Summary For the first time in history the entire planet is capitalist. Even the few remaining
command economies are surviving or developing through their linkages to global,
capitalist markets. Yet this is a brand of capitalism that is at the same time very old
and fundamentally new. It is old because it appeals to relentless competition in the
pursuit of profit, and because individual satisfaction (deferred or immediate) is its
driving engine. But it is fundamentally new because it is tooled by new
information and communication technologies that are at the root of new
productivity sources, new organizational forms, and the construction of a global
economy.
In the following paper, presented at the UNRISD conference on Information
Technologies and Social Development (Geneva, June 1998), Manuel Castells
examines the profile of this new world, centred around multinational corporations,
global financial markets and a highly concentrated system of technological
research and development. He stresses the extreme flexibility of the system, which
allows it to link up everything that is valuable according to dominant values and
interests, while disconnecting everything that is not valuable, or becomes
devalued. This simultaneous capacity to include and exclude people, territories and
activities is based upon a capacity to network.
A network is simply a set of interconnected nodes. It may have a hierarchy, but it
has no centre. Relationships between nodes are asymmetrical, but they are all
necessary for the functioning of the networkófor the circulation of money,
information, technology, images, goods, services, or people throughout the
network. The most critical distinction in this organizational logic is not stability,
but inclusion or exclusion. Networks change relentlessly: they move along, form
and re-form, in endless variation. Those who remain inside have the opportunity to
share and, over time, to increase their chances. Those who drop out, or become
switched off, will see their chances vanish.
In other words, networksóall networksóultimately come out ahead by
restructuring, whether they change their composition, their membership, or even
their tasks. The problem is that people, and territories, whose livelihood and fate
depend on their positioning in these networks, cannot adapt so easily. In a
downgraded region, capital disinvests, software engineers migrate, tourists find
another fashionable spot, and global media close down. Networks adapt, bypass
the area (or some people), and re-form elsewhere, or with someone else. But the
human matter on which the network was living cannot so easily mutate. It becomes
trapped, or devalued, or wasted. And this leads to social underdevelopment,
precisely at the threshold of the potentially most promising era of human
fulfilment.
It is urgently necessary to reverse the downward spiral of exclusion and to use
information and communication technologies to empower humankind. The
reintegration of social development and economic growth in the information age
will require massive technological upgrading of countries, firms and households
around the worldóa strategy of the highest interest for everyone, including
business. It will take a dramatic investment in overhauling the educational system
everywhere. It will require the establishment of a worldwide network of science
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and technology, in which the most advanced universities will be willing to share
knowledge and expertise for the common good. It must aim at reversing, slowly
but surely, the marginalization of entire countries, or cities or neighbourhoods, so
that the human potential that is currently being wasted can be reinvested.
Manuel Castells is a professor of sociology, and of city and regional planning, at
the University of California, Berkeley.