The Information Society has basically forfeited any democratic control over its own destiny. No one's opinion is ever asked, nobody is ever polled. If we'd been asked to vote in a digital revolution, it almost certainly would never have happened. We were never offered that chance, it never occurred to us to ask for it or take it. Our lives have been turned upside down by a series of obscure technical events that transpired in a nearly perfect political vacuum. The moral idea of informed consent was never raised. Weird homemade machinery that was full of bugs and never worked very well burst out of garages in California and destroyed the modern capitalist order. That's the story, basically. Like it or lump it.
There are vast fortunes to be made overnight in the Information Society. It's the hottest economic game on the planet. Vast fortunes can be lost just as quickly. Worse yet, there's no good safe place to store your loot if you make a pile and decide to jump off the jampacked no-brakes information bus. Thanks to computers, the stock market and bond market and currency markets are aswarm with sophisticated capital instruments that have created a seething global casino economy. There's more money in the thrash of leverage, futures and derivatives than there is in rational capitalist investment. In an Information Society, even oil companies want to act like Hollywood.
Thanks to modems, cellphones, cell-faxes, laptops, beepers and satellite dishes, we're never out of touch. I can read my email (which I happen to store in San Francisco) whenever I'm in Vancouver. The bad news is that, yes, I can read my email in Vancouver. I could be doing great British Columbia-type things instead: having the BC sushi roll, shopping in Chinatown, spiking the old growth forest. But I'll deny myself those harmless, life-enhancing amusements, because I feel