"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality. This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions, their guts online, and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself. Commodification means that you turn something into a product that has a money value. In the nineteenth century commodities were made in factories by workers who were mostly exploited. I created my interior thoughts as commodities for the corporations that owned the board that I was posting to, like Compuserve or AOL and that commodity was then sold on to other consumer entities as entertainment Cyberspace is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re- presents it as an emotional spectacle. It is done by businesses that commodify human interaction and emotion and we are getting lost in the spectacle…” - Carmen Hermosillo Carmen, aka [#humdog](/relevant/new/humdog) , wrote this in 1994. She was a poet and a research analyst. The entire article is amazing but if you only read the above quote it's enough to rock ones world a bit.