragement by collectors to produce "signature," and not "original" work). It's not in the nature of our traditions, but I wonder how things would look if folks in the cultural sector began to demand to see some sustainable job creation. The considerable local revenue generated by art, and now new media, is often cited as an argument to city, state, and federal officials for "supporting" arts, culture, and education. The result? Tax abatements and deductions, puny loans, and skinny grants. This is not enough, not when the newest form of job creation is "workfare," or mass peonage by another name.

The new-media sector is barely two years old, but it is already being confronted with basic choices about the nature of cultural work in a business economy. This is not just a quandary for industry insiders. Given the avant-garde location of the webshops, the outcome may serve as a model for at least the next generation of cultural workers. So before we all hop on the Info Love Boat, let's make sure that everyone is getting paid.

Andrew Ross is professor in the American Studies program at New York University. He is editor of an upcoming collection of essays, No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers, to be published in March by Verso.