Appendix 2: Internet and Society, The Transformation of Power

I: Introduction
	It is absurd to try and summarise all the social forces active in the AAA world over the last 30 to 40 years (let alone those of the last 200 years) in an Appendix, but it is necessary to attempt a description of the context of the Internet's appearance and the uses it has been put to. It is also necessary to show the change in the 'direction' of the development of the AAA State, and thus it is useful to give a brief history of the development of these States over the last two hundred years. Though this historical sketch makes some use of the theories of Norbert Elias, this appendix, as a whole, does not pretend to be more than a plausible use of some narronomas about this world, and to provide backing data for the claims and analysis made in Chapter 3.  
	Explanation of social process is difficult - particularly when we wish to relate, or meld, apparently global processes to apparently local, or small group, processes. What we observe is correlation not causation - as is perhaps best illustrated by debates over the 'cause' of capitalism, where it appears priority of any factor can easily be disputed. However, as Hume suggested, we cannot assume that because one event regularly precedes another that the first caused the second, merely that one precedes the other (1888: 74, 76, 87, 172). Further that some events developed out of some other events does not mean the prior events caused the subsequent events, merely that these events influenced, or affected, what occurred.
	With social processes, priority is frequently unclear - let alone the claim of regularity.  What we generally have is the correlation of events, which may be said to reinforce each other in certain ways, and oppose each other in other ways. These events are not only multiple, and hence the interaction between them is complex, but it is often not clear that these events are linked by more than the analysis which separated them in the first place. If it is hard to find causality in the past, finding causality in the future is even less certain. Thus in this section I make few claims about causation, or the direction in which society will go, but attempt to describe current patterns and their possible interactions.
	As 'dramatic' modes of explanation narronomas allocate blame or responsibility and imply modes of action, which may in turn change the situation and perhaps the narronomas being used.  As such they are almost inherently political. It is not that people who define themselves as a group (if only in comparison to other groups) make narronomas which reflect their interests, but the narronomas actually constitute those interests. The narronomic categories gather things together in certain ways, and 'battles' over these categories and their linkages is the fundamental act of politics allowing coaction.  Narronomas are not the only social force, but it is impossible to discuss a social force outside a narronoma.
	Some widespread AAA narronomas include the conception that information technology transforms society either towards utopia or catastrophe, that this technology is determinate, and that the present is influenced by, or justified by, the future (futurity). Dominant narronomas in AAA society both define and give importance to the 'economy'. They often assume a form of economic determinism (that a 'free market' both guarantees a 'free society' and always produces the best results); that perfect competition and perfect information can exist; and also that any oligopoly is only temporary or a result of 'quality' or 'talent'. There are many counterpositional narronomas with widespread distribution. One which is often considered to be increasing its appeal, is the skill and prestation based 'open source software' movement, which might be more in harmony with 'indigenous' Internet based behaviour (see Chapter 9).
	The focus on 'public knowledge' means that as well as academic sociologists such as Bell and Castells I have made use of popularizers such as Toffler, politicians such as Carville and Gingrich, 'demagogues' such as Limbaugh, 'radicals' such as Chomsky, economic 'think tanks' such as the Economic Policy Institute and the Cato Institute, and the commentary of journalists. The purpose is to give an idea of the concerns facing people who use the list, and hopefully to give pointers to the wider reasons why people may embrace electronic 'community'. 
	If it was possible to summarize these concerns under headings, the dominant concern is with the changes in the historical balance of power within the State. This balance has moved from becoming more and more inclusive, to being primarily in favour of the Corporate and Financial sectors. This correlates with:
1) Lessening of survival security' due to changes in the patterns of employment, and diminishment of the Welfare State (clearly this is comparative, survival is not anywhere near as difficult as in many other parts of the world); 
2) Growth and concentration of corporate power and wealth, with lessening of corporate 
	dependence on large workforces to command profitable markets; 
3) Decline in the self regulation of the nation state; 
4) Decline in bureaucracies in State and business, and the decline in 'middle layers of 
	integration', generally. 
5) Dismantling of 'civic society' and the non-corporate sector; 
6) Decline in the adequacy of feelings of access to social power; 
7) Changes in family structure and obligations, and diminishment of local 'community'; 
8) Increase in surveillance and controls felt to be 'unacceptable'.  
The majority of these concerns, or observed changes, are magnified by Information Technology. Such concerns would be familiar to most readers, though some may welcome these developments, or may give different reasons for their occurrence. Explanations for the changes in the AAA world vary radically. The position taken here is that they eventuate from the exaggeration of the consequences of capitalism, which has been enabled by changes in the organization, speed and capacity of communication, and 'Information Technology' generally.  A non-capitalistic system might well have made use of these changes with different results. This is not to deny this exaggeration of capitalism  may lead to a radically different society, but to claim this society has not yet arrived.
	Without implying complete agreement the following statement, from Castells summarizes some of the themes of this chapter:
Capitalism has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterised by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms...; considerable empowering of capital vis-a-vis labour...; increasing individualization and diversification of working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the paid labour force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state...; stepped up global economic competition.
[T]here has also been an accentuation of uneven development [not only between economies, but within them].
Social movements tend to be fragmented, localistic, single-issue oriented and ephemeral... people tend to regroup around primary identities: religious, ethnic, territorial, national... the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning (Castells 1996: 1-3)
We might summarise Castells' position by claiming that Capital is now nomadic and flexible, able to strike where it will, and not locatable - whereas the majority of people are comparatively fixed and subject to these raids and movements.
	This Appendix is particularly deficient in its coverage of concern about ecological catastrophe.  Details of the World's ecological (and population) problems are controversial, though it would be safe to say people fear that decisions about the ecology are taken without regard to them, and constitute further evidence of feelings of alienation from the structures of governance.  This particular alienation is usually felt to be threatening to either a way of life or to life itself.

II: The AAA State and Political Processes
II.1: Theory of the State
	The narronoma of the AAA State proposed here might be called the 'Yes Minister theory of the State', referring to the British comedy of that name.  It is not implied that all States must behave in this kind of manner - the term 'State' is clearly a congerie.  Basically, in that programme, the State was portrayed as the site of conflict between various groups all competing for power, resources or survival.  Parliament was only a site where political parties completed with each other in public. Further competitions occurred within the parties, between the parties and the public service, and between different departments in the public service.  These conflicts were complicated by struggles with other organizations: lobygroups, corporations, small business unions, worker's unions, professional organisations, local councils, or semi-independent State organizations such as the police, the judiciary, the military and, in Britain, the medical profession and the universities. People would ally and then split based upon perceived similarities and salient comparisons. These conflicts shaped the parties conflicting, the people involved were not 'self determinate'. Neither was the State particularly centralized, its offices and participants spread over a wide area. As McGrew writes "the State is a highly fragmented and in some respects de-centred apparatus of rule" (1992: 76). Mennell writes: 
A strong 'civil society' was most likely to emerge in states within which the outcome of power struggles, including cycles of violence, had eventuated in a relatively equal power balance between the major social interests contending for political dominance. This circumstance is most favourable to the growth of the dense web of cross-cutting group affiliations, where an opponent in one context can be an ally in another (Mennell 1995: np).
	A pluralistic view of the State should not be taken to imply that the State 'brokers' decisions, or reflects the demands of the public. The more groups enter into the process of the State the less this is possible, and perhaps the more it leads to political alienation - the feeling that everyone else is listened to, but not oneself or one's group. Further the State, as a whole, has to act within the demands of its environment, which in this case is the Capitalist Market System, so the State cannot be indifferent to the demands of those who 'epitomise' that system, or who promulgate narronomas about that system, which become the facts that groups have to organise within. The State also becomes dependent upon its models of the system, and the system itself, for its revenues (McGrew 1992: 95-7). The State could be said to have tried to manage the contradictions within capitalism, or the repetitive and regular crises of capitalism, when it appeared those contradictions might lead to the collapse of the 'nation' State itself (Galbraith 1994: 6). 
	Whether or not the view of Classical economics is correct - that pure Capitalism does not need regulation from the State in order to function perfectly - powerful corporations will always seek that regulation to benefit, or protect, themselves. Corporations have thus always had impact upon the modern State.  However they have often been resisted by the working and middle classes who also have input into the State, as its operatives and managers. If there were many corporations, then their interests might be diverse.  The fewer and bigger the corporations they more they can exhert coherent pressure on States.
	To some extent the 'middle classes' came to exist because they filled positions within State and business bureaucracies.  They were required to be educated, and to fill a position between the owners of capital, or those with government authority, and those supposed to obey.  Thus they acted as something of a communication channel, and referee.  Valuation of expertise ('the white collar') which distinguished them from workers, helped overwhelm loyalty to a particular workplace in favour of professional evaluation i.e. that of other equals with similar concerns.
	This post 18th Century period also established a formal division between 'public' and 'private'.  This division is linked to a division between capital (private property) and State (public property), or between 'Public life' as the official behaviour of the State and 'Private life' as that of the individual unconcerned with government, and also to a separation between 'home' and 'work', and male and female roles. Previous European Court, and Peasant societies did not have the same kind of division (Elias 1983, Riley 1992: 184, 213, Mennell 1992: 134).
	Also during this period the State had achieved a monopoly of Taxation and was able to threaten greater violence than any section of its citizenry - though organized mass violence could possibly have threatened it.

II.2: Growth of Conflict, Interdependence and Inclusion in the 19th Century
	More than 200 years ago, only the landed aristocrats, the wealthier merchants, the Church and a small bureaucracy, selected by patronage, had much access to the State.  It can clearly be argued that over the last 200 years the number of different groups which have had access to State apparatus, or who have to be consulted or recognized, has increased. 
	This increase is demonstrated through the progress of the British Reform Acts. The Act of 1832 established uniform standards, abolished the 'rotten boroughs' which enabled the aristocrats to control the composition of the House of Commons and gave representation to the new industrial towns. Its initial rejection by the Lords was marked by riots. One meeting was reputedly 150,000 strong (Green 1934: 803). The Act of 1867 was supported by huge mass demonstrations and Trade Union activity. It extended franchise to householders and lodgers paying 10 pounds per year - effectively allowing some working people in towns to vote.  In 1872 the secret ballot was introduced. Acts of 1884 lowered the property qualification; of 1918 gave the vote to all males over 21; of 1928 extended the vote to women over 21; and of 1969 gave the vote to all citizens over 18. 
	Expansion of State inclusion to people who were not followers of the State Religion, also occurred over this period. After 1828 people no longer had to take sacraments according to the Church of England, but had to take an oath not to harm the established Church. The Catholic Emancipation Act followed the next year allowing Catholics to become eligible for nearly all State offices (Green 1934: 800-1). Members of Parliament no longer had to take an oath after 1833, which effectively admitted Quakers and some other sects (ibid: 805). Jews were admitted to Parliament after 1858. The same year property qualifications for members were abolished (ibid: 817). This allowed working class members, and the eventual election of Labour Party members in 1906 (ibid: 837). Initial entrance to public offices was no longer to be granted by patronage after 1870, but by competitive exam (ibid: 823).
	The 19th century was a time of great upheaval. The Napoleonic Wars and the insurrections in Paris in 1830 and 1848 (together with other failed revolutions on the Continent) formed part of the background of violent discontent.  We might say that the Century saw the growth of working class self categorization, as a class with special interests. Protests were initially vague and local group specific,  becoming, as the Century wore on, more based in an identity as 'workers'.  At the beginning of the Century, in the UK there were widespread riots against the Corn Laws which kept the price of grain crops at the inflated price reached during the war against Napoleon.  Machine wreckers and Luddites protested against the destruction of working conditions, and local organizations, by mechanised industry. In 1817 a group of men tried to take over Nottingham by force.  In 1819 a meeting of 60,000 people in Manchester advocating parliamentary reform was fired upon by troops killing six people and injuring hundreds.  Meetings in sympathy were held all over the Country. A "series of six repressive Acts" were passed that year as a result. Protest against these Acts included the so called Cato Street conspiracy which plotted to murder the entire ministry (Green 1934: 784, 797-8).  Trade Unions were no longer illegal after 1824, and strikes followed. An Act of the following year made most such associations illegal conspiracy. However, in the 1830s Trade Unions were forming in great numbers - general and specific, male and female. Some were put down - the Tolpuddle Martyrs for example - and "the air was full of wild rumours of workers arming and drilling" (Morton 1945: 377, Green 1934: 807). There were minor property smashing riots throughout the Country by agricultural labourers in support of minimum wage rates for men. Many were condemned to transportation or death (Green 1934: 801-2).  The 1830s saw the formation of the Chartists who got together a petition of two million signatures for further electoral reform and universal male suffrage.  Some parts of the organization advocated violent means for obtaining the reform (ibid: 809). The 1840s saw the birth of workers co-operative societies which attempted to set up houses, education and manufactures independent of the bourgeoisie - colonies inside the home country based upon a sense of class (ibid: 811, 817). An act of 1871 made Trade Unions formally legal, but another act restricted strikes and pickets, this latter was partially repealed after agitation in 1875 (ibid: 824).  In 1899 75,000 dock workers went on strike and received widespread middle class support: "the general public... realised as most of them had not done before, that the whole fabric of commerce and industry rested on a foundation of ill-paid labour" (ibid: 833). 
	The first effective factory Act, in that provisions were made for its enforcement, and inspectors were appointed, was passed in 1833 in the same conditions as the first Reform Act.  An act limiting the working day to 10 hours for women and children was passed in 1844. This Act became invalid, due to a legal problem in 1850  These Acts only applied to certain industries, but were extended to all industries in 1867. However another Factory Act of 1890 had to, again, limit the hours of women's labour to twelve a day with one and a half hours for meals, and banned the labour of children under eleven in any workshop or factory (Green 1934: 833).  A series of workers compensation Acts, made it unnecessary for the employer to be found negligent for compensation for injury to be awarded, were passed between 1897-1900 (Green 1934: 834). These Acts could get passed because of divisions between those represented within the State.
	Marx, despite his occasional dismissal of the 19th Century British State as a bourgeois mechanism of government, shows these competing factions exercising restraint against each other in his chapter on the regulation of the working day (1954, chp X, section 6-7: 264ff.). Some capitalists seem to have wanted to prevent the systemic collapse that would have resulted from the destruction of labour produced by uninhibited exploitation of working people, some simply wanted uniform regulation to remove unfair competition (ibid: 229, 251, 276). Some wanted unlimited exploitation in keeping with the standard capitalist encroachment on worker's time.  In order to repeal the Corn Laws, which prevented imports when the price of grain fell below a certain price, capitalists attempted to win the support of the working class by promising factory reforms (ibid: 267).  They did not keep their promises, but the landed Gentry who had been hurt by the reappeal of the Corn Laws then helped pass the 1847 factory act, with provision for enforcement (ibid: 269).  The Factory inspectors, exposed the ways various capitalists had of avoiding the Acts, while portraying the often deadly conditions of the workers, and frequently prosecuted, even when instructed to ignore the offence (ibid: 230ff, 273).  
	The inspectors represent the British educated middle class, dependent on administrative machinery for their existence - their class position is ignored by Marx presumably to maintain his two class model. The inspectors gained their power, such that it was, through the State apparatus which gave them some independence and enabled them to conflict with reasonable success against the capitalists. Thus the improvement in working conditions was achieved through the gradual organisational categorization of the working class as a political and potentially revolutionary force, plus shifting alliances between members of a new middle class, the business class, and the aristocracy.

