Cyberocracy is Coming

by David Ronfeldt

Abstract

The government world lags behind the business world in feeling the effects of the information technology revolution and related innovations in organization. But government may change radically in the decades ahead. This essay fields a concept-- "cyberocracy"--to discuss how the development of, and demand for access to, the future electronic information and communications infrastructures--i.e., "cyberspace"--may alter the nature of bureacracy. While it is too early to say precisely what a cyberocracy may look like, the outcomes may include new forms of democratic, totalitarian, and hybrid governments. Optimism about the information revolution should be tempered by a constant, anticipatory awareness of its potential dark side.

Copyright notice: This article is copyrighted 1992 by Taylor & Francis, 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007, 1-800- 821-8312. It was originally published in The Information Society journal, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 243-296. Electronic reproduction and transmission for individual, non-commercial use only is permitted.

Author's note: This ascii file contains corrections of a few errata that appeared in the published article. As a courtesy to Taylor & Francis, individuals or organizations that down-load the article are requested to notify the author via e-mail at: or . He may periodically notify Taylor & Francis of the number of down-loads, but he will not provide them with the names and addresses.

This is a revised version of David Ronfeldt, Cyberocracy, Cyberspace, and Cyberology: Political Effects of the Information Revolution, P-7745, RAND, Santa Monica, 1991. I thank Robert Anderson, Roger Benjamin, Steve Bankes, Carl Builder, and Kevin McCarthy at RAND, William Dutton of the Annenberg School at USC, and Steven Rosell of Canada's Institute for Research on Public Policy for their comments and criticisms.

INTRODUCTION

This is a think-piece about how the information and communications technology revolution may affect politics and government in the future. The study does not subscribe to technological determinism, but it is enthusiastic, for its author has been captivated by thoughts like the following: "Perhaps it gets tiresome to read, as we have read for years, that advances in computing are going to change the world. But it's true."[1] "The world now taking shape is not only new but new in entirely new ways."[2] At the same time, the author's enthusiasm is tempered by a concern that the information revolution may have a dark side.

One idea--that something called "cyberocracy" is coming--motivates this essay.[3] It begins by reviewing the effects that the information revolution is having on business and government. This revolution and its associated technologies seem to be at an early stage of development, and analysts have barely begun to discern its likely political effects.

The essay then focuses on how the modern bureaucratic state may give way to the "cybercratic state" early in the next century. The conclusion recommends the creation of a new field of study around the concept of information, and suggests some items for a future research agenda.

CYBEROCRACY: CONCEPT FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

People have riddled history with their "-isms" and "-ocracies." Feudalism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, communism, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, bureaucracy--each historical age has created new ideas and institutional forms.

Most "isms" and "ocracies" of our day have existed for a long time. Socialism and communism, once heralded as the waves of the future, have been around more than a century. Capitalism and liberal democracy have endured much longer. Meanwhile, bureaucracy has spread throughout the public and private sectors of all modern administrative systems.

We thus continue using the vocabulary of the past to interpret the present and speculate about the future. But technological and other innovations are changing the world so rapidly, and so many more are on the horizon, especially in the areas of information and communications, that we may soon need a new vocabulary of concepts to comprehend the new age we are presumably entering-- what is termed the "post-industrial age" by some, the "information age" by others.[4]

What new "ism" or "ocracy" may arise? The purpose of this paper is to suggest that "cyberocracy" is coming. This term, from the roots "cyber-" and "-cracy," signifies rule by way of information. As it develops, information and its control will become a dominant source of power, as a natural next step in man's political evolution. In the past, under aristocracy, the high-born ruled; under theocracy, the high priests ruled. In modern times, democracy and bureaucracy have enabled new kinds of people to participate in government. In turn, cyberocracy, by arising from the current revolution in information and communications technologies, may slowly but radically affect who rules, how, and why.

Perhaps the literature does not need another attempt to field another term about the shape of things to come. Awful terms like "compunications," "technetronic society," and "computopia" have already come and gone.[5] The term cyberocracy may fare no better.

Be that as it may, to the extent that something like the phenomenon under discussion develops, it may affect the organization of governments and societies, the meaning of authority and democracy, the nature of bureaucracies, the behavior of elites, even the definition of progress. It may transform how people think about the "system" and the world in which they live. And it may give rise to new patterns of conflict and cooperation at all levels of society.

CAVEATS AND CLARIFICATIONS

This paper may seem to promise more than can be delivered. Its aim is to persuade the reader that something called cyberocracy is on the horizon, and to provide a general sense of what it may look like and how it may affect politics. But I do not presume to foretell with precision what a fully developed cyberocracy may look like. That may not be clear for decades. The best the essay may do is propose the concept, identify some forms that it may assume and some issues that its development may involve, and indicate some implications for policy analysis.

