The end of hierarchies

From Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama. Page 23.

The early 1990s saw a flood of writing about the information revolution and the transformation that will be brought to everyone's doorstep as a result of the information superhighway. One of the most consistent and widely heralded themes of information age futurologists is that this technological revolution will spell the end of hierarchy of all sorts – political, economic, and social. As the story goes, information is power, and those at the top of the traditional hierarchies maintain their dominance by controlling access to information. Modern communications technologies – telephones, fax machines, copiers, cassettes, VCRs, and the centrally important networked personal computer – have broken this stranglehold on information.

I believe that the pace of change is an often underweighted aspect of our modern lives. Change breeds uncertainty, uncertainty often translates into caution, caution often leads to reduced productivity.

It is interesting to note that of the six technologies Fukuyama calls out as examples in 1995, three have effectively disappeared (fax machines, cassettes, and VCRs), one has been transformed (desktop telephone sets into smart phones), and one whose disappearance (copiers) was being heralded in 1995 with claims of the "paperless office," is going as strong as ever, whirring out ever more reams of printed paper.