II.3: Education
	In this period Education was extended to cover more and more people - possibly to 'indoctrinate' people in support of the 'nation', and possibly to help people function peacefully within the State. In 1833 money was voted to the Treasury to erect school houses (Green 1934: 805).  1839 saw the increase of this budget, the appointment of a committee of the Privy Council to oversee elementary education, and the appointment of inspectors (ibid: 809). In 1870 a bill provided for the establishment of school boards all over the UK, and their support by local rates. Free Schools could be established in poor regions (ibid: 791, 822). 1876 Education made compulsory for children under 10 - who were no longer allowed to work. This was further extended in 1880  (ibid: 825). Prohibition of the employment of children under 10 had to be reinforced by the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1899.  Technical and manual instruction was founded by an act of 1899.  The following year evening 'continuation' schools were founded, and the year after free elementary school education was made law (ibid: 832-3). Again, much of the staffing of these schools and the agitation for extension of schooling came from alliances between working class and middle class (Bowen 1981: 281-314). Van Krieken quotes William Reese (1986) in relation to the history of schooling: 
Struggles for playgrounds, free breakfasts, social centers, and other welfare reforms as well as for fair community representation on the school board were an integral part of larger community activism by working-class, socialist, and neighbourhood interests hostile to business rule and centralised decision-making....school innovation and reform were produced by interaction, resistance, adaptation, and accommodation, with the power of capital clearly in a dominant though never unchallenged position. Liberals, Socialists, and business efficiency advocates all agreed that schools would be important social institutions in the twentieth century, and for that reason many of the period's most radical thinkers understood that public schools like other political institutions were contested ground (p.239).
II.4: Poor Law
The 1834 poor law was primarily directed at ensuring that those on relief were not better off than those that work: 
The Poor Law treated the claims of the poor, not as an integral part of the rights of the citizen, but as an alternative to them-as claims which could be met only if the claimants ceased to be citizens....   paupers forfeited in practice the civil right of personal liberty, by internment in the workhouse, and they forfeited by law any political rights they might possess (T. H. Marshall, q Riley 1992: 219, cf190-1). 
	However the Webbs were of the opinion that after 1834 "The Framework of Repression was replaced by the gradual building up of a new social structure, designed for the actual prevention of.. destitution" (1929: vi).
	With the new Century the middle and working classes began to agitate for the provision of 'essential services', such as sewerage and power, and proposed clear entitlement, as with the Age Pensions Act of 1908, and the National Insurance Act of 1916 (during the War), which proposed compulsory contributions to health, and unemployment insurance. It is sometimes alleged that the poor health of British recruits, when compared to the Germans, was a motivating factor in these reforms. 
	It is also possible to see the poor law reform, and Education Acts as attempts by the middle class to intervene in the lives of the working class and to remake them in their own image. Certainly much of the early legislation seems more interested in disciplining the victims of welfare than in freely helping them. Given the frameworks of such Acts, it is difficult not to see them, at least partially, as 'civilizing offensives' (Van Krieken 1997) directed at changing the values of those using the welfare system, and often using violence. As Van Krieken writes elsewhere:
the concrete institutions built up since the introduction of universal suffrage were not intended to expand the self-management and democratic, autonomous control of `the people' at all, but on the contrary to limit, channel and pre-define it as much as possible (1990: np). 
Middle class values were presumed to increase survival options. Nevertheless the discipline imposed by the social worker, was probably less harsh than that imposed by the charity, or the factory owner, and 'channelled' participation in the State is better than non. Frequent claims that the Welfare system functioned entirely as an apparatus of control, seem to ignore the demands of labour organizations for such a system, and the use made of it by its 'clients'. Users of the system do not seem to have been passive victims, but often seem to have actively sought interventions (Van Krieken 1991).
	Also the functions of the system may well have changed over time. Alber suggests that in the 19th Century poor relief centred primarily on maintaining a version of public order, towards the end of the century with increasing power of workers it became more focused on individual well-being or social insurance, while in the 1960s and 70s it became centred on providing quality of life (cf. McGrew 1992: 115-6).
	In the US the absence of an Aristocracy, perhaps weakened the power of the working class to ally against the capitalists. Alan Wolfe claims "The courts in the United States went out of their way, until 1937, to strike down laws that gave workers a leg to stand on in their struggle with capitalists" (1996: 156). However some reconsideration was brought by the Great Depression. The depression showed, conclusively (for a period), that economic equilibrium could bring about unemployment and idle plant.  Say's law that there could be no shortage of demand was wrong: it could be defeated by inequitable distribution of income, and hoarding by those who had income (Galbraith 1994: 72ff., 99). Attempts to solve the Depression by tax cuts produced no results (ibid:  78).
	Roosevelt, came to office in 1933 and inaugurated the New Deal which involved the "direct employment of the unemployed by the creation of jobs" (Galbraith 1994: 91). This, contradicted classical economics, but could be justified by Keynesian Economics (ibid: 97). Keynes argued that cutting wages would not reduce unemployment, but would tend to further depress spending and add to it (ibid: 99). A US Social Security Act was passed in 1935 which provided old age pensions, and unemployment benefits. This Act was objected to by business on the grounds of enslavement of the people and an impingement upon their liberty (Galbraith 1994: 94), just as had the Factory Acts of the UK. Heilbronner writes:
The New Deal had swept in on a way of antibusiness sentiment... the whole conception of 'business rights', 'property rights', and the 'role of government' was rudely shaken; within a few years business was asked to forget its traditions of unquestioned pre-eminence and to adopt a new philosophy of cooperation with labor unions, acceptance of new rules and regulations, reform of many of its practices (1967: 253).

II.5: The Welfare State in the UK 
	The extension of inclusion increased over the first part of the Century. This may partly have been to gain healthy bodies for mass warfare upon which the security of the 'nation state' depended. Also, the Labour Party and the Unions had become relatively integrated into the State, as a mass movement rather than a narrow class movement, with widespread middle class support. And partly, the spectre of communist revolution after the First World War, lead to attempts to further mitigate the harshness of capitalism.
	During the Second World War, in Britain, the State intervened heavily in the economy, and increased its provision of social welfare and the promise of social welfare.  Compulsory secondary education was "introduced with the stated purpose of equalizing the educational opportunities of children from different social classes" in 1944. Full employment, achieved in War, became proposed as a goal in peace (Riley 1992: 196, 215). The National Health Service, and income maintenance were introduced, immediately after the War (Sullivan 1987: 1, 4, 67-8). One time Conservative Prime Minister McMillan stated the aim was to create "a capitalism which incorporates socialism" (q Sullivan 1987: 6).  People returning from the war were offered university places which almost certainly would not have been available previously - as was also done in the US with the G.I. Bill.  There were vast increases in expenditure on universities, with academic ability becoming the sole official criteria for entrance, and comprehensive secondary schools were introduced with the aim of making secondary education more equitable (ibid: 2). 
	Sullivan writes "the State attempted, with some success, to incorporate previously hostile combatants as partners in the State (or quasi-State) machinery" (Sullivan 1987: 12, 38). It is this period to which commentators usually refer when they describe the State as containing or diffusing revolutionary potential, or as class compromise (cf McGrew 1992: 89-91). The Welfare State, by giving unemployment benefit to workers also helped increase their power, by actually making them free to shift from intolerable work, and making the prospect of strikes less financially devastating to them (Scott 1992: 130). 
	Recognition of interdependence between classes, and a more equitable balance of power, also changed the balance of wealth. At the beginning of the 20th Century the richest 1% of the British population owned 66% of all wealth, by 1972 this had declined to a mere 32% of all wealth. This development was not quite so pronounced in the US (Wilterdink 1995: 4-5).
	However problems remained as the aim of provision of individual care and enhancement clashed with social planning which used crude and general categories (Riley 1992: 202). The activities of the Welfare State while directed at both the middle and working classes, became perceived by many in the middle class as subsidies of the working class.  The training and benefits directed at them were not seen as welfare (Riley 1992: 203-4). Also the radical left's attack on Welfare as pro-capitalist discipline had weakened that section of the intellectual middle classes support for State action. Another problem arose in that there was an attempt to extend access to representation and 'civility', to marginal groups which were still marginal to much of the population.  Established groups with little power (say unskilled workers), perceived themselves as becoming less powerful than previously despised outsider groups (such as women, or homosexuals, or migrants).
	This disaffection could be mobilised. A rhetoric of an assault on the Welfare State was made by the Thatcher Government and the Reagan Presidency, as part of a response to the then settling economic crises of the 1970s. They argued that they wished to restore freedom from State interference - they did not portray the State as a balance of forces. As well as removing the State interference which guaranteed welfare and working conditions, the State intervened heavily in favour of employers through increased expenditure on security, the control of unions, attacking of demonstrators, and centralization of authority (Sullivan 1987: 24-7). The State, in other words, lost some of its dynamic balance, as policies were implemented which were expected to favour free enterprise. 
	One time Republican Party commentator Michael Lind writes that the 'overclass' "deliberately weaken unions, slash entitlements and raise taxes on working Americans - and... blames the results of pro-overclass policies on 'historical forces' which are usefully vague and even more usefully unstoppable" (1997: 39-40). 

II.6: A Digression on Elias and the 'Civilising Process'.
	Norbert Elias partly explains the apparent increase in integration between 'classes' in the State by the hypothesis of "lengthening chains of interdependence". Unfortunately the term interdependence implies mutuality, which is why I have often preferred the term 'coaction'. Interdependence both has to be observed and valued (or at least accepted) before it can have the effect claimed for it. For example, Eric Wolf has claimed the World has been 'interdependent' for a long time, without this being recognised. Protests against globalization often recognise interdependence but don't particularly value it. 
	Interdependence can become recognised, and lead to negotiation, when the power ratios approach equality, and it becomes clear that one side cannot survive without the others, or that the other side can take retaliatory action which is equally lethal. If the power ratios shift in favour of one particular group then interdependence is less of a barrier to the 'self interest' of the dominant group.  Thus for example, the East India Company, began as corrupt and self seeking but interested and respectful of Indians, but transformed, as it gained complete dominance, to emphasizing its differentiation from Indians (E.Wolfe 1982: 244).
	Van Krieken quotes Duerr, who argues that: as "the people in small, easy to survey 'traditional' societies were far more closely interwoven with the members of their own group than is the case with us today," this implies that "the direct social control to which people were subjected was more unavoidable and air-tight". Elias's invisible chains of interdependence free us from observation and hence lessen the need for self control (Van Krieken 1998: 122).  Van Krieken also quotes Burkitt who comments that "long networks of interdependence in society can lead to a loss of mutual identification", and that "sections of the population can then be persecuted, discriminated against, or even killed, while the central features of 'civilization' remain intact" (1997: np). These positions seem at least as logical as Elias'. Though 'lengthening chains of interdependence' refer to changes which may be important, its effects may be different in different circumstances. 
	Lengthening chains of interdependence, growth in monopolisation of violence by the State, together with the ideas that restraint changed in form from being externally based to internally based while becoming stronger, forms what Elias unfortunately called the 'civilising process'.  This term is not used here because, whether or not he intended it, it is evaluative. It suggests: linear development (either civilizing or decivilizing process being dominant), uniformity, teleology, that the later is better than its predecessors etc; while neglecting the violence of the 'civilized' State towards outsiders in the name of 'civilization', and implying that people in non-State societies have no forms of self control. The term also tends to abstract what is a set of correlates into an overriding thing with real referents, and reinforces the idea that the process has concrete existence and must continue.  However the existence of a set of trends does not necessarily imply a single trend which must continue - nor that everything that occurs is either an example of this trend or in opposition to it. Elias, himself, recognises 'civilising' and 'de-civilising' processes as simultaneous (Van Krieken 1998: 70). 
	As this series of correlations is treated as a thing-in-itself, then followers of Elias, rather than considering that some aspects of life are similar in 'style' to others or not, or how patterns of feedback interact between aspects of life, often tend to consider their data as examples of, or delays of, this overriding civilising process. 
	Elias was clearly aware of violence in modern societies but, because of his commitment to the 'fact' of the 'civilising process', often writes of it as regression. For example he describes Nazism as "a regression to barbarism" and "a genuine recrudescence of barbarism" (1996: 308, 314). The Holocaust, "appears to be a throwback to the barbarism and savagery of earlier times" (1996: 302). This conflicts with his remarks that the Holocaust "does not appear to be out of place in highly technized mass societies" (ibid: 303). It required mass identification, trains, timetables, regimentation, and concepts of efficiency. Likewise it would seem unlikely that the central authority of the German State was weakened, or the chains of Interdependence shortened, which we might expect in an 'anti-civilising' process. Furthermore, he describes other developments within German Society which also prepared the way for Nazism, and which demonstrate it was not a 'return' but a 'development'. 
	Van Krieken (1997) deals with the violence done in the name of a civilizing process in 20th Century Australia, writing  "What remains unexplored, however, is the extent to which 'civilizing offensives', the self-conscious attempts to bring about 'civilization', have revolved around essentially violent policies and practices".  Another possible reason for Elias' problems here, is his dismissal of planning as a social force (1978: 146). The legitimate argument that actions carried out from plans frequently have unforseen results, is used to dismiss the study of planning all together - yet as Van Krieken implies the actions of the Australian State, as impinging on Australian Aborigines, resulted precisely from planning an offensive in the name of civilisation. Similarly the Welfare State arose from planning even if its actual results differed from those expected, and this aspect of its formation cannot be ignored.
	There is no evidence that Barbarism and Civilization are useful analytic categories - they simply confuse the issues. Consequently it is possible, and less misleading, to dismiss the terms altogether, and examine how aspects of life work in relation to each other, and in some sense this could be truer to Elias' insights.  

II.7: Trends in Informality and Self Control: Democratization and Etiquettes
	Elias argues that a successful 'Parliamentary regime' requires the suppression of physical violence between participants, and an increase in their restraint levels, to allow peaceful dispute and change of power (Elias & Dunning 1993: 27-40, 171-4.). We might add the rider, that perhaps this continues only as long as the peaceful dispute does not completely change the power of the dominant system, and the groups involved recognise their interdependence. 
	During this 200 year period, and particularly after WWI, those aristocrats who were unable to affiliate themselves with the business world, became significantly weakened (cf Galbraith 1994: 10-17). Claims of virtue based on birth lost legitimacy. 
	In the AAA world 'democratization', spread within small groups such as the family, small scale organisations, while (after the 1970s in particular) also apparently being felt to diminish at the macro level. For example, though gender still represents difference, the types of power, access to power, and modes of deference associated with gender have become more similar over this period. Likewise middle class parents have diminished the tendency to use arbitrary parental authority and violence, and apparently give more heed to the expressed opinions of their children (Elias 1996: 24-5, 1998: 208, also this Appendix # XVIII). This change in explicit hierarchy correlates with the feeling that formal deference behaviour is not as relevant as previously, and (given mobility) it is harder to enforce by those who previously received deference. Elias also mentions that in regimes of aristocratic formality, informality within the group could be greater than is currently common, and writes of a formality/informality gradient (1996: 28-9). He summarises by writing: "The tendency [nowadays]... is towards the same behaviour in all situations" (1996: 29). 
	This sameness of behaviour, attempts to represent a truth, an authenticity, or openness which is itself compulsory, yet requires great control over certain behaviours and feelings (Brinkgreve 1982: 52-3). These restraints are supposed to be mutual, irrespective of status difference (Wouters 1990: 69). Wouters argues that, particularly after WWII:
the social codes increasingly came to dictate the avoidance of inferiority and superiority feelings. Thus, there was a further curbing of emotions in relation to the display of arrogance or self-aggrandisement.... Displaying such feelings would increasingly provoke moral indignation and shame, and thus seriously damage one's status and self-esteem (Wouters1997a:  np).
Wouters also writes: 
many people may not even experience or recognize any constraint, as it is a constraint to be unconstrained. As status competition intensified and the art of obliging and being obliged became more important as a power resource, demonstrations of being intimately trustworthy while perfectly at ease also gained in importance....  Thus, the rise in public or anonymous intimacy - part of increasing emotional and behavioural alternatives - ran in tandem with rising demands on emotion management (Wouters 1995: np). 
	This kind of balance required (or selected for) a relatively controlled personality style, able to negotiate, compromise and to avoid giving offence to an extended range of ingroup members. Towards the end of the century, this kind of style uneasily coexists with a more impulsive style (able to live on credit and impulse buy), which also indicates its truth through aggressive authenticity, and with a more extensive range of outgroup categorization. It might also be suggested that the more Corporatism becomes dominant, the less those who support it need to regard the feelings of their opposition.  Problems arising from authenticity are discussed at various times in the thesis.

