New Technologies and Changing Doctrines

Abstract

Thirty years ago, the Hungarian exile George Paloczi-Horvath argued that a Leninist command economy would inevitably tear itself to shreds over an ever-increasing incapacity to handle information abundance.¹ The market is too powerful a model of unanticipated information, functioning far more accurately through price than through fiat. Moreover, civilisation itself is about the externalisation and cross-breeding of knowledge — the mutual tapping of the skills of others. As the nature of information is transformed and retransformed, it soaks into human arrangements along new and unimagined lines of opportunity.