If the Information Age Never Happened, Where Does That Leave Us?

While few remember this today--at least in part, I suspect, because many prefer that it not be remembered--the "information age" was supposed to entail a transformation at the civilizational level comparable with the transition from an agrarian world to an industrialized world. This was supposed to be because of a radical substitution of "INFORMATION!" for every other economic input that was to make said information ever more the foundation of productivity, wealth, power and devalue tangible assets like land, minerals and (unskilled) human labor by comparison--"dematerializing" the economy in a manner that drove Newt Gingrich's "guru" Alvin Toffler and Reagan administration house intellectual George Gilder to, with their coauthors, declare grandiosely in the opening words of their would-be "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age" in 1994 that "[t]he central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter" as "[t]he powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things," and make very clear that they have in mind exactly what Toffler predicted ). Exemplary of what this meant in more concrete terms was Toffler's prediction in a book he published just a few years before putting his name to that document (1990's Powershift) that by 2025 the information age civilization would have replaced the industrial--one feature of which would be its having shifted away from industrial-style fossil fuel-burning to running on renewables.

Obviously, this did not happen. If many heeded Toffler, Gilder and company's pontification about the overthrow of matter one would have done better to heed instead what Madonna said about how we were "living in a material world," as we still do now, a fact underlined by how in 2025, far from an energy transition having been completed, it is not even clear that is properly beginning, the makeup of our ever-burgeoning "energy portfolio" having scarcely budged from what it was when Toffler was making his predictions, with this only the most obvious way in which our economy has been very far from "dematerializing" in that way Toffler predicted, and which would have been the case if "matter" and "the brute force of things" had been overthrown. However, it was not so easy for the champions of an imminent information age to back away off of the idea of an information age, hoven, however it originated, given how they had pressed into the service of a particular propaganda responsible for wide public awareness of the concept (thus could Jerry Seinfeld's neighbor Newman threaten him with the fact of his control of "INFORMATION!")--whose propaganda is made all too clear by the mention of such names as Gingrich, Gilder, Reagan. They simply had too much invested in it to let it go even as it lost credibility, with one result their lowering the bar for the "information age" from civilizational transformation to people simply having gadgets that access the Interweb, with, ironically, the economics of those gadgets endlessly reminding us how material their existence is. Thus, in contrast with the Tofflerian vision that had the "INNOVATION!" of the INFORMATION! Age using our ever-growing "knowledge" to find in the abundant and cheap raw material satisfactory or even superior replacements for the rare and costly, we hear ceaselessly of the need of those gadgets for copper and other still more exotic elements, not least those that actually get lumped together in discussion as rare earth minerals. Thus do we hear ceaselessly not of the radical economies we are achieving in the power consumption of these devices, but of the immense "carbon footprint" of what we do with our computers, with some worried that the reliance of artificial intelligence research on copious amounts of electricity dependent on our fossil fuel-guzzling energy base will by itself be enough to derail our extremely belated, glacially slow (and by those interests that have power, ferociously resisted), progress toward a "net zero" world.

Of course, all that being the case raises the question--if the Information Age, the proper Information Age that was the cause of all the fuss, never happened, then where does that leave us? The obvious answer is that when it comes to what really matters we remain squarely in the Industrial Age, with all that Age's ways of operating and thinking, with its constraints and rules and contradictions and problems that we not only failed to transcend because, again, the Information Age never came about, but which have actually worsened since that time when Toffler argued for the Information Age as our way out of them. One may argue why this has been the case--whether there was nothing to the information age but delusion, hucksterism and cynical political gamesmanship from the start, or whether the policies governments followed in the name of the information age were exactly the thing to prevent such an age from ever being properly born by making the envisaged and required radical technological progress less likely. However, whichever explanation we favor, that the Information Age did not happen is indisputable, and acceptance of the fact indispensable to our understanding our present discontents--and considering what options we may have for dealing with the unhappy situation with which they face us.