III: Unstoppable Change(?) and The Discourse of Futurity
	Writings about computers and "the information revolution" tend to explain things as they are now by reference to an imagined future. Toffler might be among the earliest people to make this futurity an explicit methodological principle, writing: 
Previously, men studied the past to shed light upon the present. I have turned the time mirror around, convinced that a coherent image of the future can also shower us with valuable insights into today (1970: 5).  
It appears people have come to perceive that computers and their connectivity represent a new determining and active teleology. Our present takes its meaning with respect to an imaginary future - either a future we fear or desire. Discourse about current society has become millenarian or apocalyptic.  Either society is heading towards a miraculous future of perfectly free disembodied 'spirits' living in a world of perfect dissemination and freedom, or the World is headed for (usually ecological) catastrophe, guided by out of control computers manned by people living disconnected and cocooned half-lives.  Many have pointed out that this discourse of futurity mystifies the fact of capitalist and military decision making, and allows the casting of opposition as retrograde, stupid or impossible (ie Sophia 1993: 56ff., 68). Like most other people I have found it extremely difficult to avoid slipping into 'predictive mode' to explain the present. 
	Many writers display a perception of out of control or unstoppable change. Current developments are constantly explained by what is still to happen. Any stability will not last long. Institutions which once promised support to people (from the family to the State), are perceived as becoming less certain.  In the AAA world the State, and other institutions of power are often seen as no longer representative - even if they never were representative. 
	Toffler's writing is a good example of this vague determinism, and its hostility to criticism of change - "a new civilisation is emerging... and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it" (Toffler 1980: 25). The analogy he uses is that of a wave which carries "us", and which collides with other waves to form the patterns we observe (ibid: 29-31). Basically the "First Wave" consisted of societies organised around agriculture, the "Second Wave" of societies organised around industrial production and the "Third Wave" is a society built upon electronic information technologies. Though Toffler does not emphasise it, and in most readings of him he is made a technological determinist (cf Webster 1995: 9), these 'waves' are, in his opinion, not determined by the economic or technical base, but are "chain[s] of associated changes that reinforce each other" (Toffler 1984: 203). Second Wave societies tend towards large scale activity, centralisation, bureaucracy and mass production, while Third Wave societies supposedly tend towards low hierarchies, localisation and individual tailoring of consumption - things are both widely integrated and small scale. There is, he claims, a series of processes in the change from a Second Wave society to a Third Wave society which involve: a shift away from fossil fuels; from mass industrial production towards 'de-massified' information based customised production and distribution; a shift away from the nuclear family to a multi-form family; a shift from bureaucracy to informal, diverse and changing administrative units ('ad-hocracy'); and from mass media to de-massified (relatively small audience) media with large varieties of different media and modes of transmission (1984: 88). For Toffler the tendency of the Third Wave is to usher in a society of individualism, freedom, equality of power and variety. This is not how it appears to many.

IV: Dispersions and Concentration - Local and Global Interact
	A commonly perceived conflict arising in "Third Wave Societies' is that between local identities and the Globalised, or non-local tendencies, of Capitalism. Globalization, or 'international competition', is frequently cited by politicians and business people as inevitably leading to the winding back of middle and working class people's conditions and wages, and the increase of their own. Globalization is not only an analytic category but a term in popular discourse and frequently joined with other such terms as 'information society', 'information economy' or by a reference to a 'technological revolution' of some sort or other - often a 'communication revolution'.  As the world situation is under constant analysis at all levels it is impossible to differentiate analytic and popular narronomas about the processes affecting the world today. However it will be apposite to both draw attention to those who query the absolute nature of the Global/Local split, and to situate the claim of that split within a particular discourse where it is almost inevitably used to make the local subject to corporate power.
	Toffler argues that both globalization and decentralisation occurs simultaneously in corporations, and might be symptomatic of a wider process. However, contra to Toffler, it is not necessarily the case that electronic communication has caused this tendency - it might merely have exaggerated it. Decentralisation or localisation may be, in some cases, illusory and in other cases reactive or defensive.
	An example arises from the 'mass-media'. At the same time as media ownership becomes more concentrated and the number of journalists and independent newspapers declines (McChesney 1998: 18, Jensen 1996: 321), it is also possible for an increase in certain types of diversity. People do not all have to read the same newspapers or watch the same TV programmes, smaller and smaller niche markets can be catered for - largely due to the cheapness of computer production and distribution of print and video etc. Populations which have migrated find it relatively much easier to maintain ties with their countries of origin than previously while it is also possible to read or watch news that concerns only one's locale. At the same time this could lead to marginalisation of difference - "minority" news only has to be reported in minority publications leaving everyone else ignorant and leading, perhaps, to less communication between exclusive groupings. It becomes theoretically possible for a person to opt out from hearing different points of view, or for them to never receive reports which might cause discomfort.
	Alliances can be formed which are not limited by factors of contiguity. Anyone who can afford a modem and a phone connection (which is a very small proportion of the Earth's population) can link up with people of similar interests, and perhaps only with people of similar interests. How much political or social pressure these groups could exert is problematic (especially if the lack of cohesion among knowledge workers thesis is correct), but nevertheless of interest to security agencies as we shall see later.
	Giddens argues this process of globilization and decentralisation, or "extension" and "intension" as he terms it, has become a feature of personal life. Not only can the effect of events at distance be related to the personal (such as a connection between a reactor accident in Ukraine and one's children), but the number of relationships of constructed, rather than accepted, trust are increased (1990: 121, 123). The expansion of both news about the world and of personal real-time contacts throughout the world, is more important in bridging the gap between distant reactor events and one's children, than the event itself. Without particular social uses of technology this would not happen. If personal tailoring of interests became dominant it might diminish. Internet based communications groups could be the most extreme form of such communicative groupings, with their problems of building trust, and the possible constant bringing of foreign (personal and national) events into the lives of others - while at the same time allowing us to find only those we agree with, or appear similar too. 
	Castells makes a complex argument on these themes, but he distinguishes between those who inhabit the global 'space of flows' and those who inhabit the local 'space of places'. Or as he writes "elites are cosmopolitan, people are local" (1996: 415).  Elites form their own society "the space of flows is made up of personal micro-networks that project their interests in functional macro-networks" (ibid: 416).  Hence the construction of a relatively secluded and uniform space along the space of flows in the form of international hotels, VIP lounges, SPA installations etc. (ibid: 417).  
	According to Castells flows are the expression of processes dominating social life. They are 
purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors... The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows (ibid: 412). 
Flows may isolate places, even whole continents (such as Africa), or destroy their local character or experience, through imperception. Communication between the space of flows and the space of places may end. They may become parallel universes whose times cannot meet (ibid: 428). There may no longer be a capitalist class but a network which determines economies and societies "a faceless collective capitalist, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks" (ibid: 474). "At its core, capital is global.  As a rule, labour is local" (ibid: 475). However the lack of flows dependence upon places, and places using flows, is more asserted than proven.
	The most dramatic version of this concentration/dispersion narronoma is the Jihad and McWorld thesis of political scientist Benjamin Barber (1996). In some ways this is an unfortunate use of terms as Barber's 'jihad' has nothing to do with Islam as such. To Barber the forces of 'wild capitalism' (homogeneity and universal unregulated markets - spread and coordinated by innovations in communication technology - which reduce freedom to consumer choice, and which fragment 'community'), are intimately bound up with process of rejection; of localised tribalisms and frustration generating into violence - often based in religion, or ideologies of 'blood'. These rejections themselves often make use of the information technologies at the heart of the spread of modern capitalism so that Jihad arises via McWorld. Modern localism depends on Globalism and vice versa.  Barber comments "neither  Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future... the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggests new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny" (ibid: 220).

V.1: The Military History of Living Conditions
	After the Second World War, the balance of power in the world shifted. The US became the dominant force in the West, and countries that had existed almost entirely as a result of European Commerce and imperialism became independent, if unstable, entities - often through costly guerrilla style warfare or the threat of such. Indeed it looked possible, through playing off the presence of Communist States, that many countries might avoid the dominance of the West altogether (Toffler 1980: 107). 
	Though the largest Communist and Capitalist States avoided direct warfare, partly because of the threat of mutual destruction after 1953, both sides intervened heavily in the affairs of other countries, whether through provision of non-nuclear weaponry, loans or economic aid, or by direct military action. This perception of the world as the subject of a vast struggle between two camps possibly contributed to the rise in living conditions and the provisions of social security in capitalist economies, as a deliberate attempt to lessen the appeal of a 'worker's revolution'. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of European communism has rendered the provision of these conditions less urgent. This is not to suggest conspiracy but to suggest a perception of common category that arose through the construction of a hostile other.
	Furthermore, in the conditions of the Cold War, some States may have encouraged Capitalist globalization as they considered it would lead to an increase in their global dominance. Thus David Rothkopf of Kissinger Associates said: "For the United States, a central objective of an Information Age foreign policy must be to win the battle of the world's information flows, dominating the airwaves as Great Britain once ruled the seas" (q D.Schiller 1999: 81). A Similar thrust is shown in US Vice President Al Gore's well known "information superhighway" speeches in which it is claimed that America must maintain corporate leadership and world dominance, by improving the Internet.

V.2: Military Computing
	Because of the actual size of the military front it became vitally important to guarantee speed and accuracy of communication in both conventional and nuclear war.  Computers were developed within the amalgamation between organised science and the military which occurred during the Second World War, and which has continued ever since. After the war, the US corporate sector also benefited from Military research subsidies. Personnel flowed easily between academia, corporation, research organisation and the Department of Defense (Norberg & O'Neil 1996: 289, 26). The first computer networks were built for the SAGE 'defense' system by IBM which became a computer company as a result (Lubar 1993: 315). "America's clear technological edge in warfare sprang, in good measure, from the fact that the Defense department spends nearly $40 billion annually to conduct or contract out defense related R & D" (Toffler 1993: 142). 
	The Internet (originally the ARPANET), was built to allow 'time sharing' to cut down the expense of duplicating military research on software, and based upon an abandoned design for a decentralised communication and coordination system which could survive the destruction of various nodes in nuclear war (Hafner & Lyon 1996: passim, Hardy 1996). Military imperatives led to a generalised control protocol which could be used in satellites, radio and computers (Hafner & Lyon 1996: 222, 228, 236, Salus 1995: 99-102, Cerf nd). This makes it useful to any organisation seeking to coordinate widespread activities.
	According to Toffler since the 1970s there has been a gradual change in the ideology of warfare, in computerised countries, from mass industrial warfare with carpet bombing, huge numbers of troops and equipment, to precision bombing of selected targets. One general explained it to him (borrowing his "Third Wave" terminology), as moving "toward the de-massification of DE-struction" (1993: 72-3). It may be disputed that the Gulf War was largely fought in this manner, but certainly the images marketed through the reporting of it were (Toffler 1993: 166-175, see Wilson's criticism of Toffler's earlier "ode to mass murder", Wilson 1994: 249-55). There was little room for sympathy with the civilian enemy or mention of the troops buried alive in the sand by bulldozers. Baudrillard's thesis (1995) that the difference between the images and what happened was so extreme that the "gulf war did not take place", is well known. The war was imagined and portrayed like a video game, with few casualties and repeated shots of the same high-tech missiles hitting the same inanimate targets. As shall be shown (#XVI.2), the military consider this 'new warfare' has rendered the Nation State considerably less secure, leading to an increase in their need for surveillance and disinformation.

VI.1: Growth of Corporate Computing
	After WWII corporations increased in size until, in the late 1960's and early '70s, the public became aware of the "multi national corporation". As their geographical spread and size was increased, corporations needed improved methods of communication and record keeping to coordinate their activities at all levels. Computers became common tools in this environment and they were applied the already familiar methods of management and control. Computers were used for filing, working out timetables, keeping accounts, keeping track of inventories, and to further expand the control of robotic assembly lines which allowed corporations to shed their human workers, and lower their dependence on the workforce. Corporations found it useful to be able to call upon speedy and widely distributed funds transfer. The computerised technology to make this possible was available, implemented and improved, as fast as it was for the military, and for much the same reasons of dominance and extension. Investment in this area increased rapidly: "By 1992 capital investment in information technology was nearly $25 billion higher than traditional industrial capital investment and pulling away fast" (Burstein & Kline 1995: 274. See also D.Schiller 1999: 14). 
	Even by the mid sixties, corporate use of computer networks was significant. A Federal Communications Commission inquiry which began in 1966 was informed that the number of non defence Computer Systems had risen from 91 in 1953 to more than 35,000 in 1966, and that more than 2,000 online systems were in use with more than 45,000 data terminals (D. Schiller 1982: 22).  The International Communications Association, in 1980, submitted to the FCC that "international telecommunications provides the pipeline which enables US industry to extend its enterprise to the vast world markets" (q D.Schiller 1982: 99 cf "Business Week" 1985). 
	Volume of cheque transactions lead to the establishment, in 1970, of another computer network - the Clearing House Interlink Payment system. It replaced carrying cheques between banks by messenger, handled deposits and payments electronically and made credit card services easier to manage. The system received sustaining support from the US Government which used it to pay employees and to make social security payments (Ernst 1985: 339-40). 
	The first commercial packet switching Network (using the technology used on the ARPANET) was Packet Communications Inc. Founded in 1973, by ex-employees of BBN (one of the companies involved in building the ARPANET), it went out of business in 1975. BBN's own venture Telenet, under the direction of former director of IPTO Lawrence Roberts, was licensed in 1974 and five years later merged with the General Telephone and Electronics Corporation (GTE) (Salus 1995: 107-8, D.Schiller 1982: 53).
	Among the earliest users of packet switching carriers were Lockheed, System Development Corporation and the National Library of Medicine. Other corporations developed their own private packet networks, and by 1980 more than 500 organizations used some kind of packet switching network - almost 4 times as many as used the ARPANET at that time.  The president of a communication firm recommended in 1981 that companies paying more than $100,000 per month on telecommunications should install their own packet networks (D.Schiller 1982: 54). By 1980 Toffler was also celebrating the prevalence of in-house electronic mail systems (1980: 206, 269).

VI.2: Computing and Corporate Agglomeration
	In the 1980s, US firms merged and took each other over to an extent previously unparalleled in US history - "in a single four year period the maximum size of these mergers increased more than five times". This merging occurred across national boundaries (Toffler 1990: 218-19). By 1988 about 600 corporations accounted for one fifth of the total "value added in agriculture and industrial production in the world" (ibid: 460), and by 1993 Toffler could write that a quarter of the world's trade occurred between subsidiaries of the same corporation (Toffler 1993: 244). Seventy corporations were responsible for over a half of global sales, and the revenues of the worlds 200 largest companies increased tenfold between the mid seventies and the 1990s (Giddens 1993: 543). Huge mergers, collaborations or attempted mergers, have not ceased during the 1990s, particularly among financial institutions (the Citicorp/Travellers merger of early 1998), communication companies (the AT&T/British Telecom deal of mid 1998), and Information Technology companies (the AOL/Compuserve takeover, followed by the AOL/Sun/Netscape collaboration, followed by the AOL takeover of Time Warner; and the IBM/Dell collaboration).
	Corporations, with such assets and turnover, almost became nations in their own right, with cash flows and income that exceeded those of many more orthodox nations. Giddens states "one half of the hundred largest economic units in the world are nations, the other half are transnational corporations" (1993: 543). This situation will not have changed in favour of States since then. Toffler even suggested that certain Corporations should have chairs at the UN (Toffler 1990: 463). 
	Corporate size and globalism reinforce each other. Bartholomeusz writes:
The globalisation of financial markets has produced financial institutions which increasingly invest on a global basis... Those institutions want to invest in companies of global size and scope, with big market capitalisations and deep liquidity in their shares. They reward companies that have those attributes. That produces a circular relationship where companies that can attract global capital gain access to capital on terms that enables them to continuously improve their competitiveness relative to those [non global firms] who can't attract that capital (SMH 30 Nov.99: 25).
	Effective size and power also increase from the tendency to form 'strategic alliances' between corporations when a particular sector of their business interests agree. Peter van Hoogstraten of Royal PTT said; "different industries are interweaving and creating new forms of conglomerates in which communications play the central role" (q Brown 1997: 81).  This joins with the rise of what Giddens calls "Institutional Capitalism", where shares are not held by wealthy individuals but by other corporations who, as a result, are: 
concerned not only with decision making within single firms, but also with the development of corporate power outside... It is marked by the increasing significance of collaboration between corporate leaders from different companies (1993: 502-3). 
Supposed competitors may own large shareholdings of each other, which renders competition problematic (McChesney 1998: 18). The economically powerful now have explicit interests in common and a bigger sphere in which to act. It is probable they are more powerful than ever in their ability to affect the world, and dominate within the State, and there is no evidence that their power is in decline. 

