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We all have two choices: follow 'new barbarians' and advance to an uncertain future, or obey 'old barbarians' and their fundamentalist gospel of a false past. The new barbarians represent the winners in the new economic reality, leaving the losers to circle their wagons around old values and rituals, easy prey for the old barbarians. The outcome of their coming battle will be a world of three zones. The first world is the libertarian realm of new barbarians that supports the rights of the individual, not of the tribe. The second world is an uneasy compromise between old barbarian ideologies and the modern world; its mode of governance focuses exclusively on the rights of the collective. Might is right in the third world, a place of terror and repression. Putting it simply, the three worlds are an open society, a closed society and no society.
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Information technology and other new technologies have provoked profound structural changes in the world economy, and these are concocting unimaginable levels of complexity. This complexity is manifesting itself as market instability, political turmoil and civil unrest, increasing rage and violent actions amongst previously passive people, as well as 'immoral' behaviour on a gigantic scale. In fact we are witnissing the possibility of a wide-ranging and complete systemic breakdown in many societies. As the problems run totally out of control, we will need to identify the trends if we are to have any chance of stopping the rot, let alone of prospering in these totally unstable conditions.
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This book will not look further into [the collapse of the old order]. But will this
degeneracy lead to decline and fall, a collapse into anarchy? No! The future will work, for some.
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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. Is it any wonder the US vice-president Al Gore led the developed world's politicians in a scramble to ensure that their own particular countries were ahead of the game? Ministers from G7, the group of the world's seven leading industrial nations, met in Brussels in February 1995, at the invitation of the European Union, to raise awareness of the superhighway. Their aim was to create an
international (that is G7) strategy that would ensure that political short-terrorism, meddling and indecision would not block development. And who would achieve this? Why the very same indecisive short-termist politicians meddling in its development.
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Pious words abounded, concerning the availability of public information on the Net and the democratic nature of the information society. The rest of the G7 countries are likely to imitate the US attempt at bridging the 'information gap' between the political centre, in the US's case Washington, and the rest of the country. By supplying the population with electronic access to the data, politicians believe that 'the people' will be lining up to read what the politicians want them to see.
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However, all such attempts to control technological development are misguided, as are the politicians' attitudes. What a splendid shame that the consequences of their best intentions will be the end of their own political power: but much more of that later.
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