Original of the article appearing in Information Strategy, January 1998.
The Real Politik of the Information Age
A new order is being forced upon unsuspecting societies across the world by advances in
telecommunications and computing. This new technology is being projected as so exiting, so
positive, so constructive. It is progress; another step on the yellow brick road to utopia. Or is
it?
Of course not! The future doesn't become better, it becomes different. The pressure intrinsic
in the stresses and strains of today's society is just lying dormant, waiting for the catalyst to
trigger a chain reaction of change. Information technology is that catalyst, and it has created
an explosive mixture which is unleashing unstoppable global economic and political forces.
The certainties of the past are being blown apart; the future is being born on the so-called
`information superhighways'.
Very soon these electronic telecommunication networks, covering the world via cable,
satellite and radio, will enable everyone in the world to `talk' to everyone else (at least
everyone who can afford it). Global commerce will force through the construction of
multimedia highways, and anyone bypassed by these highways faces ruin. Wealth will as
always be focused in `strip development', and those off the beaten track will be abandoned to
obscurity or extinction.
Many of the jobs that are tied into the old ways of doing business will disappear completely.
According to Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave: "We, who happen to share the planet
at this explosive moment, will therefore feel the full impact of the Third Wave in our own
lifetimes. Tearing families apart, rocking our economy, paralysing our political systems,
shattering our values, the Third Wave affects everyone."
Members from every sector of society, even those who are still lucky enough to have jobs,
are all finding it difficult to come to terms with this collapse of employment; a situation
accurately summed up by Jeremy Rifkin in his mistitled book The End of Work ? it should
have been called The End of Workers. From all sides of the political divide, it is commonly
accepted that Karl Marx was quite correct in his analysis of capitalism, of the power struggle
between capital and labour. In that analysis capital needed labour, both as a healthy efficient
workforce and as a market for the goods produced; but his nineteenth century arguments were
fundamentally misplaced by an understandable, yet ultimately fatal, oversight.
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The generations of Marxists that followed thought that physical labour would always be
needed to run the factories and machines, and that by organizing labour and by threatening its
withdrawal and other forms of mass violence, industrialists would ultimately be forced to
secede ownership of production to the masses. Marx didn't, he couldn't, envisage the
computer ? the ultimate extension of automation and the nemesis of unskilled labour. The
Machine Age is dead, long live the Information Age!
The coming millennium will be a watershed. It will be a time of amazing opportunities,
emerging through the heroic actions of individuals and organizations. These opportunists
have the vision to see novel and simplifying interpretations of the complexity around us.
They take what is best, but they will amputate the degeneracy eating at the heart of today's
western societies.
Democratic politicians are perpetually surprised by the amoral opportunists who profit from
treading a different path. Apparently oblivious to (or cynically ignoring) the societal collapse
taking place around them, Western politicians are pandering to the masses by affecting the
poses of CNN anchor-men (characterless good looks and perfect teeth), and hypocritically
espousing the fascism of political correctness. All the while they fail to see in it the excesses
of a popular "ideological thuggery". But the masses will not win in the natural selection for
dominance of an increasingly elitist world. Naturally the politicians don't like it. For the past
two centuries "the values of the weak prevail[ed] because the strong have taken them over as
devices of leadership" (Nietzsche). But no longer. In vain, our `representatives' try to legislate
against them, but they are just pissing in the wind of change.
For we are entering a new elite cosmopolitan age. Information technology, the collision of
previously disparate technologies of computers, telephones, consumer electronics, television
and radio, has increasingly liberated the talented few from the restrictions of the three
dimensions of physical space and from the tyranny of the masses. It has freed the elite from
the constraint, the mind-set and the moralities of the collective. It has set the individual free
to roam the higher dimensions of `cyberspace'. This new freedom will have profound and
astounding implications for everyone on the globe. Together with rapid international travel
and greatly increased mobility, information technology is changing the very essence of
political governance and its relationship to commerce, and commerce itself - yesterday's
regulatory structures no longer work.
Information systems running along the superhighway will change everything, which is why
politicians see it as so important to control the superhighway ? a vain hope. All such attempts
to control technological developments are misguided, and are symptomatic of politicians'
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attitudes. What a splendid shame that the consequences of their best intentions will lead down
the primrose path to the end of their political power. Their thinking still has not yet grasped
the new realities. Their jobs along with those of so many of their voters will go the same way
as the Age they represent.
And what about the rest of the world. The `fat cats', representing what are rather
optimistically called `developing countries', still demand aid. However, the days have gone
when moral blackmail pricks the conscience of the West, previously softened up by television
pictures of starving children. The competition among television reporters, their cynical heartrending portrayal of famine, death and disaster, in search of an Emmy, Bafta or other
sanctimonious self-congratulatory award, has become counter-productive. After the success
of Band Aid, Bob Geldof was the first to recognise that "compassion fatigue" had set in.
