The West likes to hold up its rich media environment as evidence of the success of our democracy. The internet in particular is said to let everyone get his message across, let everyone participate in discussion. I argue that this democracy is actually a vehicle for intensifying capitalism. The concept I offer for this merger of democracy and capitalism is communicative capitalism. One way to understand the hold of communicative capitalism is to consider its animating myths, the fantasies about the internet that tie it to democracy. Three such fantasies are those of abundance, participation, and wholeness.