VI.3: The Theory of Level Corporations
	Toffler argues that corporations will not become the dominant political force in the world because Third Wave society moves towards decentralisation and dispersal. In 1980 he wrote of Corporations changing their structures to have temporary sections, teams and project bosses, and argued that local economies were becoming distinct, making it harder to implement universal solutions. Such factors are held to put hierarchical organisation at a disadvantage (1980: 276-80, 343). In 1990 he claimed that Third Wave companies need innovative workers who are less amenable to discipline and that this will result in power sharing and a more level organisation (1990; 209-12). That small players do better in the new economic environment is presumably not a belief shared by those companies engaged in 'mega-mergers'. I shall argue later, that concentration of assets and monies, or startling innovation in a previously untouched field, enables dominance of markets, and without dominance a corporation's future in that market is limited.
	Though it may not be possible to guess the future accurately, advocates of the success of "level organisations" or "molecularization", to use business writer Don Tapscott's term, seem to be forgetting the effects of existent power differentials. In the AAA world, those with greater power justify their power in terms of their knowledge and skills, which pre-suppose a better access to 'important' information than those they command. As Schiller points out networks do not necessarily 'democratize' corporate hierarchies: different classes of employees usually have differential access and security clearance and 'lower class' employee email and computer use can be monitored (D.Schiller 1999: 19).With the growing divisions in salary, and unification amongst the economic elite, it seems unlikely they would implement a strategy calling these divisions into question, and they might try and prevent it from happening elsewhere. Corporations do not just 'compete' within the market place, but in the Courts, and within the State. Even if Toffler is right and "mass production is replaced by its opposite: de-massified production - short runs, even customized, one-by-one production" (1984: 14), this does not mean that corporations will not exert control on these processes, or that a larger number of corporations will be involved. In the software industries mass production reaches its apogee. People purchase identical copies of Windows 95, or Word or Word Perfect. These are not made by companies that do 'one off production'. Any individuality in the product comes from the customer configuring it themselves, and what they can do is limited. 
	Even if corporations become less hierarchical, that is no guarantee there will not be radical disjunctions in power or wealth within the remaining hierarchy, or that they will not be able to exercise power on those outside successfully. With computerised communication, it is now possible to centralise gathering of data and decision making. Distance or speed is no longer an effective limit to authority. The inertias and invisibilities which allowed low level bureaucrats discretion and some freedom of action are gone. A low hierarchy can be more rigorously controlled. Systemic uniformity and continuous accountability, with the demands of software over-riding the customs of place, is in theory possible and, to the corporation, desirable (Brown 1997: 66). With uniform software throughout the company the possibility of local adaptation decreases, and perhaps leads to frictions with local society. With such centralisation of control it is, at the same time as talking of the 'information society', possible to talk of the 'surveillance society' (Lyon 1994). 

VII.1: The New Information Economy
	According to one story, Capital is no longer an exchange of goods but has itself become symbolic - a matter of constantly shifting electronic digits (Toffler 1990: 62). Though this neglects the continuing importance of industrial manufacture and mass production, industry, in the popular view, is now tending to shift from the West to areas of cheap and frequently repressed labour. Industry is frequently seen as subsidiary to the play of its profits in financial markets, rather than in reinvestment.
	Electronification of money has changed the nature of the economy. It becomes easier to loan money that you do not have, hide money from others and transfer money surreptitiously - making attempts at internal and external surveillance more likely. It also appears to encourage the transfer of capital from long term research, production and labour to short term speculative transactions in currency, futures and shares, as this is where the greatest profit can be made in the shortest period of time.  These transactions can involve vast amounts of money and exceedingly few people. There is no longer any direct connection between wealth and production, or between the wealthy and a labouring class. The speed of such transactions means they are partially controlled by Artificial Intelligence programmes, and at least one stock market crash (1987) may have been bought about by this.  Such programs may not judge the worth or reliability of the company but simply the patterns of trade, severing any connection between the 'moral virtues' of capitalism and company survival.
	Such an economy has frequently been labelled an "Information Economy". Although Toffler did not originate this conception, he gave it popular form.  More recently he has argued that it is now the knowledge of how to do something which is economically important, rather than owning or controlling the means of implementing this knowledge. 
	Technology to do with communication, has long been a part of the ethos of Western societies, and usually been hailed as either revolutionary and universally beneficial (Lubar 1993: 9-10), or as the harbinger of disaster and object of fear. This has been the case with books, the telegraph, the railroad, the telephone, radio, television and now the computer. Perhaps it is this traditional set of extreme expectations about communication technology that is definitional of Western "information society"?
	Information will become available and distributed to the extent (and only to the extent) that it is economically viable or appealing. Information may also be restricted due to 'economic' imperatives as well. The information you can obtain depends upon your economic position, which then reinforces that position and the position of your children.
	An important group supporting the propagation of the information society narronoma is the Progress and Freedom Foundation, (which supports Newt Gingrich and has a large corporate membership). Though this organisation (in its "Magna Carta for Cyberspace") supports the idea of the "immateriality" of the modern economy, it is also fairly determined that the material substrata should belong to its corporate members. 
	Stock markets also follow this kind of position and overvalue "information" stock despite poor revenues. Thus Microsoft's income for 1995 was $5.9 billion and Wall Street valued its stock at $60.8 billion. For comparison General Motors had 28 times the revenue and its stock value was one third less.  Kmart had revenues more than 5 times greater than Microsoft and was valued at less than a twelfth (Hacker 1997: 97-8). Microsoft also does not pay dividends to share owners, as these other companies do, so the shares have no intrinsic value (Australian 29 Jul.97: 58). The Internet bookstore Amazon.com had a sharemarket value of $8 billion in late 1998, while never having made a profit, and losing up to $45 million per quarter (SMH 1 Dec.98 IT: 1c, 6c). Soon after, Amazon became valued on the stockmarket as "worth more than the entire US bookselling industry, and with a market capitalization of $US 29 billion is even worth more than the retailing giant Sears, and Wall Street's largest securities broker and investment bank, the global Merrill Lynch". As Amazon announced loses would increase the share price increased (SMH 16 Jan.99: 40). A study originating from the finance department of Perdu University reportedly showed that by adding "web- designations such as '.com', '.net', or the word 'Internet', companies shares gained 125 per cent more than those of their peers [who did not make this change]" (SMH 17 Aug.99: 24).
	Such share prices further demonstrate the severance of wealth from production.

VII.2: Problems of 'Information' and its Regulation
	There are many problems with the concept of information itself. One is that clearly the term is being used for many different things with very different applications.  Information is seen as a cultural artefact, useful instructions, data about anything, fiction, plans, and so on. However, as Jacques Vallee points out, data does not become information, or become useful, outside of a purpose, and it is the purpose that creates value (1982: 46). Thus in Research and Development departments it tends to be 'product' that is valued, whereas it could be possible to argue that Research and Development are different tasks, only the second of which is always about 'product' (Johnson 1996). Such a valuation of the end product causes problems in the valuation of the traditional research activities of Universities, which now have to be geared to a product valued in 'rational economic' terms. 
	This term 'information' elides questions about differences in information exchanged. Is there a difference between scientific research, financial planning, design specs for a product, a novel, PR or 'spin', military 'disinformation', painting, sports 'trivia' or whatever? It might be argued that in AAA society these things are considered equivalent. That the move to evaluate all things by how much people or organisations are prepared to pay for them, turns information into "product" which is valued by its "appeal" rather than by its "accuracy. Information becomes subject to the normal 'laws' of capitalism, and a University can be worth less than a tabloid newspaper, if it makes less money.
	The concept of information also marks a problem in classical economics, where perfect information supposedly determines the functioning of the market but, particularly in an information economy, information itself becomes a good which provides direction in a market and thus becomes valuable and no longer evenly distributed. Toffler argues that information is a difficult concept for capitalist economic theory because information is a potentially unlimited resource unlike labour, capital or land. A person's stock of information is not reduced by another possessing it and information is not consumed and destroyed, but is generative (1984: 21-2). Furthermore information is often easily and cheaply replicable.
	Capitalism has tried to deal with the latter problem by creating information scarcity via patenting or copyright, or through other means of hindering information exchange or reproduction - otherwise the Corporation could no longer profit from its sale. Thus in the US in December 1997 the "no electronic theft act" made it a criminal offences to distribute or possess copies of online copyright material for profit or otherwise, so it is possible that previous "fair-use" provisions were abolished. In mid 1998 the US Congress extended copyright protection for corporations to 95 years (D.Schiller 1999: 78). Lester Thurow writes that: "the days of the low-cost sharing of private knowledge are over" and:
The Industrial Revolution began with an enclosure movement that abolished common land in England.  The world now needs a socially managed enclosure movement for intellectual property rights or it will witness a scramble among the powerful to grab valuable pieces of intellectual property, just as the powerful grabbed the common lands of England three centuries ago (q D.Schiller 1999: 77).
	This extension of copyright clashes with the ethos of free exchange of information that grew up on the Internet when there were large sections of traffic outside Corporate influence. It also clashes with the easy exchange of solutions to technical problems which allowed the Net's construction (King et al 1997: 26ff., D.Schiller 1999: 10).  Many 'original' denizens of the Internet objected strongly, though without effect, to this kind of commercial incursion, and are currently championing 'open source' software as part of this 'tradition' of free exchange. 
	In software, where the information economy model is perhaps the most accurate, companies with a large market share must continually revise and complicate their software if they do not wish to be overtaken by someone with a similar product, or for their market to be filled with illegal copies - hence the continual upgrades of Netscape the promotion around Windows 95, or the efforts of some companies to destroy the use of widespread format conventions, such as rtf files or javascript, by making their own incompatible versions. If a dominant company can convince people that a new product is soon to be released then it will also tend to slow sales of lesser used products by rivals.
	However it also affects other product oriented research. Courts have granted copyright to the discoverers of naturally occurring genes and viruses. In a recent case (1996) in Australia the company who's researchers discovered the Hepatitis C virus and which produces tests for that virus went to court to prevent another company from releasing cheaper and different tests for the same virus on the grounds that they have copyright on the virus. Their main justification seemed to be that they thought it would not be economic to do research if they could not copyright what they discovered.
	Another problem arising from the ownership of information is the question of who owns such information as phone numbers, or information about shopping patterns? It appears 'average people' do not own information about themselves. It might be possible to suggest a division between those who can successfully prevent the 'radiation' of information about themselves, those who depend upon the radiation of selected information about themselves, and those who have no control at all.

VIII.1: Speed, Capital and Success
	Toffler argues that eventually a division occurs between economies of great speed (with short production delays, instant fulfilment of orders etc.) and slow economies. Slow economies cannot provide for the variations demanded by fast economies, whereas fast economies can provide goods for slow economies. Slow economies also tend to be more vulnerable to variation in prices due to stockpiling of goods - therefore the wealth accumulates with the fast (Toffler 1990: 397-99, 1993: 23). Joining wealth and speed produces positive feedback. Wealth allows the use of faster computers and programs, and even tiny differences in speed on currency and derivatives markets can make fortunes. Automation can also be faster and eventually cheaper than labour, which diminishes the number of people required in this economy and leads to accumulation of wealth among particular groups. However with no stockpiling, fast economies might be more subject to crisis in unexpected shortages, and have less resilience (cf Brown 1997: 203-4).
	The importance of speed to success fuels demand for faster communications, fibre optics, computer networks and so on (Toffler 1990: 407, 1993: 62). It also stimulates requirements for a workforce which can be dismissed in times of slack activity and hired quickly when activity picks up.

VIII.2: Personal Computers or Networks: Systems and Standards
	Toffler predicted in 1980, when small computers were just taking off (the IBM PC appeared in 1981), that the appearance of these machines would change the relationship of users to computers. Previously computer power had to be centralised, and was ruled by a technical class who controlled access and priorities, now it could be run by anyone - the power of the technicians was diminished. This was evidence of another movement towards decentralisation (1980: 185). This movement also changed the nature of software - which had to become more 'user friendly' to non-technicians. Nowadays this is perhaps being countermanded by Network Computers, which do not function outside of a centralised network, and which have been promoted as allowing greater control over the software used by workers. People can be prevented from playing computer games on company time, fewer workers have to know how to configure their machines etc.. 
	Probably one of the most important decisions in the flow of computing to a mass audience was the decision by IBM to allow people to build cheap copies of their personal computers. This defacto hardware standard while, in the short term at least, deleterious to IBM, as people refused to buy their more expensive machines, also made software standards more important. There were now no major hardware incompatibilities to prevent people using similar software on different machines. More people could understand the systems, it was easier to transfer people between computers, and it was both quicker and easier to teach competence. It produced a deskilling of computer work and lowered the cost of this work by making it more widespread.
	Most products are part of a system, so companies fight over standards, partly to persuade people who purchase part of a system to keep within that system, and partly to gain a time lead over their competition and the ability to charge royalties to those who decide to use, or add to, their established system (Toffler 1990: 130). The volume of the adoption of a system can make that system become more attractive as more products are made for it. During the construction of the Internet the EU, the US, Japanese and various Corporations all fought to make their particular standards universal. The struggle continues in the war between Microsoft and Netscape for control of dominance in net browser technology, and in Netscape's recent (1997) support for 'Network Computers' running Sun software rather than PCs running Microsoft software.
	Uniformity in software leads to political and commercial problems. Such goods have become cheaper and easier to reproduce, and people (particularly in poorer countries) find that purchasing the goods they need is prohibitive compared to the cost of replicating it. As a result the US threatens trade wars against Asian countries such as Thailand. While accepting human rights violations in China, the US threatens to revoke Chinese trade privileges over copyright (Toffler 1990: 329-30, 469). It appears corporations still need States to enforce the laws that make their operations possible, That States appear not to use this leverage is interesting.

IX: Information Theft, and Surveillance
	If information is important, then stealing, or otherwise uncovering information (not just plans, or replications of a product but also information about people), becomes even more economically important. Such information can allow adaptation to developments, pre-emption of developments, discovery of weakness, sabotage, real pricing and so on. This almost certainly mitigates against the freedom of 'knowledge workers'. Any knowledgeable employee has the potential to cost a corporation huge amounts of money, either through carelessness or though going public or selling information to a competitor. Therefore internal surveillance increases the more internal openness might occur. Frequently 'knowledge workers' have written into their contracts that after leaving their current employment they cannot work in a similar field. This has the potential to render their knowledge/experience of less benefit to them.
	There appears to be a tendency for intelligence agencies and the corporate sector to work together to beat national competitors. This in turn leads to increased counter and pre-emptive surveillance. Toffler commented:
If intelligence operations.. become so intertwined with the everyday activities of society, so decentralised, so fused with business and other private interests, as to make effective control impossible, democracy will be in mortal peril (1990: 318). 
The very next year Stansfield Turner, an ex-director of the CIA argued that the agency should extend its brief to include economic spying and recommended "a more symbiotic relationship between the worlds of intelligence and business" (q Webster 1993: 66).

