Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet

The network economy presents itself in the transactions of electronic commerce, finance, business, and communications. The network economy is also a social condition of discontinuity, indefinite limits, and in-between spaces. In Cornucopia Limited, Richard Coyne uses the liminality of design—its uneasy position between creativity and commerce—to explore the network economy. He argues that design, with its open-ended and transgressive explorations, provides a new way to think about the world of commerce; design's inter-territorial precinct, its in-between condition, offers a way to frame the problems of the Internet economy—for profit vs. for free, private vs. public, security vs. open access, defense vs. permeability. Coyne examines the threshold between conditions exemplified by the boundary between design and commerce. The threshold condition, Coyne says, is the site of edgy design and a portal into the new. The threshold, he argues, provides the most potent metaphor for understanding the liminal dwellers of the network economy.