Professor Ian Angell

Department of Management, LSE, London WC2A 2AE    |    +44 (0)20 7955 7655    |    i.angell@lse.ac.uk

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.

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' 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 heart-rending 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.

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 Rees-Mogg).

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 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.