A few terms used throughout this essay--information, information technology, and information revolution--deserve clarification. How best to define the term "information" remains one of the key problems of the information revolution. There are many definitions out there, but none of them seem satisfactory, so I will not cite and pick from among them. Yet as a rule, many analysts subscribe to a rising hierarchy with data at the bottom, information in the middle, and knowledge at the top (some would add intelligence or wisdom above that).[6] In some versions of this hierarchy, data are defined as raw facts, and information as organized data or patterns that arise from the data. Some analysts presume that more of the former will mean more of the latter--e.g., more data will mean more information, and more information more knowledge-- but this is not necessarily true. Also, it should not be presumed that the hierarchy is driven from the bottom by data; values and value judgements may intrude at all levels. Depending on context, I often use the term information to refer collectively to the hierarchy, but at other times I use the term to mean something more than data but less than knowledge. It may turn out that knowledge is to the study of information what wealth has been to the study of economics, and power to the study of politics. (It may also turn out that networks are to the study of information what markets have been to the study of economics, and institutions to the study of politics.)

The term "information technology," also expressed as "information and communications technology," and in short as "the new technology," includes computers but rarely refers solely or primarily to them. As used here, the term encompasses not only computer hardware and software but also the communications system, networks, and databanks and other information utilities to which computers may be connected. In some allusions, this technology may be located in an office, but in others, it may be spread web-like around the world. Advances in television, radio, and telephone technologies are also increasingly part of the information technology revolution. That all these technologies will come into play as the demand grows for new kinds of information- related goods and services may be illustrated with the following question: Will the morning newspaper be delivered electronically to subscribers by a computer network, an interactive cable television , a wireless radio, or a telephone company?

However, the term "information revolution," or "information and communications revolution," is not used in a merely technological sense. This revolution derives partly from the new technologies, but it is not determined by them. Many recent developments in the theory and practice of management reflect the information revolution, but have little to do with technology per se. They owe to conceptual changes in the awareness of the role of information in human behavior, organization, and society. The information revolution is a social, political, economic, cultural, and psychological, as well as technological revolution.

Cyberocracy is the new term here. Terms with "cyber-" as the prefix--e.g., cyberspace--are currently in vogue among some visionaries and technologists who are seeking names for new concepts and realities related to the information revolution. The prefix is from a Greek root, kybernan, meaning to steer or govern, and a related word, kybernetes, meaning pilot, governor, or helmsman.[7] The prefix was introduced by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s in his works creating the field of "cybernetics" (a term related to cybernetique, a French word meaning the art of government). Some readers may object to my addition to the lexicon, but I prefer it to alternatives like the "informatization" of government and the "informated" bureaucracy.[8] In my view, a good case exists for using the "cyber-" prefix, for it bridges the concepts of information and governance better than any other available prefix or term. Indeed, kybernan is also the root of the word "govern" and its extensions.

INFORMATION AS POWER

The new information and communications technologies are spreading rapidly throughout offices, factories, and homes around the world. The popular and professional literature is filled with news and ideas about the latest computer hardware and software, about databanks and expert systems, about fiber-optic cables, communications satellites, and emerging global networks for electronic mail, conferencing, and data transmission, about privacy, security, and computer crime, about electronic cottage industries, automated production lines, and offices of the future, and about the vast societal changes that may result.

These developments have affected how people think about power and its use. Agreement is spreading that information should be viewed both as a new source of power and as an agent for transforming one kind of power into another. In the words of two very different observers:

"The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic and transforming resources of industrial society." (Daniel Bell)[9]

"We are witnessing a historic transformation of the traditional modes of power. Power today is becoming based less on physical and material parameters (territory, military forces) and more on factors linked to the capability of storing, managing, distributing, and creating information." (Regis Debray)[10]

In short, we are beginning to live in an "information economy" and an "information society"--we are entering an "information age."[11] But just how far into it are we?

STRONG EFFECTS ON BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

Business leaders have recognized and responded to these trends more quickly than have government leaders. Economic thinking and behavior are already heavily affected by the information revolution.

The production, dissemination, and consumption of information have become major growth activities, especially in the United States where more than half the jobs may be information- related.[12] In the advanced nations, jobs in the information sector are said to be growing more rapidly than jobs manufacturing physical goods, while manufacturing is becoming less labor- intensive and more knowledge-intensive. Management economist Peter Drucker estimated in 1986 that, "In all developed countries 'knowledge' workers have already become the center of gravity of the labor force."[13] Meanwhile, investors and "knowledge elites" in the private sector have found that creating new wealth is depending more on information than on other resources.

