What is new in the U.S. and world economies is not just a rise and fall of dot-com businesses but rather a deeper and more long-lasting transformation: the emergence of a new stage of global capitalism. This new stage, referred to by some as postindustrialism, has been labeled informationalism by Castells. Informationalism represents a third industrial revolution. The first followed the invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century and was characterized by the replacement of hand tools by machines, mostly in small workshops. The second followed the harnessing of electricity in the nineteenth century and was characterized by the development of large-scale factory production. The third revolution came to fruition in the 1970s with the diffusion of the transistor, the personal computer, and telecommunications. In other words, what we have is not an Internet economy but an information economy in which computers and the Internet play an essential enabling role. Castells has identified four features that distinguish informationalism from the prior industrial stage: the driving role of science and technology for economic growth; a shift from material production to information processing; the emergence and expansion of new forms of networked industrial organization; and the rise of socioeconomic globalization.
Capitalism and Colonialism: Subjugation of Human Societies