X: States, Boundaries and 'Globalization'
	During this period the stability of the Nation State has been challenged as regional economies became as complex as national economies, market segmentation occurred, and the nation could not treat all its parts uniformly. With the linkage of economies, nations are often unable to control external impacts upon their economies, (they are often financially weaker than the corporations they are dealing with), and in some States the mass media no longer provides a uniform ideology or participation in events for their citizens (Toffler 1980: 330-5). As Frank Webster argues the huge trading in both currencies and debts, means that it is often the group judgment of corporate users of capital markets which determines the functionality of even an apparently powerful government rather than its citizens or its rulers (1995: 147).
	Electronic networks allow the almost instantaneous transfer of capital, and central banks have little control over currency because of the volume traded. There has also been a change in the nature of the transactions. Whereas previously, currency transactions arose during trade and only a small amount was speculative, by 1990, 90% of such transactions were speculative (Toffler 1990: 57-8). In 1995 US$1.2 trillion was exchanged every day in the currency market (again more than the GNP of many countries), with only about 50 main players (Castells 1996: 434-5). Huge amounts of money can be made by very small numbers of people using large amounts of capital. They can also loose huge amounts of other people's money, causing economic repercussions which have little to do with the productive capacity or efficiency of the firms affected. As Castells writes "money has become almost entirely independent from production" (1996: 474).
	Speed of transfer increases the possibility of uncontrollable economic feedbacks. Politicians have also removed many of the fail safes or impedances which might prevent external flows triggering economic collapse in their countries, which reinforces the vulnerability of Nations (Toffler 1993: 206). The ability of corporations to engage in 'transfer pricing' whereby they take their profits outside of national domains, though incur costs within national domains, means that traditional ways of raising tax from corporations do not work. The tax burden is shifted on to those smaller companies or wage earners who cannot shift their incomes off-shore. As a result the revenues of Nation States may decline, and proposed regulation of corporations (such as the suggestion of curbs to pollution), or tightening of taxation can be greeted with threats of corporate flight. The currently suspended talks on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment appear to be trying to make it illegal to regulate corporations unless every nation agreed to the same regulation. In terms of power, it is interesting to note that international agreements 'liberalising' trade seem to have 'teeth', while international agreements regulating ecological damage, which might diminish corporate profits, do not. Organisations like the World Bank and the IMF are frequently claimed to act in favour of the ideology of capitalism and the corporate sector. Both "have shown themselves willing to sacrifice civic equilibrium and social equality for purely economic goals like privatisation and free trade" (Barber 1996: 221). The IMF helps banks:
consolidate their power over poor nations. At the same time, and in exchange for co-operation, it generally allows the elites of these same nations to maintain their affluence and perks at the expense of their fellow citizens.... The IMF... works as a channel for funnelling public money to private banks (George 1988: 48-9). 
	Leaders of nations often seem to have tried to counter the problems of control over finances by forming economic blocks - though it might also be possible to argue that one of the ways in which capitalism has been able to become global is through the economic alliances of States.  Whatever the case, the presence of computerized networks has purportedly intensified this process particularly in the European Union.  David Brown writes that the logic of European Monetary Union: 
is set very much against the background of the imperatives of competition in a networked global economy.  In theory, the introduction of a common currency... will mark a definitive transformation of Europe from a collection of closely associated states into the world's strongest integrated economy, whose monetary policy will be coordinated by a single central bank... It also requires a harmonization of varying national tax and social spending policies each reflecting a different mix of cultural and historical relativities, and thus will also subtly and rapidly strip national electorates of a substantial degree of control over their own collective destinies (1997: 110-11).
Desirability of this loss of local control has been a subject of debate in various European electorates. Another subject of debate in the EU is the requirements and design of the software of the centralized electronic payments system called Target, which is intended to serve as the instrument of monetary policy, and which will have deleterious consequences for those European banks whose countries do not join (ibid: 93-4). Other trade treaties such as NAFTA and APEC may well lead to the elimination of both trading barriers and the control by a particular Nation of its economy, in the hope that a group of nations might be able to have more control. 
	Together with this pursuit of wider and more integrated trading connections there has been a resurgence of local nationalisms or ethnic independence movements. Castells remarks that "people all over the world resent loss of control over their lives, over their environment, over their jobs, over their economies, over their governments, over their countries, and, ultimately, over the fate of the Earth" (1997: 65). He proposes that for those excluded from, marginal to, or resisting, the global network society, 'cultural communes' of religious, ethnic or territorial basis might provide the main sources of identity (ibid: 65). Contemporary nationalism is "more often than not a reaction against global elites" and may not be oriented towards the construction of a nation state. It is more reactive than proactive, more cultural than political, and more about strengthening identity and community than achieving political sovereignty (ibid: 30-1). If a state 'breaks up' then any resultant states may share sovereignty with the former state or with some broader configuration of states, while some new nations simply force their parent state to cede some sovereignty (ibid: 52). 
	This perceived erosion of local autonomy or power is, in the AAA world, thought by both right and left to arise from globalism.  The left (ie Chomsky, Sklar, Thurow) tends to see this process as arising from triumphant capitalism whereas the right (American militias, various Nationalist parties, or fundamentalist Christians such as Pat Robertson) see it as arising from either international business, international conspiracy, international satanism, or even incredibly devious international communists. Mainstream politicians complain that their own policy, their intentions, or the sovereignty of their nation is under threat from various international organizations or processes. People of all persuasions can celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of the dawn of the (International) Information Age. Such a position can involve a celebration of global individualism, global markets and the decline of the "predatory nation state" (ie Davidson & Rees-Mogg 1997: ch5), though Castells argues such criticism is not necessarily anti-State - it may be a rejection of hegemony which does not reflect a particular identity. So one common response to the conception of globalization is to announce alienation from a particular State and to emphasize local identities, whether religious, national, ethnic, or individual.
	Internal fragmentation of States might also be indicated by the concentration of population and financial power in large cities. Theses about decentralisation, as well as being dubious in the corporate field, have not been demonstrated by a decline in the size of cities, or of their importance as sites of control/input for international economic networks. Castells writes that cities with populations of over 10 million 
are the nodes of the global economy, concentrating the directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet; the control of the media; the real politics of power; and the symbolic capacity to create and diffuse messages....
[T]hey are connected externally to global networks and to of their own countries, while internally disconnecting local populations that are either functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive... It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected... that makes megacities a new urban form (1996: 403-4).
Castells argues that these 'Megacities' will continue to grow. They are the centers which link economic, technological and social dynamism.  The fate of their countries depends upon them (1996: 409-10). As for dominant companies, winning seems to accumulate and to inhibit surrounding centres. In Australia attempts at decentralisation have failed since the 1980s, and the capital cities of each State have increased in power and size. Rather than contrasting globalization and decentralisation, it might be more useful to contrast globalization and disconnection, and to specify them as part of the same process. The interaction of the global with the local is to destroy, put to one side, or ignore the local - and without this putting to one side the global cannot be uniformly global. Simultaneously the local uses the global to form new connections, or to emphasize aspects of 'tradition', or to globally criticise, or celebrate, the global. Wilterdink summarizes this kind of position by implying that National interdependencies weakened as some International interdependencies increased (1995: 13).

XI: Knowledge Workers: Disunity and De-skilling
	Toffler argues that Second Wave, or industrial, production required standardisation and uniformity in the workforce which allowed that workforce to find a common cause out of a common experience. Third Wave work requires change, innovation and individually oriented production, hence the workforce has no sense of commonality and finds it hard to organise in traditional pyramid style unions (1984: 38). Knowledge workers tend to unite only on certain issues rather than around groups of issues. Left and Right are no longer coherent positions - people mix ideas from both and splinter on fundamental points (as with the libertarian Right and the Christian theocratic Right, or left wingers who believe in the virtue of market forces). The Single Issue Party flourishes if only for a short while. So it may be unlikely these knowledge workers will become a self organised group deliberately oppressing everyone else (ibid: 84, 114). However oppression can be unintended, a result of not perceiving those unlike yourself. It is also disputable that all "knowledge work" is equal. Management constitutes knowledge work, in a sense, and the conditions of management may not vary as much as the conditions of those whom they manage - and thus a particular group of management 'knowledge workers' could gain dominance, however individually precarious. It is probably worth investigating how much modern knowledge workers differ from the middle class bureaucrats discussed in section II. The main difference is not in that knowledge is involved (though that of course differs), but in their conditions of work,  the lack of permanence in those conditions, and the lack of deep bureaucracy.
	In the early days of computer networks Daniel Bell argued there was no reason for knowledge workers to become either "a new economic interest class, or a new political class", as they are divided into "four estates: the scientific, the technological, the administrative and the cultural" with large operational disjunctions between them (1976: 374-6). Bell argued that in 'post-industrial' society there was no necessary connection between status and situs (the situs being the "actual loci of occupational activities and interests"). Each 'estate' could be divided among many situses, and Bell considered it probable there would be more conflict between situses than between statuses and, as a result, situses would become "the major political-interest units in society" (ibid: 377). In more anthropological terms we might say that Bell predicted segmentary rather than class based organisation. Though his argument that knowledge workers differ radically depending on their kind of task or estate is useful, the concept of situs does not add much to his analysis, as the increasingly temporary nature of employment, though affecting some people more than others, makes such alliances unlikely. Neither do these arguments explain the almost uniform application of the official values of unfettered capitalism.
	However Toffler and Bell's portrait of fragmented and disorganised 'knowledge workers' seems to reflect contemporary AAA reality far better than Alvin Gouldner's well known 1970s description of the "New Class" of intellectuals, a "cultural bourgeoisie" who, with their "cultural capital", form organised bureaucracies dedicated to 'rational' and 'virtuous' management, and who are opposed to the interests of the "old class" of capital (Gouldner 1979). Perhaps Gouldner's analysis was more accurate in the 70s and the contemporary situation represents either a decline in this 'class' power and status, or the movement of people who would have previously become 'new class' over to a more precarious existence, or to identifying with capital. 
	A central problem for 'knowledge workers' is the question of how many people (as opposed to machines) are needed to generate information commodities. It is conceivable that "Expert Systems" could replace routine knowledge tasks, including interaction with humans, thus displacing the existent class of 'knowledge workers', or placing them in what Garson (1989) calls "electronic sweatshops", driving down wages and having the same effect on white collar labour as factories had on craft workers in the Nineteenth Century. The arguments on deskilling, or superseding of skills, are complex (cf Hakken 1995: 112, 119-20), but the fear is common. For example Pierre Levy writes:
as numbers of employees and managers have found out, nothing can be automated as  thoroughly and as quickly as the processing and transmission of information (1997: 31).
Kapor and Barlow, who are definitely pro information technology, claim that:
Information workers, forced to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, are stuck on 'the learning curve of Sisyphus'. Increasingly, they find their hard-acquired skills to be obsolete even before they've been fully mastered. To a lesser extent, the same applies to ordinary citizens who correctly feel a lack of control over their own lives and identities. (1990: np).
Robert McC.Adams joins in by pointing to a possible decline in skilled work. He refers to a Commission on Skills in the American Workforce, which claimed that:
more than 70 percent of the jobs in America will not require a college education by the year 2000 (1996: 241).
	These imperatives are the traditional capitalist ones of using technology to substitute for skills, to extract more from labour, to increase control over labour, to measure labour numerically with pay linked to 'performance' (Wood 1998: 39). Work is ideally stripped from the 'social field' which prevents organisation amongst labour. Workers are isolated in cubicles or via 'telecommuting', and by becoming contingent make only temporary bonds with other workers - some phone services change worker's locations in the office space to ensure making bonds is harder. Turnover in these positions is high (SMH 19 Sept.98: 6s). Networks and data files provide a substitute continuity and cultural context which allows the use of contingent labour in new contexts (Menzies 1998: 92-3, 95). Even Universities are not immune from such fears. In mid 1998 nearly 900 faculty members of the University of Washington signed a protest against the shift to a profit driven knowledge industry which sought to supplant instructors with teaching machines (D.Schiller 1999: 202).
	Furthermore, if the economy depends upon innovation or synthesis which can be controlled and made by relatively small numbers of people, what, then, happens to those who have different aptitudes or to those who start with poor education?

XII: Inequality and the New Economy
	Together with this centralisation of economic power, nomadicism of capital, and de-skilling of 'white collar labour': large corporations provided less jobs. None of the so called Fortune 500 companies increased the number of people they employed in the late 80s or early 90s. It was clearly possible to have a massive increase in profits and executive salaries without a corresponding increase in employment. Business Week (February 27 1994) estimated that profits were up 41% over 1993, despite a much smaller (9%) increase in sales, because of the decline in the proportion of income going to labour, and Fortune magazine (November 14th 1994) reported "the percentage of corporate income devoted to payrolls is hovering near a record low".  
	In 1973 the 800 largest US firms paid 229 out of every 1000 workers; in 1993 they paid 169 out of every 1000 (Hacker 1997: 46). Decline in the employment provided by the Industrial Sector alone was even more marked. In 1973 the 500 largest industrial firms employed 15.5 million people; by 1993 this had dropped to 11.5 million. This was accompanied by increases in production, and most of those actually employed might be employed outside the US (ibid: 231). Again, large generators of wealth no longer necessarily have to distribute the wealth among many employees. 
	Whatever the case in reality, it is widely believed that transnational corporations take their production basis and jobs to wherever the wages of people capable of doing the work are cheapest and the cost of production is lowest.  In 'information' firms the cost of a production base can be quite low, just some computers and a communication link, leading to even more likelihood of transfer of business to wherever it is cheapest. The effect on those dependent for survival upon a job is to lower expectations and for them not to openly object to the distribution of monies away from them. As an article in Fortune Magazine claims: "If a pat on the back in lieu of a pay rise can feel like a slap in the face, who dares complain?  These days having a job is a privilege and keeping it is the measure of success" (July 12, 1993 "When will you get a raise" q Sklar 1993: 21).
	Toffler argues that as Second Wave providers of jobs decline, it cannot be assumed that Second Wave workers will find it easy to get whatever jobs are created, or that enough new jobs will be created for them. Even the concept of 'a job' may have to be rethought (1984: 38, 40, 55). It seems that people are aware of the possibly diminishing total numbers of jobs, as well as a decline in well paying jobs, full time or permanent jobs. As Sklar remarks it is important not to confuse the occupations with the highest growth rates (skilled knowledge work) with the occupations creating the largest number of new jobs (retail sales, waiters, cashiers etc.). Even when retraining was given, subsequent jobs paid less (Sklar 1995: 26). Expansion was widely reported as primarily occurring in the so called service (or servant) industries, with uncertain pay or length of work. (See TIME 22 Nov.93: "Where is the Great American Job"). 
	Another set of articles in TIME (29 Mar.93: "Disposable Workers", "The Temping of America", "Nobody is Safe") talked about workers being "contingent", "disposable", "peripheral" and "throwaway", hardly terms which give a vision of security. TIME continues:
The American work force is being downsized and atomized... millions of Americans are being evicted from the working worlds that have sustained them, the jobs that gave them not only wages and health care and pensions but also a context, a sense of self-worth, a kind of identity.....  For good (sometimes) and ill (often), the workers of the future will constantly have to sell their skills, invent new relationships with employers who must, themselves, change and adapt constantly in order to survive in a ruthless global market.... After two years of record profits, the Bank of America recently announced that thousands of employees will become part-timers, with few benefits. More than 90% of the 365,000 jobs created by U.S. companies last month were part-time positions taken by people who want to work full time. 
Richard Belous, chief economist for the National Planning Association in Washington, has studied the proliferation of tenuous jobs. "If there was a national fear index," he says, "it would be directly related to the growth of contingent work." 
Already, one in every three U.S. workers has joined these shadow brigades carrying out America's business. Their ranks are growing so quickly that they are expected to outnumber permanent full-time workers by the end of this decade.
	The Sydney Morning Herald quotes Michael Pusey, Professor of Sociology at the University of NSW as saying: 
one in three jobs in Australia is now part time or casual, as opposed to one in 20 in the 1970s...  The effect [of the deregulated labour market] is to allow corporations to do what they want with labour - move them around, retrain them, fire them, make them part-time, pick and choose.. It's the degradation of work (SMH 6 June.99, GW: 18).
	Frequent changes of jobs, implies frequent periods of unemployment, with difficulties accumulating savings, in paying off homes, paying for children's education and in keeping a pension. When faced with the prospect that part time jobs, in particular, may not pay enough in the first place, insecurity could be expected. As Menzies suggests Marx's "reserve army of the unemployed is being augmented by a new reserve army: of the self-employed, the contingent part timers" (1998: 94).
	Hutton suggests that in the UK 30% of the workforce is unemployed (a large proportion of these unable to get social security), another 30% are "marginalised and insecure" (being largely temporary, part-time or casual workers), with the remaining 40% being those workers who have held a full time job for over 2 years or a part time job for over five years (1995: 106-9, 1997: 39-41).  
	Finally as Juliet Schor argued in 1991, the figures suggested those Americans still in work were working longer hours (98 hours per year extra for men in general, 334 for unmarried men and 305 for women), and having less time off work, to earn similar wages to twenty years previously (1993: 29, 80-1). The reaction from the corporate world was that Americans still do not work long enough. 
	Recent research in Australia indicates a similar decline in wages, increase in working hours and decline in permanent work (SMH 7 Sept.98: C3). So despite early promises that computerisation of the work place would lower working hours, free people from drudgery and increase leisure, this has not occurred.
	Andrew Hacker argues that the evidence suggests that, in general, people will not live as well as they have done. This is most marked in the 'middle class' professions (1977:143). "The stars will continue to shine and some will even set records for annual earnings.  But law and medicine and higher education will offer fewer of the well-paid careers that earlier generations could take for granted" (ibid: 233). Protections for the middle and lower classes have been removed, with resulting lower pay, lower safeguards and lower benefits. However at the very top end benefits are increasing.