It used to be said that money is power. Now one hears instead that "Information is power, and economic information is economic power."[14] Former Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston has reportedly claimed that information about money is more valuable than money itself.[15]

Thus information is increasingly treated as a valuable source of competitive advantage, and capital and information are becoming more interchangeable as factors of production. For some business leaders, this means that information is important as a source of capital; for others, that information is succeeding capital as a source of economic and political power. The effects of such rethinking appear throughout the business world.

Conceptual Changes

Concepts of business management are changing partly because of the new technology. The private sector has found that a dispersed business can now be managed directly from a single center or from several locations. Corporate officers and management theorists tout the end of hierarchy and the rise of flat organizations. Top management finds that the new information systems may enable them to run complex operations without relying heavily on middle management. In some cases, the new technology means that a wider span of economic and social control may be exercised from the top; in other cases, the technology may open new channels for lower echelons and outside investors to challenge management decisions. Access to telephone lines and satellite systems for high-speed data transmission has become an important consideration in decisions about where to locate new foreign investments.

Concepts of markets are changing. A marketplace used to mean a geographic area with a boundary that expanded and contracted. But as Daniel Bell notes, the Rotterdam spot market for oil "is no longer in Rotterdam. Where is it? Everywhere. It is a telex-radio- computer network." As work becomes detached from place, and operations from central headquarters, "we see a change of extraordinary historical and sociological importance--the change in the nature of markets from 'places' to 'networks.'"[16] The entire planet is becoming a real-time market for electronic financial transactions. As the global economy grows, what were once called "multinational corporations" are evolving into "global companies" that regard the entire world as a production platform and marketplace, virtually irrespective of national borders.

Concepts of capital are changing. Corporations now buy, sell, store, and transmit information as though it were money (and vice- versa). Capital is viewed as a form of information (and vice-versa). "Capital today exists largely in terms of credit information. Banks no longer ship around large quantities of cash; instead they transmit credit information."[17] Electronic transactions and financial news result in immediate, worldwide adjustments in monetary exchange rates without any bullion or currency physically changing hands. Thus, in Wriston's view, a new "information standard" is replacing the gold standard.[18]

Wriston, who has been praised for building Citibank into "the one institution that understands that finance no longer has to do with money but with information,"[19] says that new terms and concepts are needed.

"[M]ost of the terms we use in standard economic analysis were invented in the industrial age, and while many are still relevant, some no longer measure what they once did, because the base has changed....If we think about our economy, another word we use is "capital." Economists of many schools tend to agree that capital is stored-up labor which has been expressed in dollars. A good case can now be made that knowledge and information are becoming the new capital in today's world.... A strong argument can be made that information capital is as important, or even more critical, to the future growth of the American economy than money. Despite this perception, this intellectual capital does not show up in the numbers economists customarily look at or quote about capital information."[20]

Meanwhile, traditional concepts of labor and work are also being challenged; the new technology is transforming the nature of work and relations between workers and managers. According to Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff:

"The contemporary language of work is inadequate to express these new realities. We remain, in the final years of the twentieth century, prisoners of a vocabulary in which managers require employees; superiors have subordinates; jobs are designed to be specific, detailed, narrow, and task-related; and organizations have levels that in turn make possible chains of command and spans of control.... However, the images associated with physical labor can no longer guide our conception of work."

In her view, "work organization requires a new division of learning to support a new division of labor," because in the final analysis "the informated organization is a learning institution."[21] The image she offers for labor-management relations is one of concentric rings rather than hierarchical pyramids.

Computer-Productivity Paradox

Despite these changes in theory and practice, the new technology is far from fulfilling its promises for business. Instead of a paperless "office of the future," only about 1 percent of business information is currently kept in electronic form. Moreover, the new technology has so far had few positive effects on efficiency and productivity, and a "computer-productivity paradox" is widespread. As MIT economist Robert Solow notes, "We see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics."[22] This does not mean that the technology cannot fulfill its promise. The problem is not so much the technology as the fact that organizations are still learning how to absorb and use it.

