Habermas was of course speaking of his idea that post-modernism (I use the term here in reference to the contemporary social mood of late capitalism) is, if anything, an unresolved modernism that has not as yet worked through its contradictions. In a similar way, the changes in the informational means of production were flying every which way by the year 2000.

Capitalism, as a social and economic system, works through creative destruction in search of new profit-taking, and social value is expressed through commodification; that is, monetary value determines social value. It largely pays no respect to relatively unprofitable enterprise such as book publishing, which has always been a low-profit business, even in boom times. There have been periods of reasonable profitability, mainly in North America and Europe during periods where the form was the dominant media, but in Australia a survey of 228 businesses in 2000-01 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that although publishers generated an income of $1.36 billion (of which literary publishing is a small percentage of turnover), expenses were $1.32 billion, a profit of only around 6 per cent (qtd. in Webster 84). The least profitable publishing enterprise of all is the literary magazine, as it has always been in permanent crisis, and runs at a loss if subsidies are calculated. Thus the question developing in the 2000s was how the literary magazine would survive in any format alongside the advent of the worldwide web around 2000.

In 2007 the author Richard Flanagan attempted to sum up his despair as to the state of contemporary literary publishing. Most of the small magazines under discussion either call themselves literary or are perceived as such by a society obsessed with labels and niches, so his comments are relevant and would prefigure what would happen to the magazines after the year 2000. He noted that