WE ARE on the threshold of a new age of communication, and many observers
appear to be feeling optimistic about it. Information technology will bring
knowledge and power to the dispossessed, they predict, making life easier for
everyone. For them, the Internet is the ultimate democracy, a kind of
technological Peasants鈥� Charter.
Are they right? I doubt it. I鈥檓 with Oscar Wilde when he claimed that the
basis of optimism is sheer terror. The optimists are ignoring the likelihood
that new information technology will disenfranchise large sections of society.
The Information Age will be no Utopia. Rather, it will be a world for the brave.
The certainties of the 20th century鈥攊n politics, economics, business and
society鈥攁re evaporating. Everything is changing, and anyone who does not
embrace the change will go under.
So just how will the changes affect you and me, the governments we elect and
the countries we live in? To begin with, as electronic commerce grows,
governments will find it harder to raise taxes. Every day, trillions of dollars
move around the global electronic money markets as corporations carry out their
transactions in low-tax jurisdictions. As products and services that have
traditionally been delivered physically are transferred electronically, the tax
deficit will grow. People are increasingly buying goods and services via the
Internet from places where sales taxes are lowest.
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Another example is in the regulation of large organisations. Governments will
find it more and more difficult to keep track of the activities of corporations
and non-governmental organisations that operate simultaneously all over the
world. Now that better communications are increasing the globalisation of
business, how can individual governments control companies that produce and sell
in several different countries? Democratic politicians believe they see
everything that goes on and they think they know what鈥檚 happening. But the truth
is that they don鈥檛. This represents quite a paradox. Countries that want to
raise their standard of living need businesses that succeed. But successful
enterprises in the Information Age will be those that eventually cut the
umbilical cord with their country of origin.
As with most new technologies, rich countries will be among the first to
benefit. It won鈥檛 be so rosy if you鈥檙e poor. India and China are rapidly being
wired up with mobile telecommunications networks. So, in theory, a small farmer
from China should be able to exchange e-mail notes with his counterpart in
India. But this is likely to remain a 鈥渢heoretical鈥� possibility for some time.
How many Chinese small farmers do you know who are ready to use the Internet?
Like traditional transport networks, the Internet will attract wealth along its
highways. Those living off the beaten track will be cast into obscurity. Profits
from building the information technology infrastructure will be a fraction of
those made from the information that it will eventually carry.
In this way, information technology will accelerate inequality. As this
change is bound to alienate and dispossess many people, civil unrest is
inevitable. The worldwide Carnival Against Capitalism in June 1999, and the
demonstrations against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in
November are two examples. Of course, as society shifts from production-based to
knowledge-based, so will the method of protest change. Street demonstrations
will be augmented by cyber-protests.
Information warfare will be commonplace between individuals, pressure groups,
companies and the state. The dispossessed will hit the capitalists where they
are most vulnerable: in their computer and telecommunications infrastructures.
Criminals will be able to exploit people in the same way. The Internet makes it
very difficult to police rogue traders because buyer and seller often do not
live within the same jurisdiction. Illegitimate electronic shop fronts and false
customer identities are proliferating. Pornography and other proscribed material
are a huge global business, thanks to the Internet. Anyone with Net access can
buy from abroad pharmaceuticals that are banned in their own country.
It鈥檚 clear what all this means: the underlying order of life is breaking up.
Most of us are blind to the change. Drugs, crime and terrorism, once localised
problems, are now organised globally. Unemployment among the semi-skilled
workforce will increase as more production jobs are automated. These and other
precursors of social fragmentation are the consequences of our traditional power
structures becoming impotent. Natural selection will decide which parts of
societies will degenerate and which mutate into stable survivors in the new
environment of the Information Age.
My predictions might seem far-fetched, but they are supported by history.
Since the emergence of the human race, technology has changed and been changed
by society, and often the changes were radical. Gunpowder, the printing press,
clockwork, the production line, the steam engine, the railway, the aeroplane,
the telephone, the television, the computer, the credit card: each of these and
many other technologies radically changed human society. However, we didn鈥檛 know
beforehand how society would change. Would the outcome be positive or negative,
and for whom? Although gunpowder was invented in ancient China, it made little
impact on life there. Yet it brought about the end of medieval European society.
The steam engine was merely a novelty in ancient Greece where it was invented,
but it stimulated the Industrial Revolution in 18th-century Britain.
In the same way, it鈥檚 impossible to forecast the effects of the information
revolution in precise detail. However, some signs are unmistakably clear. People
with computer skills are likely to end up winners. Those without are likely to
emerge as losers. The power of the nation state will weaken. Communities that
invest substantially in communication technologies will thrive. Those that
don鈥檛, or those whose citizens are isolated from the new ways to communicate,
will suffer. Change is inevitable. The Information Age will be kindest to those
who adapt.