A friend of mine with a far keener ear for the euphony of the English language cringes at the word blog. (He also objects to the word bromance, for I think a not unconnected reason). This gives me some pause as I hazard the claim that "a blog is a social text." What forms of technohype do I thereby embrace, in urging upon the collective the use of a communication technology that, in any case, and without any additional urging on my part, will increasingly be imposed upon us by the cultural logic of advanced capitalism? The oft-trumpeted potential for a "creative commons" of the Internet may well prove to be neither creative nor common, if we take seriously the challenges Marx presents in "The Fragment on Machines": "Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it" (my emphasis). From the virtuosic instrument of the pen, which the writer makes into "his organ," the means of intellectual production has moved within my lifetime onto the networked computer, which deskills the writer not only by imposing its own mechanical laws on writing, but through the overwhelming compositional force of its accumulated intelligence. In machinic virtuosity, which word processing, e-mailing, blogging, and Twittering extend and intensify, we confront not simply a transition but a transformation in prose.