First mover advantage

  Declaring unlimited horizons for technological growth, they predicted a peaceful evolution beyond the vicissitudes of industrialism to a brave new world of affluence and stability. While there were more critical strains of postindustrial theory associated with the New Left and the student movement - such as Alain Touraine's (1971) anti-technocratic account of the 'programmed society' both versions were fundamentally at odds with Marxism, regarding proletarian struggle as a grimy relic from a fading smokestack era.

The unexpected return of economic crisis in the 70s briefly blighted such futurology and encouraged Marxists to dismiss it as a mere fad. But within a few years the basic propositions of postindustrialism were revived with redoubled strength, now reappearing under the Japanese label of 'the information society' and centred on the amazing capacities of microelectronics and genetic engineering to reconstitute the basic elements of mental and biological life (Bell 1979; Beniger 1986; Dizard 1982; Masuda 1980; Nora and Mine 1981; Oettinger 1980; Porat 1977, 1978). Fostered by state and corporate sponsors, harnessed to the mass marketing of the microcomputer, and widely disseminated by popularisers such as Toffler (1970; 1980; 1990) and Naisbett (1982) the allure of info-tech bit deeply into the culture of the 1980s.

Here it was swiftly articulated with an ascendant neoliberalism for which notions of information revolution provided a handy way to 'annex the language of social change from socialism' (Webster and Robins 1981, 250). Domestically, the demands of 'inevitable' scientific advance were deployed to berate trades unions resistant to technological change, while internationally insistence on the 'free flow of information' became a vital ingredient in a global reorganisation of the market. At the end of the decade, amidst the excitement of Cold War victory, silicon gee-whizzery fused with anticipations of the 'end of history' (Fukuyama 1992) to create visions of a new planetary order from which technology has terminally exorcised the spectre of class conflict.