Abstract
Information age societies will look very different from our current ones. In the past what mattered most was geography, natural resources, and physical assets. In the future intangible assets will be king. The ability to process and move information will displace much of the physical infrastructure of society. Fewer office buildings, hotels, roads, and shopping malls will be needed. Businesses will be disintermediated, distribution channels will vanish, and the middle manstock brokers, retailers, distributors, travel agents, etc.will become increasingly less important. Of course the form and role of government will change as well. For example governments have gone to war to protect physical assets such as land that other countries wanted. In the future people will steal intellectual assets and governments will have no one to attack Microsoft software, for example, is stolen by the citizens of China, not the government.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Davidow, W.H. (1997). When societies are built from bits. In: Lazar, A.A., Saracco, R., Stadler, R. (eds) Integrated Network Management V. IM 1997. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35180-3_58
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35180-3_58
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-5519-0
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