Maggie's Farm

Who among contemporary thinkers (Right, Left, or Whatever) has confronted the Information Revolution or factored in the REAL ECONOMIC GAME CHANGERS: instant global communication, commercial monopolies, digital automation, computing(especially the implications of MEGA data bases), greater interdependence than ever before, the accelerated churn in innovation and the life cycle of businesses and careers, globalization and the HUGE assymetry in knowledge and power between the regular folks and the Mandarin class (meritocracy). No one that I know of, though commentators like Walter Russell Mead have done a good job of chronicling the decline of the “Old Blue Model”, not so much about what will take its place. You can’t even have a conversation about the implications of it without being accused of being a Luddite.

Consider, for a second, the accelerated churn in innovation and the life cycle of businesses and careers. The shorter ACCELERATED life cycle of “careers” and businesses is very destabilizing. I don’t know if the Information Revolution is the Industrial Revolution on steroids or if ultimately we will determine that there is a qualitative difference between the Information and the Industrial Revolutions.
I am not convinced that the thinkers who wrote for the Industrial Revolution have that many insights applicable to the Information Revolution, which they could not have imagined. I am not aware of any politician that seems to grasp the implications of the innovation and engineering advances that have emerged. How does the increasingly rapid turn over of innovation, jobs, businesses affect the middle class, how does it effect investment? I don’t see how these technologies don’t lead to greater concentration of power politically and economically, and greater intrusiveness, not just by government but by both the private and public sector. I would like to believe that there are natural organic restraints, but I don’t see them.