XIII.1: Winners in the New Economy
	During the 1980s divisions in the distribution of wealth in the West became more pronounced.  Salaries to upper management increased and those to lower placed workers sank or remained the same. Thurow writes: 
real per capita gross domestic product has risen by a third. All of this extra income has gone to the top 20% of the population, and most of it to the top 1%. Probably no country has ever had as large a shift in the distribution of earnings without having gone through a revolution or losing a major war (Thurow 1995). 
Similarly ownership of corporate wealth remained concentrated; Alan Sondhiem posted the following press release to Cybermind about the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report 1996 on 19 Jul.96:
the wealthiest 10% of households own 90% of stocks; the wealthiest 20% own 98%. The remaining 80% of middle-class and working-class households own only 2% of stocks, either directly or indirectly. When holdings in pension and retirement savings accounts are subtracted, the share of stocks owned by this 80% of households drops to a mere 0.5%... Today, assets of the world's 358 billionaires exceed the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 per cent of the world's people. 
	These movements represent something of a change. After the Second World War incomes and working conditions for most people in the Western World improved.  Assistance was given to help people who would not have otherwise qualified for higher education to enter university.  This could be considered the beginning of the move towards expanding the body of 'knowledge workers'.  As Toffler is fond of pointing out, the number of white collar workers exceeded blue collar for the first time in the 1950s.
	The decade 1950-60 brought a rise in median household income of 37% in real purchasing power.  Between 1960-78 the increase was 26%, this slowed in the period between 1970 and 1990 and went negative after 1990.  Increase in household income after 1970 seems to correlate with increased numbers of incomes per family.  In constant dollar terms, men's incomes generally declined, though dramatic increases at the high end skewed the average (Hacker 1997: 223-4, 226). 
	Between 1975 and 1995 the incomes of the top 5% increased by slightly over 54%, while those of the bottom 20% increased by 1.5%. The share of all income by the top 20% households increased from 43% to 49%.  Every other quintile decreased its share (Hacker 1997: 10-11). 
	Despite the increase in the number of households having two or more incomes in all quintiles in 1995, there was no large increase in the income of the lower quintiles.
	The period saw the creation of more high individual incomes and more low incomes.  Thus in constant dollars, more men earned $50,000 but the median income dropped from $24,000 to $22,560 (Hacker 1997: 11).
	In Australia in 1999, the average yearly salaries of local CEO's increased by 22%, far more than the ordinary wage earner had increased in the previous decade. As well CEOs were given an average share holding of over A$6 million. The Australian Financial Review while excusing these increases on the grounds that incomes had to be competitive with those in the US, wrote that there was "little discernible linkage between the price of chief executives and the performance of their companies" (1.Nov 1999: 1, 26). In fact quite famously, at that time, a leading CEO had been paid A$13 million for leading his company into several disastrous moves.
	It is difficult to gain exact figures for distribution of wealth as opposed to income, but at least one source gives the following estimates for the US. In 1970 the top 1% owned only 20% of total wealth - probably the lowest this century (Wolff 1996: 8). By 1992 the top 1% had increased this to 37% of total wealth, the next 19% owned 47% and the remaining 80% owned 16% (ibid: 67). "Over the period from 1983 to 1992, the top twenty percent of wealth holders received 99 percent of the total gain in wealth and the top 1 percent 58 percent of wealth growth" (ibid: 72). 
	If an analyst was to try and construct a class model based upon wealth they would have significant problems, not least of which is that the rich constitute such a small stratum that by comparison the poor would have to include the entire 'middle class' (Hacker 1997: 57). The top 20% of the population own over 80% of the US's wealth, yet most of this top 20% (and even the top 1%) gain their income from earnings, and are thus, to some extent, 'workers', dependent on others and insecure. Median net worth of the US's 94.7 million households in 1991 was $36,620 (ibid: 85). The median worth of the top 3.6% of US households was still under $500,000 including homes, which is small compared too those we might call really wealthy. "So even members of this stratum, who are better off than 96 percent of their fellow citizens, close their careers within the middle class" (ibid: 86-7). 
	In 1996 Forbes identified 137 Americans with personal fortunes which exceeded $1 billion. Six of these were worth over $5 billion. 52 people were worth between $2 and 5 billion (Hacker 1997: 89). Median pay for a CEO in the top hundred corporations (averaged out between 91 and 95) was $2.8 million, their median stock ownership was $8.4 million (ibid: 115). When compared to the average worker the increase in return for CEOs was considerable. In 1995 the income of corporate chairman "averaged 190 times that of a typical worker, up from a ratio of 40 times twenty years earlier" (ibid: 53). For comparison, in 1990 in Japan it was 16 times greater and in Germany 21 times greater (Crystal q Frank & Cook 1995: 70). In the US, the income in the top quintile was 13 times higher than that going to the bottom.  In South Korea the top quintile make only six times that of the bottom (Hacker 1997: 107).
	Many people with these kind of incomes do not inherit this wealth, and have few reputed kin ties to people with such wealth. Most of the increasing (though minuscule in relation to the population as a whole) number of people with incomes of more than $1 million a year also attained this within their lifetimes. Therefore associations between such people are subsequent to their wealth. The twenty most affluent American families [this seems to mean descendants of wealth holders] have holdings worth $145 billion.  The next 90 families have assets totaling $100 billion (Hacker 1997: 94). Again most of these families seem to have obtained their wealth during this century, or late in the last one. If there is a ruling class marked by wealth, it is small and probably unstable - it is more like a ruling cadre.

XIII.2: Winner Take All
	It is tempting to explain such growing income disparities by Derek Bok's (1993) argument that nowadays elites are insulated from competition and able to set their own terms, or David Gordon's (1996) argument that US executives have used downsizing to redistribute the money earned by their companies among themselves. However, though these factors may contribute, they do not explain the effect entirely as within the same societies there have been monumental salary increases for some other groups to whom these arguments do not apply - a small number of "super-models", film stars and athletes for example - some of whom earn far more than the average CEO. This is not evidence of prosperity within these professions, but as usual only for an elite. Most film actors or models earn less than the median American income from their chosen career. Economists Robert Frank and Phillip Cook have produced an interesting, if flawed, attempt to explain this tendency to extremes of salary, in terms of the effects of Information Technology, which is worth consideration.
	In their book The Winner-Take-All Society (1995), Frank and Cook argue that information technology is "increasing leverage for the talents of those who occupy top positions and [giving] correspondingly less room for others to find a lucrative niche" (1995: viii). This leverage produces what they call a winner-take-all market, or as they say more accurately; "those-near-the-top-get-a-disproportionate-share markets" (ibid: 3). Such markets supposedly occur when what is produced "depends upon the efforts of only a small number of top performers who are paid accordingly" (ibid: 2). They explain that such markets generate positive feedback loops, or "positional arms races" because if one person or company does not do the maximum to obtain the whole market then they can lose completely to other people or companies who do.  Coming second can mean gaining nothing or a much smaller share of the market, with no return on investment and thus bankruptcy (ibid: 11). "Small differences between contestants often translate into large differences in economic reward" (ibid: 29). "The real changes have been... in the way the environment translates skill differences into earnings differences" (ibid: 85). 
	One of the problems with Frank and Cook's analysis is their reluctance to break from the formula that the 'free market' always rewards quality or effort - despite the arguments that they present to the contrary. Thus they assume that the low cost of reproduction will mean that we listen to the best sopranos rather than the marginally less able (1995: 2) - even though margins in ability may even be undetectable by the audience making the purchase (ibid: 24-5). They also assume that 'talent' is consistent, but even in sport the position between athletes can vary between races; commentators will say someone "was better on the day". So it is the race (say the Olympic medal), or the arena (say heavyweight boxing as opposed to horse shoe throwing), or embedding categories (such as gender: the top male sports and film stars usually earn more than female), which makes the victor/reward pairing - not the performance alone. It is not just talent or effort, but talent as promoted and perceived (with all the culturally defining factors or 'propaganda' about that), and the restriction of entry to others, which counts. 
	For mass markets the greater the number of people who use a product, the more will be produced for it and the more valuable it becomes. Technologies that are more widely used at early stages tend to attract research and development, and this locks in learning for producers, coherence of purchase for customers and stock holdings for suppliers (Frank & Cook 1995: 33, 35). Thus VHS did not necessarily beat BETA, or Windows beat OS/2 because of abstract quality, but when a product mass was reached it was exceedingly difficult to breach the dominant position without some innovation which would change the market again. The winner might take all, but not because of quality.
	The perceived risks in these markets encourage the tendency for established companies to go with 'winners'. Rather than taking risks, there is pressure to choose 'the name', as this shows they have tried to get the best if the venture fails. In this way opinions on quality become self validating rather than competitive, and their main effect is communication to others about worth. We might call this the 'No one gets fired for buying IBM strategy' which, as a side effect, helped Microsoft. This, to some extent, explains the salaries offered to CEOs; it is not so much to 'attract the best' (there is no real competition or comparisons as CEOs are not measured in the same company under the same conditions), but to convince the board of directors, company shareholders and other corporations that the company has attracted the best - usually a person with a name - as the consequences of not convincing people of this can be disastrous. Frank & Cook's continual slippage into the belief that money always attracts the best, shows the force of the narronoma that wealth equals quality.
	Such competitions for the 'best' diminish the availability of funds for non elite others, and put control of the process with the much smaller number of designers, executives and financiers who benefit from it. Globalization of markets increases this tendency. For example in sports, competitions might tend to become limited team and world wide, rather than multi-team and local. The number of teams that might have once satisfied a country are now enough to satisfy the world. The possibility of replicating, or extending the capacities of 'the best' diagnosticians, 'case makers' in law, or even share market dealers, and thus further limiting the number of 'symbolically good' people required, could also threaten to lower the incomes of such 'knowledge workers'.  
	These factors translate into other areas as well. When it comes to choosing employees, companies cannot make 'objective choices' but have to use cues to tell them of the abilities of potential employees. One obvious clue is the supposed quality of the university the person has graduated from. The presence of graduates from these elite universities then implies the proficiency of the companies that hired them (Frank & Cook 1995: 147-8). So there can be fierce bidding for such graduates and elite universities become the "gatekeepers for society's most sought after jobs.  Those who fail to pass through their doors often never have a chance" (ibid: 12). This whole process increases the incomes of those defined as successful and lowers the incomes of other graduates. With some elite American Universities, membership is not only decided by 'academic brilliance', but by whether one of the student's parents graduated from that University - which keeps success within the family. Yet another force making a 'normal' university education less of an opening, than it was, to the wider world. 
	Within the University the same process could occur, as a University only needs a relatively small number of 'symbolically good people', and a country may only need a small number of 'symbolically good universities'. In the US the real salaries of average professors declined between 1972 and 1997, and a report in 1993 declared the proportion of part time professors doubled over 25 years (D.Schiller 1999: 165). The not as markedly symbolically good people and institutions, compete for a diminishing share of resources. For my argument, it is not necessary that this be the case, but only that people could expect that this diminishment of places and possibilities might happen or be happening.
	As Hutton points out these disparities in income undermine the cohesiveness of the organisation and remove the 'work ethic', as the rewards are out of all proportion to labour. High paid officers have been willing to risk the integrity of the corporation in order to benefit their own salaries (1997: 35-6).
	The concentration in the US and Britain on immediate return to shareholders (which often includes senior management, who receive stocks as part of their salary package), may intensify this process of wealth redistribution. CEOs who do not sacrifice their workforce in favour of shareholders may cause of market devaluation of the company and hence diminution of their own share issue. Institutionalized share ownership diminishes any personal sense of responsibility a traditional owner could have towards their employees.  There are also social factors which affect the prevalence of "winner-take-all markets", as they have not appeared with quite such force in Germany or Japan, where according to Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars (1993), there is more emphasis on fitting in, on mutual support, ascribed rather than achieved status and on the success of the group rather than the individual. 
	Perhaps in relation to this 'individualism', it always seems to be the tendency for AAA managerial elites to make sure that those poorer than themselves take the burden of crisis, and suggests class is not dead.

XIV: Politics of Redistribution 
XIV.1: Tax
	Politics in the AAA world from the 1980s onwards could be seen as concerned with either accelerating this transfer of wealth or, more rarely, with slowing it down. Income tax burdens were widely reported as shifting from the corporate sector onto the 'middle' and 'lower' classes, partly because of the ease of transferring money away from the territorial control of government. Governments seeking to attract or keep these moveable corporations often give huge subsidies and tax concessions (cf. Lind 1997: 217-8). Thus New Mexico is reputed to have given microprocessor company Intel a total of $114 million in tax concessions and subsidies (Sklar 1995: 42). More generally TIME Magazine reported that 
In 1989, in fact, 1,081 people with incomes over $200,000 ended up paying no federal taxes at all... Corporations and the very rich have seen their taxes decline about a third in the past few decades, while those of us in the middle class now pay 329% more than we did 20 years ago (TIME 18 Apr.94: "Helping the Rich stay that Way"). 
The tax on the top 1% decreased between1980 and 1990, tax on the bottom 40% increased  (Congressional Budget Office 1993 Green Book tables 11 and 26). The proportion of the tax paid by corporations to the US government has also declined in this period. According to the Economic Report of the President for 1995, fifty years previously Corporations paid 35% of federal taxes, now they pay 11%.  During the same period the tax paid by individuals has increased from 48% to 80% of the total. "Something close to half our largest and most profitable companies - including Boeing, DuPont, GE, and Texaco - paid absolutely no federal income tax in at least one year from 1981 to 1983" (Carville 1996: 48). Other companies managed to earn overall tax rebates. Citizens for Tax Justice calculated that in 1987 GM obtained a tax rebate of $742 million (Forbes 9 Jan.89: 298), and of the 250 companies they were monitoring in the 80s, 108 of them had an average tax rate of 1.6%. (BusinessWeek 26 Dec.88: 40). More recently, in 1999, ConsPress, an Australian media company, reported A$1.249 billion profit and paid no taxes at all (SMH 9 Nov.99: 3).

XIV.2: Asset Sales
	A further factor in this re-distribution is the transfer of profitable publicly owned industries to the 'private sector'. This removes income from the State and, through the usual dismissal of employees in the name of efficiency, from workers - distributing it to shareholders. This consequently, not only temporarily (at least) increases the unemployed, but eliminates money the State has not raised through taxation - leaving the State having to raise taxes on those who cannot escape them, or cut services to the populace. Frequently the services offered by the privatised company are not as good or universal as they were previously, as there is no longer the same drive to service all markets irrespective of 'profitability'. In parts of the AAA world this privatisation is also accompanied by deregulation of the markets in the aim of 'market efficiency'. In Australia the effects are often perceived to have been that 'ordinary' consumers have their charges increased, while larger consumers have their charges decreased. With Banks the average user now finds that instead of the bank paying interest for using the money deposited, the person now has to pay to access their own money or even to leave it with the bank. This is despite computerisation lowering the cost of transfers and record keeping. Similarly deregulation of the milk industry resulted in less money for farmers and higher prices to consumers. At the limit, the deregulated market will not provide goods or services for those who cannot afford them, rendering the life of the less well paid continually more precarious. Public monopoly is often replaced by a private monopoly or oligopoly which provides fewer and poorer services more expensively (Hutton 1995: 217ff.; 1997: 6ff., 19). 

XIV.3: Corporatisation of Education
	The effect of class in education, as discussed above (#XIII.2), is in positive feedback with the increasing expense of education as AAA governments withdraw from the education 'market', or increase subsidies to private education facilities. In the US public schools rely upon local property taxes, and on what they can raise from parents. Consequently schools in poorer areas are becoming considerably worse off than those in richer areas, and are less likely to be able to afford the information technology that is supposed to enable students to gain reasonable incomes.  In 1991-92 in Texas, for example, "spending ranged from $2,337 per pupil in the poorest district to $56,791 in the wealthiest" (Sklar 1995: 107). During the 1980s costs of attending College in the US rose considerably faster than inflation, average incomes, or support (ibid: 110). Between 1980 and 1994 funding per student at public universities was cut back by 22% (D.Schiller 1999: 160). In Australia 80% of university funding came from the government in the "early 1980s", but had fallen below 50% by 1999 (SMH 1 Feb.00, IT: 6c).
	The Australian ABC's 7.30 Report of 16.Nov 1999 claimed that not only have Australian State payments per student have declined, but that the student-staff ratio has increased from 13.5 to 1 to 18 to 1 over the past 10 years. The need to find fee paying students may destroy Arts and Sciences which have large demand for free positions, and little for feed positions - some academic disciplines could be facing extinction. Fees could also render poverty a barrier to Education, again. The Government has tied any increases in funding to "fairly significant downgrading of employment conditions in the area of promotion, workload, employment security. They even go as far as dealing with the question of how universities govern themselves". Furthermore the Government has repeatedly suggested that public money should be taken from Universities and handed to corporations to fund their internal training programmes, and give them the status of degrees.
	Conditions of work have changed even for tenured staff. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald refers to tenured staff being frightened to criticise University managements because their contracts stated they should not "generate adverse publicity" or criticise University corporate management styles. Academics critical of management had their email revoked, or were thrown out of their offices. Research Institutes were pressured if their findings not prove the social benefits of 'free market' economics, or right wing policies generally (SMH 11 Dec.99 GW: 28-9, 32). The cuts in State funds for Education (evidence of the decline of the influence of the intellectual middle class) and the necessity to raise it from the corporate sector directly, lead to University administrations being more attentive to corporate sensitivities, than to academic freedom. The corporate sector has little interest in 'independent thinking', or in the humanities, so these kinds of areas are cut back (ibid: 31). As stated earlier (section XIII.2), academic 'stars' who bring in corporate sponsorships and publicity may be allowed some freedom and time for research, but everyone else is overworked and constrained.

