Information Technology Meets Global Ecology II: Are Computers Centralizing or
Decentralizing Power?
Ideological opponents to information technology like Jerry Mander argue that
computers, “gather staggering new power in the hands of giant corporations,
banks, and global trade bureaucracies.1” Mander tells us that, “Two hundred
corporations now control twenty-eight percent of global economic activity;
twenty-four corporations are among the hundred largest economies of the
world, far larger than many countries.2” All this is made possible by the
centralizing power of computers.
Consider this 1924 statement by educator Joseph Hart which discusses the
revolution of electricity as opposed to steam-power:
Centralization has claimed everything for a century: the results are apparent
on every hand. But the reign of steam approaches its end: a new stage in the
industrial revolution comes on. Electrical power breaking away from its
servitude to steam is becoming independent. Electricity is a decentralizing
form of power: it runs out over distributing lines and subdivides to all the
minutiae of life and need. Working with it, men may feel the thrill of
control and freedom again.3
How wrong this writer was. The production and distribution of electricity is
centralized in the hands of a few large corporations. Rather than feeling the
freedom that this writer predicts, we are entirely dependent on the energy
companies. One of the greatest pleasures for back-to-the-landers, even today,
is the ability to get ‘off-the-grid’ - to be able to produce, regulate, and
control one’s energy costs and use.
*
These ideas appear as the feature article in the Feb 15th issue of Mindjack: www.mindjack.com
Next week we continue this discussion: Is the internet giving us power or
putting it in the hands of large corporations?
1 excerpt from “Internet: The Illusions of Empowerment,” by Jerry Mander,
Whole Earth, Winter, 1998. See Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred: The
Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations for a more
complete discussion of computers and freedom.
2 Ibid.
3 Joseph K. Hart., a professor of education wiriting in 1924, as quoted in
Stephen L. Talbot’s The Future Does Not Compute, O’Reilly and Associates,
1995, page 364.
