The Emergence of Cross-Border Electronic Commerce

One of the major social changes over the last two centuries has been a ‘double alienation’: the alienation of the producers when they ceased to own the means of production, and then the alienation of the consumers, who no longer needed to have trusting relationships with the sellers. This chapter argues that we now live in a time of new and even greater alienation. Electronic platforms like Taobao or Amazon offer the purchaser economic exchange without ‘real’ money, without ‘real’ interactions with the seller, who may be located anywhere on the globe, and, more importantly, with alienated virtual goods (the buyer purchases her commodity without having any ‘real’ touch of it). What is the implication of this expanded alienation – will it have a strong effect on trust and social relations? To answer this question, the author addresses ethnographic materials collected among consumers and Internet mediators in a provincial Russian city on the border with China.