XIV.4: Internal Separation
	Integration and internationalisation of corporate elites and fragmentation of nations may have removed any sense of obligation the elites felt towards those they shared the nation with. Toffler noted this attitude. With the breakdown of the nation-state and the lack of a need for workers, the rich revolt - claiming they are subsidising the others - "'we basically don't need the poor as workers, so why pay social security'" (1993: 216).
	With the collapse of Communism, there was no apparent challenge to capitalist dominance, and those systems set up to forestall revolution could be undone. Social security safety nets have been cut back or removed at the same time as there would seem to be an increasing need for them. Cutbacks also applied to services which had functioned as subsidies of lower and middle class incomes thus increasing the effective divergence of wealth.
	Toffler's "Third Wave" theory has been used to justify the removal of government funding from welfare, services, and repeal of attempts to control the corporate sector on the grounds that the bureaucratic state is a "Second Wave" institution and should be abolished (ie Gingrich 1995: 54ff., 142ff.). The effect of this on perceptions of the "computer revolution" among those who depended on the demolished assistance is not clear. 
	Despite the attempts to decrease spending which goes to the general populace, there has been an increase in taxpayer subsidy of the corporate sector, so called 'corporate welfare'. 'Right wing' critics Stansel & Moore (1997) estimate at least $65 billion is spent this way in the US, while 'left wing' critics Zepezauer & Naiman (1996) estimate a cost of about $448 billion a year. Not surprisingly they argue that different things constitute such welfare. In Australia it is estimated that subsidies and tax concessions to corporations exceed the total payment of sickness and unemployment benefits. While the Government continually harps on the "social obligation" of the sick and unemployed because of their benefits, benefits are given to corporations without the slightest guarantee of any return (SMH 7 Dec.99: 18).
	Essentially there has been an attempt to replace the non-corporatised structures of "Civil Society" with bodies that either share the corporate world's ideology, have to work with the same imperatives or are dependent on corporate sponsorship. Perhaps this is a reaction to similar expectations as Toffler's prediction that a strong Civil Society would force the Corporate world to have a social and ecological conscience (1980: 253-8). Civil Society declined and the Corporate World continues. Negri and Hardt claim that "it is not modern society but civil society that has withered away, so that our world might be characterized not as postmodern but as postcivil" (q Breslow 1997: 247). This may be one factor which helps increase the apparent alienation from the political system that people express - there is less access to any 'arena' in which they can participate.
	Whereas previously the educated middle class could have expected to gain influence, prestige and moderate wealth by the pursuit of a professional career, in medicine, science, the academy, government or civil bureaucracy as well as in commerce - these options are slowly being withdrawn or governed solely by commercial factors. 
	For these educated, and now insecure, middle class people the Internet opens up a new social arena. They have the education and usually the money to afford a connection of sorts, and the need to find some kind of society or set of alliances with which they can create a new vision, and perhaps a survivable life.

XV: Politics of Alienation
	One of the most frequently remarked features of AAA Politics over the last 20 or so years has been the supposed triumph of 'conservatism' and 'selfishness'. Yet surveys suggest that what is more common is a decline in the sense of participation and connection with Government. Castells refers to a 1994 survey which found "no clear direction in the public's political thinking other than frustration with the current system and an eager responsiveness to alternative political solutions and appeals" (1997: 343). Greenberg who was a researcher for the US Democratic Party, interviewed primarily 'working middle-class' people and reported his findings in (1994) and (1996), some of which are of interest. His interviewees expected their own living standards rise, but for this not to happen to the average American. They took more than one job, thought education was essential to advancement, and their main aim in life was security and paying the bills. Their alienation was more marked than their conservatism. Greenberg (1996: np) writes:
People have little expectation that civic organizations will rise to their defense or advance their interests. Barely anybody thinks of unions [...] 
People in these interviews go out of their way, without prompting, to point out that political leaders have failed them [...] 
About half of the participants volunteer something about government and politics holding them back, with the emphasis on government, politicians, taxes, and the Congress, in that order [...]
Almost a third of the men immediately point to the government, bureaucrats, and taxes; almost 20 percent cite Dole, Gingrich, and the Congress; almost 10 percent cite Clinton [...]
These working- and middle-class voters think they are on their own, but it is not out of choice. Politicians have abandoned them. The government works for the special interests
Such is not confined to the working middle class. Toffler in an interview with Micky Kantor says: 
Minorities do not feel represented.  Majorities don't feel represented. The Christian Coalition doesn't feel adequately represented.  I can tell you that people I know who are multi-zillionaires feel that they are not represented. So there is a widespread, deep, deep feeling in the country that the system doesn't match the assumptions on  which we've all been taught to take for granted.
Sometimes these expressions of alienation seem quite strange, as when American  rightist media celebrity Rush Limbaugh, who has a widely syndicated radio show, a television programme and two heavily promoted mass market books, complains that 'The Media' is completely dominated by the Left (ie 1993: ch. 24). Nevertheless Limbaugh is probably expressing his audiences feelings that most media do not reflect their concerns or interests.
	Part of the problem might be that 'we' are trying to force what is now a multifarious political field, with the melding of positions which used to be mutually unacceptable, into a polarity. However, reports and surveys into these types of questions tend to be politically motivated, and interested in what people actually voting for' Is it the policies the parties implement, which may not be quite the same as the policies they announce, or something else? 
	Chomsky, who's left wing bias is well known, is the most consistent arguer that there has been no shift to the right among the populace. He states that in his 1980 landslide Reagan got only a bare majority of the actual vote and only 28% of the potential electorate voted for him.  In 1984 the total increased by 1%. Only 4% of voters supported Reagan as a conservative. 70% of voters opposed his legislative program, most supporting a new deal style welfare programme. In the 1994 'Republican landslide', Republicans got about 52% of the vote, slightly better than a 2 point improvement over the previous election and only one third of the electorate voted - thus giving them the positive support of 17% of the population. Only 12% of these voters thought the issue of a more conservative Congress was important. Only a quarter had heard of the Contract with America which summarised the Republican platform, and most opposed increases in defense spending.  Before the election, 61% had said spending for domestic programmes should increase (Chomsky 1995: np). Even on supposedly popular issues like cutting back on welfare (which is distinguished in the US from Social Security), the results were ambiguous: 44% of those polled in one poll thought the US was spending too much on welfare and 23% too little.  When the phrase "assistance to the poor" was substituted for "welfare" then the figures changed: 13% said the US was spending too much and 64% too little (ibid). If people were asked if the debt should be eliminated they answered yes, but if they were asked if the debt should be eliminated at the cost of health or the environment etc. the percentage went down to about 25% (Chomsky 1996: 134-5). James Carville, who was President Clinton's campaign director, quotes a Wall Street journal poll which said that despite the well reported unpopularity of the Clinton Health Plan, if people actually had it described to them without attribution 76% of them liked it (1996: 114).  In another 1994 US poll referred to by Castells 82% of respondents did not think the government represented their interests, and 72% considered the government represented special interest groups (1997: 343). 68% of the respondents identified these special interests as business interests (ibid: 345).
	The question is not the accuracy of these polls as a reflection of the US as a whole (and they certainly give no comfort to the Democrats, who then have to explain why people do not vote for them), but they illustrate the perception that Government ignores the wishes of the people who vote for it - and perhaps a realistic appraisal that the corporate sector carries more influence than they do as individuals. They also suggest that current discourses, do not allow much "match of assumptions" in Toffler's words, - that public life is immoral or inauthentic. Such a discourse also alienates people from the political structures, as the only control over the wider-society an average person has is either their vote, or the possibility of joining politics - but if politics is perceived as corrupt or distant then there may well be no point.
	Some of this maybe deliberate. The 70s and onwards saw the foundation of Right Wing, pro-capitalist "think-tanks" in both Britain and the US (Ricci 1993), whose mission was to restore the appeal of free-market economics, and this seems to have been done by associating the distrust of government, which arose during the Sixties and the Nixon years, with a free market agenda of 'looking after oneself'. Such an argument links with the sense that as no one belongs to a wider group, then 'self-reliance' is all they have. Politics of 'non interference' benefit those who have already succeeded within the system. The widespread practice of negative advertising, even when the accusations are not accurate would ultimately have the effect of further alienating people away from politics, whether this was its intention or not. Taylor & Saarinen suggest contemporary society is a society of "excessive refusal" rather than of positive choice. We do not vote for what we want, but against what we want least (1994: 'Superficiality 8'). But it is important to note that this refusal is linked with, an exploration of alternatives, what I have already quoted Castells as calling the "eager responsiveness to alternative political solutions and appeals", particularly when applied to personal identity. 
	Michael Piore argues that social groups in the AAA world have shifted from a basis defined in common economic experience to a basis defined in social identity.  These 'neo-identity groups' are often defined by supposed biological properties of their members which mark them as isolated from, or rejected by, other groups (Piore 1995: 21, 23, 163, 177).  'Biology' is the way AAA society tends to ground the features of society in 'individualism'. Most of these 'biological' markers are perceived as either/or categories. A person is white or not, gay or not, deaf or not etc, which ignores the continuum quality of these category distinctions, and renders the plurality of the others into an Other.  Talking with each other and acting for each other the members of a neo-identity group define what it means to have the particular property which marks them as rejected, and as they go about defining themselves they define the distinguishing property (ibid: 131). The property indicates membership of a 'community' at the same time as it excludes from membership of other groups, or indicates rejection by other groups.  The property is frequently exaggerated in order to emphasise the rejection, by others and make rapprochement impossible. Touraine writes "in a post-industrial society... it is the defense of the subject, in its personality and in its culture, against the logic of apparatuses and markets that replaces the idea of class struggle" (q Castells 1996: 23). 
	Benedict Anderson has drawn attention to another feature of this defense of the subject, in the simultaneous integration and disintegration of globalization - what he has called "long distance nationalism" (1992: 1-2), in which people who identify with a particular country (even though resident overseas), can participate in the politics of that country in an extreme manner without risk of personal danger.  He instances 'Irish Americans' financing the IRA, 'Punjabi businessmen in Canada' providing bombs for Sikh activists, and 'Croatian Australians' helping to ferment war in the Balkans (ibid: 10-11; 1994: 326-7).  This "politics without responsibility or accountability" is furthered even more when email or the use of newsgroups is involved (Anderson et al). 

XVI.1: The New Class War?
	If Piore's argument is right and economic experience is no longer a basis for identity then traditional uses of the category 'class' become more difficult. Furthermore though divergence in wealth and power is marked, it is, as Toffler points out, not necessarily marked out by ownership or, as I have suggested, by continuity of personnel. People who control corporations are not necessarily the owners but those who integrate operations - a small number of managers (Toffler 1984: 101), and their control is influenced by a perception of what the financial markets demand. These people may not belong to powerful families or, until recently, have attended the "ivy league" Universities. They may not form a group with a history of establishment, even though members of boards of directors are a relatively small group with great overlap. Mostly they are salaried workers and, except for a very small number, have little financial security. 
	Nevertheless there has clearly been a growth in economic inequality, and in economic or survival insecurity for most people in the AAA world. This growth in economic inequality has several consequences:
	Firstly it changes the economy from an economy driven by general demand to an economy driven by the demand of the elite. It becomes less economic to gear production, distribution and services towards the wider population as they have little to give in exchange - even when the costs are small. Thus employment tends to crash even further in poor areas, leading to even less money in those areas which accelerates the process. For example deregulation of Australian banks has lead to the discontinuance of services in rural or poorer areas, whilst they covertly give cheaper services to wealthy customers (SMH 9 May.98: 96). Disney and General Motors developed a two tier marketing strategy to reach "two different Americas - rich and poor". MCI planned to drop services to the poor, while AT&T also began focusing on the wealthy (D.Schiller 1999: 53-4). Nathan Newman writes: "Local phone users, mostly lower-income uses without a computer in the home are seeing investments diverted to industry and higher-income Internet users" (q. D.Schiller 1999: 31).
	Traditionally people in the lower class areas have spent money on locally made and sold products such as food, clothing or shelter which adds to the local economy, stimulates local demand, production and employment. Whereas the 'excess' money belonging to the extremely wealthy can be stored out of circulation (as gold, or as other items where the raw materials are the major part of the cost), invested in non productive, if remunerative, returns such as currency speculation ('Casino Capitalism'), or used to import "luxuries" from overseas - all of which serve to bolster category separation. The theory that wealth "trickles down" from the wealthy to other classes is popular with the elite, but there is no evidence it works. Similarly it seems probable in AAA societies that as inequality increases Governments services will continue their inclination to go to wealthier areas and people.
	In societies of great social disparity, I would suggest that social cohesion arises from a combination of several factors. Either the lower groups must:
	1) think that it is possible to "improve" themselves, so that they can benefit from 
		the hierarchy or move within it.
	2) respect the higher levels and see the disparities as both natural or ordained,
		and/or mutually beneficial.
	3) hardly ever see the elite. Or
	4) fear the elite.
	With an 'information economy' 1 becomes less possible- as (a) there is less work,  (b) quality of education becomes even more important and will not be provided to those who cannot pay, and (c) not everybody will be good at this kind of task anyway.  Greenberg's data suggests people think it possible to better themselves with education, so it is probable those already educated may not be as optimistic. The openness of the revolt of the elite makes 2 more uneasy as the revolt breaks mutuality. Despite most Americans being unable to name the most powerful or wealthy families in America (with the exception of Bill Gates who functions as an icon for the rags to riches story - despite the pre-existing wealth of his family), they are likely to be bombarded with images of wealth way above their means which undermines 3 (the consumer lead revolt in Russia should be remembered). This leaves only 4.

