When I speak about the radical changes around the development of the Network Society, I tend to use a lot of hyperbole. One of these is the statement that the Nation State will disappear. Of course it wont. For many years, the shift in value from the old organization to the new is not going to be complete. There will be activities that will be better organized centrally. There will be decisions made hierarchically and implemented by people who wont question them. What I mean by those statements is that the beating heart of value creation, the excitement of innovation, the attractive center of opportunity where those seeking empowerment and emancipation will gather is going to be elsewhere. The Nation State will be like the mainframe computer. It will still exist, just wont matter that much anymore. Mainframe computers (colloquially referred to as big iron[1]) are computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning and transaction processing. The term originally referred to the large cabinets called main frames that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers.[2][3] Later, the term was used to distinguish high-end commercial machines from less powerful units.[4] Most large-scale computer system architectures were established in the 1960s, but continue to evolve. [from Wikipedia] When is the last time that you saw boastful announcements of unexpected leaps of performance, of user interface innovation, or similar gains on the home pages of the technology websites or the business press associated with mainframes? Practically never, because the raise itself of the web as a means of communication coincided with the decline of the computer architecture and paradigm represented by the mainframe. These days we are even beyond the previous shifts from minicomputers to personal computers. We are even crossing from smartphones to smart dust. When Google bought Nest, the smart thermostat maker, they showed they realize that computers disappearing into the environment represent the next step in an unrelenting process. Do you think that the Nation State is going to be able to reform radically enough in order to stay relevant?
Posted on: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 09:28:03 +0000
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