"The record of history is clear: Though technological innovations have changed the way we live, they have not changed man's essential nature. Strife is the origin of everything, the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist Heracleitus reminds us. Indeed, technology has always been a tool in man's struggle with other men, magnifying his capacity for both good and evil. The Industrial Revolution liberated man from the fields, but it also created the material framework for trench warfare in World War I and the mass murders perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin. The information revolution will, likewise, have an ambivalent impact, perhaps on an even greater scale: Few inventions have demonstrated the capacity for social and economic transformation like the computer. Yet history shows that rapid social development is often accompanied by violence and inequality."A person writing at the end of the nineteenth century--when words like fascism and totalitarianism were still unknown--might have intuited the evils of the coming fifty years had he or she concentrated on how technology was increasing the power of the state in Europe and Japan. Bearing this legacy in mind, I worry about two consequences of the new information technologies: their tendency to widen the gap between those cultures that are already good at producing exportable material wealth and those that aren't; and the ability of these new technologies to enrich and complicate personal life at the expense of the community and the state. Whereas the Industrial Revolution constructed the massified state, the information revolution could deconstruct it, unleashing forms of benign and unbenign chaos at the same time that the computer revolution increasingly reveals how some cultures and subgroups are more technologically proficient than others. Therefore, group tensions will intensify, even as the state's ability to contain these tensions diminishes. Ultimately, the state may be replaced by something better. But this transformation, taking up most of the next century, will be cruel.
"People are not passive actors who can be lifted up by their bootstraps with gadgetry. Technological innovations are useless if there is no civil order. What good are new vaccines in areas of Africa where health clinics are vandalized and there is no electric current for refrigeration because there is no tradition of maintenance? You can provide computers, but you cannot provide habits like maintenance, record-keeping, and returning messages on time--habits upon which a postmodern society depends. In a world where wealth will be less and less determined by muscle labor, technology's advance will further expose some racial and ethnic fault lines.
"For example, Africa's per capita income growth rates are usually driven by price hikes in agricultural commodities, not by the attainment of the industrial and postindustrial skills that drive growth in Asia. In fact, large parts of Africa show few signs of undergoing even an industrial revolution, let alone a postindustrial one.
"In the Indian subcontinent and China, meanwhile, the central state apparatus is decomposing, leading to the rise of regional, economic warlordism. The acceleration of information technologies in these areas is helping to create Westernized, middle-class bubbles, whereby businesses and home offices are maintained by private electricity generators, private water wells, and private security guards, even as state electricity, water, and police systems deteriorate. These middle-class bubbles are large, but the numbers of the poor and the subproletariat in the subcontinent and China are much larger. Information technology will certainly bring the middle classes of Asia and the rest of the world closer together, but they will become like the aristocrats of medieval Europe, who had more in common with each other than with their own peasant populations. Traditional state forms will not forever survive such crosscutting loyalties.
"In postindustrial societies, information technologies will undermine the bureaucratic state in other ways. The federal government, as we know it, is not synonymous with the United States of America, but with the Gilded Age, when great increases in national wealth and population led to a complex society that required a huge bureaucracy to manage it. The building-down of the federal government will continue, whatever the fate of the 1994 Republican revolution, since the accelerating computer revolution will make many bureaucrats redundant while allowing millions of individuals to make end runs around the state. But this hopeful trend comes with a price.
"As the late-eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson reminds us, human beings are most attached to each other where material conveniences are the least. The decline in civic spirit from the era of classical Greece (when Athenians regularly risked their lives in war and the average citizen took an intense, daily interest in city-state politics) to our own day, when many citizens do not serve in the military and invent excuses to avoid jury duty, is, as Ferguson would suggest, related to the growth in technological conveniences, which have enlarged the parameters of our personal lives, bringing an array of new choices and stresses that leave little time for communal concerns.
"We are back to pure history then: the Darwinian struggle of individuals, each made more powerful than ever because of the computer. As the state withers, corporations grow in relative power because corporations--which are run by clusters of individuals committed to financial gain, and thus to efficiency and talent rather than to "politics" and "hiring quotas"--make better use of information technologies than do governments or universities.
"But corporations have yet to establish a moral framework to the degree that Western governments have. And as the state proves increasingly unable to control our appetites, the search for new disciplinary values, religious and otherwise, will grow in importance. Remember that as new information proliferates, the past recedes ever faster and historical sensibility (and wisdom) consequently diminishes. Because of the speed at which this information travels, much of it will be unchecked and prove false. Given the greater cultural and material divides, the spread of both conspiracy theories and fierce ideologies has never before known such fertile conditions. We should be trembling.
"The twenty-first century will certainly be more tumultuous than the twentieth. In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams writes that two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, the fact that a simple and blunt man of action like Ulysses S. Grant--a type who "should have been extinct for ages"--had attained the presidency, is proof that human nature does not evolve. What future Alexanders, Caesars, Grants, and Hitlers will the computer age give us, I wonder?"
Robert Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly and the author of five books, most recently The End of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century. He also has written for The New Republic and the New York Times.