XVI.2: Internal War
	As stated earlier the new warfare is exceedingly difficult to control. The State no longer has the means to monopolise violence or to protect its internal order once that order is broken. A single person can produce truly devastating destruction which leaves no target for retaliation. Random State terror to protect such fragile hierarchy (as apparently taught by the US in Latin America with great success), against suspect populations will now only increase the likelihood of further devastating response.
	It is currently much easier to attack than to defend. This changes the whole pattern of armed struggle and potential violence. The high cost of defense may prove to be more of a problem for the integrity of the Nation State, than its loss of tax revenue.
	This is not just futuristic rambling, but part of people's awareness and imagining. The nuclear bomb in terrorist hands has been the subject of movies and speculation in Newspapers. At least one American has been arrested on suspicion of having anthrax in their fridge. The Aum Supreme Truth movement made world headlines as did the Okalahoma and Atlanta bombings - and Atlanta was reputed to have the best security that could be bought. This possibility of terror is part of the construction of the contemporary world.
	Dependence of the military, corporations and state on electronic communications and systems also renders them deeply vulnerable to hacking and electro pulse attacks as well as to orthodox physical attacks.
	A report issued by Rand for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) (Molander et al 1996) makes the following points about information warfare, though it is also relevant to the kind of internal physical war discussed above:
There is no "front line." Strategic targets in the United States may be just as vulnerable to attack as in-theater command targets (1996: xiii). 
The only enemy retaliation on its own shores, this century, the US has had to face is from 'terrorists'.
Unlike traditional weapon technologies, development of information-based techniques does not require sizable financial resources or state sponsorship [...].
Traditional distinctions--public versus private interests, warlike versus criminal behavior--and geographic boundaries, such as those between nations as historically defined, are complicated by the growing interaction within the information infrastructure. [...]
You may not know who's under attack by whom, or who's in charge of the attack. This greatly complicates the traditional role distinction between domestic law enforcement, on the one hand, and national security and intelligence entities, on the other. [...]
There is currently no adequate tactical warning system for distinguishing between strategic IW attacks and other kinds of cyberspace activities [...]
Interconnected networks may be subject to attack and disruption not just by states but also by nonstate actors, including dispersed groups and even individuals. [...] 
The "Corrupted insider" is considered to be a particular problem.
	In June 1997 officers of the National Security Agency, using software easily available on the Internet, gained access to the computers controlling the US electricity grid. They reportedly claimed "they could have quite disabled the entire grid and shut down the military command system for the US Pacific forces" (SMH 20 Mar.99: 15).
	Another report issued for the Pentagon (Swett 1995) emphasises the use of the Internet for political purposes, suggests the routine monitoring of the net for intelligence and using it to carry out "psychological operations". It is difficult to read the context of this report, but it suggests some people in the Pentagon regard protests at a Republican Convention as the same kind of problem as terrorist attacks.
	It seems probable that the separation of groups and categories, together with the fear of the new weaponry, would lead to an attempt by military and corporate bodies to engage in either pre-emptive strikes or increased surveillance of the population. Antiterrorist bills, have been brought before the US Congress which would legalize this. 
	Surveillance of the populace is not fantasy. Industrial workers have been subject to "Time and Motion" studies for most of this century and the activities of credit agencies are well known.  We have been told for many years now that military satellites are good enough to read license plates; there are automatic speed cameras on many roads, surveillance cameras in parks; and in some banks you can watch yourself on video. Surveillance (or more neutrally gathering information about people), has been an essential part of State, Military and Commercial practise - the computer merely increases the ability and the efficiency of doing so. 
	The issue of control of privacy (or control of the distribution of information) is a common political concern on the net. Many 'political' posts to Cybermind were concerned with issues of privacy - particularly government violation of privacy rather than corporate or other forms. Talk of surveillance is common. Concerns about "freedom of speech" are often connected with fears of surveillance, as the only way speech could be regulated on a mailing list would be for it to be observed. The imagining of violated privacy, and attack from 'outside' or 'above' haunts cyberspace. There is a fear that this is a "temporary autonomous zone" to use Hakim Bey's term (1991: 97ff.) that will be restrained and brought within a society perceived as inimical or without understanding. Concerns with 'free speech' also perhaps stem from concerns about authenticity and the ability to be one's self though expression. 

XVI.3: Hacker Fear
	This fear of Internal Warfare is particularly connected to the Internet through fear of Hackers. Certainly huge amounts have been written about computer crime: people breaking into back accounts, stealing information, or blackmailing corporations, than any other aspect of online life, and the line between programmer and hacker is frequently vague. Anyone with a modem can attempt to break into another machine, and programs for attempting this automatically are easily available on the Net. Ex-employees are reputed to sabotage their prior employers (SMH 22 May.99: Icon 5). Ruskoff tells us that it is rumoured that corporations hire hackers to sabotage other corporations (1994: 32-3).
	Stephen Levy tries to distinguish "true" hackers who write ingenious program code ("it must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity" {1994:23}) from hackers who "electronically ventured into forbidden digital grounds like government computer systems" or were "talentless junior high school students... downloading system passwords or credit bureau codes and using them to promote digital mayhem" (1994: 432-3). Yet despite such attempts to distinguish hard working commercial or intellectually backed hackers from disreputable free wheeling youths, the word was never clear (even Levy admits that its origin may lie in a MIT word used to refer to "college pranks" {ibid: 23}), and it has taken a life of its own.
	The proportion of 'criminal' hackers using the Internet when compared to others is small, and it is tempting to think of hackers in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, yet as the Critical Art Ensemble point out it is actually the elite who can make use of cyberspace to make:
a diffuse power field without location, and a fixed sight machine appearing as spectacle... hostility from the oppressed is rechannelled into the bureaucracy which misdirects antagonism away from the nomadic power field. The retreat into invisibility of non location prevents [the definition]... of a site of resistance... No longer needing to take a defensive posture is the nomad's greatest strength (1994: 15-6).
	Sterling's book The Hacker Crackdown (1994) demonstrates that hackers were at the mercy of a more mobile authority. Hackers were generally caught in their bedrooms. 

XVII: New Forms of Family and Kinship
	'Love' is the primary bond that is supposed to keep the AAA family together.  Kinship and marriage are justified by authentic feeling.  There are few social functions or sanctions, such as demarcated gender roles, which prevent members of one sex surviving without the cooperation of the other.  Families have also been split by distance and conflicting social demands arising from work - a trend increased by the unpredictability of contingent labour. It is not surprising that when a psychological value is expected to maintain a set of roles and responsibilities, almost entirely by itself, that family relationships are prone to disruption. Inevitable conflicts of loyalty can become points of breakdown. Giddens comments: "Kinship relations often used to be taken for granted on the basis of trust; now trust has to be negotiated and bargained for, and commitment is as much an issue as in sexual relationships" (1992: 96). Elsewhere he writes "Commitment... is essentially what replaces the external anchors that close personal connections used to have in pre-modern situations" (1991: 92). According to a survey conducted by Wuthow in 1989 about 37% of people felt they could not rely on relatives to help in sickness (1994: 424n14). The network of friends one builds up in life are at least as important, as fragile or as strong as the network of kinship one is born into or creates.  As family sizes decrease it is possible that friendship may become more important, as eventually there is no family.
	The lament for the decline of the conventional AAA family is widely distributed and has been occurring for some while. Toffler quotes both Lundberg from 1960: the family is "near the point of complete extinction" (1970: 211); and from the same period Foote: "To expect a marriage to last indefinitely under modern conditions is to expect a lot" (ibid: 222).  It cannot be argued that such changes originate with the Internet.  
	Castells writes "at the moment when the traditional family becomes indispensable as an instrument of both financial and psychological security, it has been falling apart" (1997: 97).  He goes on to blame the 'wars' between feminism and patriarchy for this. With the growth of the Welfare State and paid labour for women, strains in the family which were previously endured became possible points of rupture. However with rollback of State support things become more difficult. Though it may be true that feminism has changed the kind of interdependence demanded of the sexes, it might be that the spread of feminism, and the resultant 'wars', is a product of the same kinds of changes which have produced these more negotiated and uncertain kin ties. Certainly there is change. Castells argues that 'non-family' households in the US rose from 15% in 1960 to 29% in 1995. In the same period the percentage of married couples with children dropped from 44% to 26% (1997: 222). The supposedly traditional married couple with children, with the male as the sole supplier of income, may exist in only 7% of households (Stacey 1991: 19). Conservative commentator William Bennett remarks that "since 1960 the percentage of children living with both biological parents from birth through to age 18 has dropped 22 percentage points" (1994: 51). In Australia, between 1991 and 1996, the "number of Australian households containing just one person grew by 26 per cent. The number of single-parent households grew by 21.8 per cent" (SMH 21 April.98: 2).  
	According to Fuller there was an 85% increase in the number of 'singles' between 1970 and 1990:  "Approximately 49 million Americans today aged 25 and older are never-married, divorced, or widowed...  The largest cluster (37 percent),... are persons aged 25 to 44 [the main age group on Cybermind]... some two-thirds of these baby boomers have never married".  In some areas the presence of 'singles' is even greater: "some 47 percent of Manhattan households are made up of people living alone" (Fuller 1996: 3-4). Riche adds that in the US in 1994, 44% of men and 48% of women over 15 were not married, that 29% of households did not contain families, and that 83% of these 'non family' households consisted of a person living alone (1996: 377). There are supposedly "three times more single people in Britain than there were 30 years ago", and "one French adult in three lives alone" (SMH 12 Feb.00: 32). This renders more people more vulnerable to changing circumstances.
	There appears to be no prevailing type of family emerging, diversity is the rule (Castells 1997: 227).  As Toffler predicted: "The family may neither vanish nor enter upon a new golden age. It may - and this is far more likely - break up, shatter only to come together again in weird and novel ways" (1970: 212). Or as Stacey writes: "Americans today have crafted a multiplicity of family and household arrangements that we inhabit uneasily and reconstitute frequently in response to changing personal and occupational circumstance" (1991: 19). Stacey also shows that despite the fulminations of Christian commentators, there appears to be a degree of ease between feminism, multiple family arrangements and Christianity (1991: 24ff.) - though males tended to be marginal to, and inarticulate about, these arrangements (ibid: 26, 32). 
	Shere Hite sums up her research on the new family structures, by claiming that the traditional authority structures of the family are crumbling, as is the model of the 'holy family' (Jesus, Joseph and Mary), but that this is leading to democratisation and the end of family based fascism (1994: 345ff.). Giddens also in the context of romantic love and kinship discusses the "democratization of daily life" (1992: 95, 182-6). Drucker simply alleges that the family bond is now more important than it was, but it is nnow voluntary (1993: 173).
	However, further evidence of insecurity in the family and increasing poverty is shown by increases in homelessness among 'working' and 'middle class' people not affected by mental illness or drug problems. In Sydney Australia, the number of people seeking help from the Homeless Person's Information Centre increased by a factor of 3 between 1992 and 1997. Available accommodation halved as beds reserved for crises have become medium term accommodation (SMH 3 Nov.98: 17). The percentage of children living in poverty in the US increased from 14% in 1969 to 20.5% in 1998 (D.Schiller 1999: 207), and in Australia it was reported that the number of children living in poverty had almost doubled between 1983 and 1996 (SMH 18 May.99: 3).
	Worries about the decline of the family may primarily mean that the model that commentators use of kinship is significantly different from the diverse marriage, kin and friendship patterns that people actually negotiate - though these relationships are now subject to pressures which make their non-normative character problematic. People cannot predict how those close to them will behave in crisis, but they do know it is important to establish connections.

XVIII: Computer Mediated Communication?
	By 1995, when this ethnography begins, Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) had moved from a limited number of Universities, the military, internal corporate nets and commercial email suppliers into the public or mass commercial arena. The successor to the ARPANET, the government funded NSFNet, had been transferred to a consortium run by Merit, MCI and IBM who used the government subsidy to provide a network which would link commercial information suppliers with the users of NSFNet (Salus 1995: 199-200, Mackie-Mason & Varien 1994: 2, Cerf & Aboba 1993). By mid 1997, all five of the leading Internet backbone suppliers, responsible for 80% of US Internet traffic, were owned by major telecommunications carriers (D.Schiller 1999: 33).
	The history of America Online which became Cybermind's home, is instructive in terms of the rapid expansion of Commercial consumer oriented computer networks. AOL was founded in 1985 and was initially an independent communication network that also provided content, in the form of specialised 'chat rooms', data bases provided by various companies and an electronic shopping mall. Growth of interest in online connection is shown by their customer base.  AOL had about 130,000 subscribers in 1991, they passed 1 million subscribers in August 1994,  reached more than 8 million by January 1997, and had doubled that figure by February 1999.Their revenues rose from about 19.5 million to more than 4.7 billion in the same period. The first figures for customer usage come in the 1995 report, which claims that the average user spent five hours on line every month in 1994, while a press release from Jan 1997 reports: "The average AOL member now spends approximately 32 minutes a day online". By June 1999, the average was 52 minutes per day. AOL originally had no Internet connection, but began adding external mail connections in 1992, increasing the degree of connection until in the 1995 report they could announce full connection. According to their estimates, online connection in the 1992 to 1996 period rose from about 3% of US households to just over 10% of households. In the 1996 statistical breakdown of their users, they claimed 41% of their users were female and 63% were College graduates. US Census figures gave 23% of the population as Graduates. 
	So what of the effect of CMC? Castells argues that, like the telephone, CMC does not change anything, it merely reinforce things. For him CMC 
does not substitute for other means of communication, nor does it create new networks: it reinforces the preexisting social patterns... it expands the reach of cybernetic networks, and makes it possible for them to interact more actively and in chosen time patterns. 
It's most important impact could be "the reinforcement of the culturally dominant social networks, as well as the increase of their cosmopolitanism and globalization" (1996: 363). He argues that the 'new media' as a whole supports a cultural pattern of widespread social and cultural differentiation, with stratification among users (ibid: 370) - yet another instance of dispersion and integration acting simultaneously. 

XIX: Relevance for Cybermind
	This discussion has aimed to demonstrate the rather simple point that people in AAA societies fear or celebrate an overwhelming and apocalyptic change. A huge social transmutation associated with computer technology. Information technology, as used within global capitalism, has indeed changed the expectations and patterns of life of people. It has changed the relative power of groups, and the conditions of work and survival. In this society, oppositional political discourse has been largely shattered, and those supposedly running the system have no perceived connection with those being run by the system. It is a world whose commanding discourse is a theory of economics which states that whatever happens as long as it does not interfere with business is good (the best of all possible worlds), and that a particular economic system is inevitable. It is a world in which the local often appears threatened by an impersonal global - even though the actual relationship is complex. It is a world in which the vision of equality before the law, and before Government, is stretched by increasing disparities of wealth and income. The prosperous fear the many, or at best separate from them. It is a world in which those people who might be described as 'middle class intellectuals', who could have been expected to find fairly prosperous positions in civic or professional society are faced with uncertain work and little career future. Universities no longer have positions or money, bureaucracies and civil bodies are being dismantled. Middle layers of integration either appear to be disappearing or under attack. It is a world in which success is perceived to come at the cost of defeating others, and yet this may not be a cost which all people consider normal. The fracturing experience of these people with its overloads of 'information', shifting, uncertain jobs, and lack of independent institutions, makes organisation as a group, or even planning as an individual, difficult, if not impossible. They are faced with a political system which would seem to ignore them and most others, even if they succeeded. Furthermore the only perceived means of building 'freedom' available to these people, the new communication channels, also involve the perceived potentialities for further control and surveillance by others of them. This 'freedom' and its possibilities are precarious, and the possibilities of 'doing something about it' seem remote, even if they are not. However it seems fairly much the case that people are  using the Internet to try and combat these comparative alienations and insecurities, through making contacts, discussing mutual problems, and giving each other whatever support that is possible to give.

XX: The Return of Pure Capitalism?
	In their Communist Manifesto, the no longer fashionable Marx and Engels, claimed capitalism 
cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society... [E]verlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones (1968: 38).  
They held that Capitalism inevitably spreads over the globe giving a "cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country". It destroys national industries, compels every nation to adopt the capitalist mode of production, creates enormous cities making the country dependent upon the city, and "creates a world after its own image" (ibid: 39).  
	This 'image' involves six features: firstly, massive inequality; secondly, the concentration of wealth, property and power in progressively fewer hands; thirdly, working people becoming an "appendage of the machine"; fourthly, deskilling of labour; fifthly the decline in the size of middle class; and finally the increasing precariousness of survival for most people (ibid: 41-4). Capitalism converts "every occupation hitherto honoured... into its paid wage labourers" and reduces all connections between humans, including family ties, to monetary ones (ibid: 38).  The State finally becomes a committee for managing the common affairs of the capitalist class (ibid: 37). 
	These narronomas have seemed unjustified as wages, conditions of life, and access to the State improved for most people. However, over the last twenty years, particularly since the collapse of Communism in Europe, these positions have again seemed more current. The revolutionising of the 'instruments of production' and the resultant social uncertainty, is an object of common discussion. The triumphant spread of capitalism over the globe, and its 'rendering all places the same' is another commonplace. Growth of inequality and the decline of the middle classes is by some denied, and by others feared, but the 'breakdown' of 'the family', 'social relations', 'respect', 'community' and so on, is daily lamented. Similarly, some people have far more money than they can spend on goods, while others are destitute. The processes of extension of the 'we category' is changing. 
	Marx and Engles were describing an ideal, triumphant, unregulated capitalism, which did not entirely exist in their day, and which certainly did not exist for most of the 20th Century because of the actions of others in the State. Now, unregulated capitalism has been, at least temporarily, restored to its dominance, by the corporate use of Information Technology, which has lessened corporate dependence on particular States and on particular, large, workforces. 
	This, as we have seen, has changed the survival opportunities available to the Intellectual middle classes who make up the population of Cybermind, yet while they may feel disoriented and unsure of their future, perhaps unable to find the security and status that was, for a brief while, part of that classes self identity, they are trying to come to terms with these changes and, indeed, to use the machinery of that decay to further their own interests, both individually and as a group.