(2020-09-27) Shalizi on Information Society and the Information Economy

Cosma Shalizi on Information Society and the Information Economy. The text which follows was mostly written in the 1990s, which explains, if it does not excuse, some of the now-dated references.

Nowadays (goes the tale) we either have, or will shortly have, an information economy, as opposed to an industrial economy, and consequently an information society, as opposed to an industrial society. (We are all historical materialists now.) The Great Change is supposed to have happened since the end of World War II, and mostly since the 1970s.

I used to buy this notion without many reservations. In the last few years I've become more skeptical, mostly after reading Beniger's book on The Control Revolution. Beniger's key point is that you cannot have an industrial economy without a massive information-processing apparatus, just to keep track of things and make sure that everything gets where it's supposed to, when it's supposed to.

The great innovations of information-processing were not so much machines as procedures: standardization, interchangable parts, printed forms, record-keeping, regularity, advertizing, management. The Great Leap Forward in information-processing took place, at least in this country, between 1880 and 1930, in which period the percentage of the workforce employed in information-handling grew from 6.5 percent to 24.5

Beniger's documentation is, as I said, impeccable, at least for the United States. I think we simply have to take it as given that industrial economies have always had big information economies, and that there's no way around this: "We have always been informational." I think this disposes of the idea that our economy is now or will be soon "post-industrial" in any real sense

This leaves us with at least three puzzles. First, why did no one twig to the information-processing side of industrialism until after World War II? (Or, if they did, why didn't the insight go anyplace?) Second, what has caused the changes of the last few decades? Third, why is the information-age explanation so prevalent, if at least one of its premises is badly flawed?

Another plausible suggestion is that, simply because computers are more efficient information tools, they let previously-existing trends (like concentration of control and long-distance exchange) be pushed further. --- Both these lines of thought assume that the economy is not becoming decentralized, that George Gilder (among others) is wrong. That's fine, because, at least in terms of control, it's not, and he is. (See Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean, for example.)

As to the third, a good answer would probably involve producing a good theory of ideology. I don't have one.

Of course, if all this is even half right, it strengthens a generalization I'm fond of, that societies' self-conceptions (that is, ideas about what a society is like that are widely-distributed and respectable within that society) are usually wrong. (The Industrial Revolution, for instance, wasn't even named until --- the 1880s.)

Who has access to information and networks, and how? Who controls different sorts of information and different forms of it?

Does specifically modern information technology really destablize authoritarian governments? (If so, warn Singapore.) How does the quality of information (its reliability, concision, salience to the task at hand, etc.) enter into its economics and processing?

Just how has the economy changed in the last few decades, and how does this connect with changes in the way we handle information, and changes in society and culture? What can we say about information societies in general, now that we've got, at a guess, 150 years of history on them?

See:

Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society [This is, IMHO, the single best book on what the information society actually is, and how it got that way. It was one of the first books I reviewed, but I've become increasingly unhappy with that write-up.]

Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States.

Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization [Deserves a detailed constructive rubbishing.]

Alvin Toffler, The Eco-Spasm Report, The Third Wave, Powershift, and no doubt more books as long as he can keep cranking them out and people keep buying them. [So far as I can see, he is, at all times, either entirely unoriginal or dead wrong or both, and is more than a bit of a fraud (see, yet again, my comments on Machlup), but bears watching, since people actually pay attention to him.]