Nobody believes that anything can be done any more for countries whose internal conflicts
set them on a course of self-destruction and whose leaders are cushioned by Swiss bank
accounts stuffed full of aid dollars; dollars used to deck out the wives of the parasites in haute
couture as they parade at UN summits such as the Rio, Cairo, Copenhagen and Kyoto
circuses. Even the most deluded optimist must now know that Third World conditions will
not recede into the past as a bad memory, far from it. Perhaps there is even a growing
realization that Third World conditions could be the future awaiting many in the West?
What is going on? How have the pathetic politicians lost control over the course of events?
How is it that they stand before us with sham, bluster, superficiality and panic, while their old
certainties are falling apart? Unquestionably, all around the globe there is a growing sense of
unease, an undercurrent of uncertainty, a feeling that it is all running out of control.
Politicians, with louder and louder voices, parade and preen, and dabble on the world stage.
As they pose with a false confidence for both the press and their constituents,
computerization is deskilling, and far worse displacing, a large proportion of today's jobs. A
conservative estimate from the banking sector is that in this decade more than 150,000 bank
employees will have been made redundant in the UK alone, and more than half a million
across Europe, which unfortunately for continental bank clerks is lagging behind the UK in
the `rationalization' stakes. The vast majority of these losses were precipitated by
technological innovations such as the ATM machine, and the need to restructure banking
procedures in the face of frenzied international competition. Many more financial sector
redundancies are to come when electronic money is accepted by the richer sections of
society, and fully automatic banking becomes the norm. But the job losses lurking just over
the horizon for some other business sectors, particularly in retailing, could be far, far worse.
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While the politicians are posing for the peasants, aggressive opportunists are carving out the
New Order, as when money markets manipulate national currencies and pour scorn on the
pathetic pleas of finance ministers, and drug barons flood the world with narcotics. They are
sweeping away old moribund institutions, not in anarchy and chaos, but with new ideas, new
moralities, new rituals and new power structures; subsequently laying the foundations for
new institutions.
Meanwhile impotent politicians worldwide want to appear moral in their power broking.
They seek the justification for their selfish actions in an infinitely flexible `international law'.
Don't they realise that their position is not based on morality or justice, it never has been?
Power intrinsic in the institutions of the time, and that power alone, gave them their position.
But now that power is in terminal decline. It comes as no surprise that they are thoroughly
bewildered when the consequences of their actions finesse, even reverse, their best intentions.
Yet there are still socialists out there who think they can redistribute wealth via the tax
system, but they are rapidly becoming an endangered species. As usual it won't be the rich
who will be targeted, but the suckers in the middle classes who must pay for bloated
government. But the number of suckers is shrinking. From one end, unemployment is hitting
the middle classes too; and the other end is getting smarter. They are leaving for cyberspace:
"the greatest tax haven of them all, Bermuda in the sky with diamonds" (William ReesMogg).
There are trillions of dollars in hot money from the black economy, narco-dollars and other
ill-gotten gains from arms and other forms of smuggling and money laundering in addition to
tax-flight money sloshing around the world financial markets, in effect gambling against
national economies and profiting from the numerous mistakes of their politicians. The huge
losses, of course, are covered by the poor, and getting poorer, tax payer. On Black
Wednesday 1993 British ministers ran around like headless chickens while claiming to be in
control; moving interest-rates up and down like a yo-yo. It fooled no-one, these politicians
may promise and posture, but now the market decides.
Muddled messages coming from ministers and their `spin doctors' do not help either.
Rumours appear in the press, many of then government inspired. Politicians insist that they
will not be bounced into decisions. Of course they will be bounced. They will be bounced
into responding to every rumour, or not responding! Either way is just as good for the
markets. The markets need movement to make money. Rumours not politicians drive
movement and start the cash registers ringing. Politicians and their lackeys are mere
marionettes, with the markets pulling the strings: wind them up and let them go. The press
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conspire in the pretence that government is in control; it's easier to be fed drivel by `close
friends of the minister' than to go looking for real stories. They even play up to the
overweening smugness of these spin doctors, who, in fits of self-importance, actually start
rumours in the `interests' of their political masters. Kching, kching; the rumours start, the
cash registers ring on indefinitely. The market makers don't even have to invent rumours any
more; the lunatics in charge of the asylum are doing it all on their own.
On resigning in June 1993 after sterling's collapse, Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer summed it all up. The government, he said, gave every impression of "being in
office, but not in power." How ironic that Karl Marx predicted that politicians would become
impotent, although he gave other reasons. Impotent? Castrated is probably closer to the truth.
Democratic politicians are eunuchs in the harem of real politik: they see everything, they've
read the books, they insist that they know how it should be done, but they simply don't have
the equipment to play the game.
Ian Angell is Professor of Information systems at the London School of Economics.
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