The Triumph of the Flexible Society : The Connectivity Revolution and Resistance to Change

Hinds takes offers a fresh perspective on the social, political, and economic disturbances now affecting our world. This book looks at those disturbances not as separate problems, but rather as the coherent symptoms of a deep technological revolution that is changing the shape of society on the scale of the Industrial Revolution: the Connectivity Revolution, the basis of the New Economy. Analyzing the resistance to change that erupted violently in response to that last major economic upheaval, Hinds shows how Communism, Nazism, and fundamentalism owe their triumphs not to the prevalence of poverty or oppression but to the rigidity of societies threatened by profound social changes prompted by rapid technological progress. Demonstrating that their rigidity was caused by the same kind of state intervention in the economy that is now being proposed to stop globalization, he argues persuasively that only a horizontal, flexible society can smoothly manage change in such a way that the pain of transformation—and therefore, the risk of giving birth to new varieties of destructive regimes—is minimized. Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 12 I. Resistance to Change, Stagnation, and Destructiveness......Page 24 1 The New Economy......Page 26 2 The Economic Disruptions......Page 48 3 Riches and Stagnation......Page 62 4 Cold-Blooded Destructiveness......Page 80 5 The Resurgence of Fundamentalism......Page 102 6 The Inversion of Reality......Page 126 7 Divisiveness and Social Interest......Page 138 II. The Road Ahead......Page 152 8 The Challenge......Page 154 9 The False Solutions......Page 158 10 Politics and the New International Order......Page 174 11 The Problem of Social Cohesion......Page 188 12 Forever Flowing......Page 202 Bibliography......Page 206 Index......Page 216 "Analyzing the resistance to change that erupted violently in response to that last major economic upheaval, Hinds shows how Communism, Nazism, and fundamentalism owe their triumphs not to the prevalence of poverty or oppression but to the rigidity of societies threatened by profound social changes prompted by rapid technological progress. He argues that only a horizontal, flexible society can smoothly manage change in such a way that the pain of transformation - and therefore, the risk of giving birth to new varieties of destructive regimes - is minimized."--Jacket How do we know that the marriage of computers and telecommunications is the dawn of a new technological revolution?