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The website entitled "Real Costs" by Michael Mandiberg is an interesting project, which acts as an interesting social and political commentary about consumerism in America. The age of the internet is all about instantaneous gratification, having the world at your beck and call whenever you please. With the advent of online-shopping, we have the capacity to comparison shop more efficiently than ever before. Since the internet is a constantly-changing entity, it provides the only possible venue for this type of art installation to work. The monetary conversion used in the program is based on the actual costs of oil at the time. Therefore, without a constantly changing program such as the internet, the effect of the real-time conversion would be lost. Also, the project is strengthened by the fact that the internet is a relatively "green" entity, in that it doesn't consume any paper products or oil to generate the massive amounts of information available on the web. The only energy consumption involved with the internet is that which is needed to connect a computer to it. However, since there are various ways of getting sustainable energy for the electricity needed to connect to the internet, it could theoretically be a totally green institution/entity/etc.
This artwork fits into Sterling's description of the internet because a project like this could only survive on such a relatively unregulated system. Although the project is very benign in practice, it is quite subversive in nature. The idea of the application is to get people to start thinking about their own oil consumption, and on a larger scale how much we as a nation tend to take for granted our fossil fuels. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thinking that our government would like to erradicate, keeping our CO₂ emissions far out of the minds of most Americans. I think that an even more effective use of this program would be to calculate the amount of oil that actually goes into the production of the goods in question, including the manufacturing process and transportation. This would probably be a much more extensive application, though, and somewhat unrealistic given that more than a simple calculation would be needed.