Today most people believe that cultures are more matters of taste than sources of guidance for behavior that can mislead as well as inform. We are all too keen to believe that all cultures are created equal, too slow to recognize the drawbacks of counterproductive cultures. This is especially true of the hybrid cultures that have begun to emerge in the hothouse of subsidy and intervention in many parts of the world in this century. Like the criminal subculture of America's inner cities, they retain incoherent bits of pieces of cultures appropriate to earlier stages of economic development and combine them with values for informing behavior in the Information Age.
The Information Revolution, therefore, will not merely release the spirit of genius, it will also unleash the spirit of nemesis. Both will contest as never before in the millennium to come.
The shift from an Industrial to an Information Society is bound to be breathtaking. The transition from one stage of economic life to another has always involved a revolution. We think that the Information Revolution is likely to be the most far-reaching of all. It will reorganize life more thoroughly than either the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. And its impact will be felt in a fraction of the time. Fasten your seat belts.
-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age
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