For the most part, the technology is being inserted into existing organizational forms--computers are being thrown at workers and managers--as a tool to improve the speed and efficiency of routinized parts of the production process. But analysts are finding that many organizations may need some redesigning to take advantage of the technology and its capacity to integrate the production process. A few firms have figured this out--for example, Frito-Lay Inc. and Raychem Corporation stand out for their use of the new technologies to enhance productivity. But for each story of successful redesign and adaptation, there are more stories of failure. Many problems reportedly reflect the absence of networking among the (often mismatched) computer systems that a company has, a result being that even if individual offices are well equipped and have computer-competent staff, they may lack electronic access to vital data in another office or the company's mainframe.[23]

Perhaps a productivity paradox should be expected in the early phases of a revolutionary technology; the existence of the paradox may be evidence that the information revolution is in an early phase. Stanford economic historian Paul David has reportedly found that the introduction of electric motors led to a similar lag in productivity in the early 1900s until factories shifted entirely from steam to electricity, redesigned their layouts, and got fully wired in the 1920s.[24] David and others concerned about the current productivity paradox feel it may be resolved in the 1990s, particularly if a shift occurs from emphasizing the computer as a tool for processing data to using it more as a tool for acquiring and sharing information across vast networks.[25]

As part of the transition, the current U.S. recession may continue (even worsen), or a global recession/depression may occur if either of two propositions is valid: (a) that a revolutionary new technology is likely to induce, or help induce, a major recession/depression in the course of its adoption; and/or (b) that a major recession/depression is required for a revolutionary technology to take hold. The histories of the telephone and telegraph in the late 1800s, and of electricity and electric motors in the early 1900s, lend credence to both propositions, as does the current U.S. recession.[26]

LAGGING EFFECTS ON GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

The governments of all the post-industrial nations are acquiring the new technologies, seeking competitive advantages from them, and addressing the issues they raise. The governments of England, France, Japan, and the United States have all produced major studies of various policy implications of the information and communications revolution since the 1970s. France is pursuing the "informatization" of society. Japan has an aggressive plan to re-wire the country with fiber-optic cables and connect businesses, homes, and institutions to them by the year 2015. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, notably with Congressional approval of a controversial bill sponsored by Senator Albert Gore, is beginning to determine to what extent, when, and how to connect the United States with networks of fiber-optic cables and high-performance computers.

The new technology has given rise to a new generation of policy issues. Foremost among them have been privacy and security issues. Sweden was the first nation to enact a privacy law, in 1973, after discovering that data on Swedish citizens was available in 2000 data banks stored outside the country. A year later, the United States passed its first Privacy Act to protect individual rights that could be jeopardized by the use of the new technologies. Since then, numerous other countries have adopted laws to protect privacy.

The technology has also obliged governments to focus on a new set of international telecommunications issues. The growth of transborder data flows and international trade in information services, the rising demand for access to communications networks and crowded radio-spectrum frequencies, and the prospect of direct broadcast satellites have all raised complex commercial and regulatory issues, and touched sensitive nerves about national sovereignty and independence. International institutions and agreements, like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have all been modified to deal with "a world economy that is more and more driven by flows of information."[27]

Thus governments are responding to the challenges that the new technologies pose for the defense of individual and national rights. But in a more general sense, the government world has been slower than the business world at coming to grips with the information revolution.

Recognition of Information's Power

Numerous corporate leaders have spoken and written about the information revolution. But while a vast speculative literature exists about the political effects of the information revolution, only a few government leaders, notably France's President Francois Mitterand and former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, have shown keen interest in the significance of the new technology.

Shultz quickly realized in the 1980s that it represented a new source of power. In his view, its diffusion was making the world smaller and more interdependent, but also more turbulent. It was altering the technological bases of national, regional, and global economies. It was inducing political changes that would challenge traditional concepts of national sovereignty and affect not only the role of government in society but also the international balance of power.[28] He foresaw that the outcome would be to the advantage of the open, democratic societies of the West.

"The more they [communists] try to stifle these technologies, the more they are likely to fall behind in this movement from the industrial to the information age; but the more they permit these new technologies, the more they risk their monopoly of control over information and communication."[29]

Thus, recognition is spreading in governments around the world that the new technologies may profoundly alter the nature of political power, sovereignty, and governance.

The distribution of power and the prospects for cooperation and conflict are increasingly seen as a function of the differing abilities of governments and other political actors to utilize the new technologies. A new distinction is emerging between the information "haves" and "have-nots." Some actors may become global information powers, but others, notably in the Third World, fear "electronic colonization" and "information imperialism."

Information flows based on the spread of the new technology are undermining traditional concepts of territorial sovereignty.[30] Information in electronic form, unlike most goods and services, is difficult to control; financial data flows, electronic mail between computers and fax machines, and television broadcasts from remote trouble spots do not halt at border check points. Clinging to closed, autarchic notions of sovereignty is less and less a viable option for ultra-nationalistic governments.

A key expectation about governance is that the new technology benefits society over the state, and thereby strengthens the prospects for democracy. The revolutionary upheavals of 1989, especially in Eastern Europe, have provided evidence for this, and raised optimism that open societies are superior and will triumph over closed ones. But in the United States and other leading democracies, the new technology may also lie behind trends that could undermine the democratic process: e.g., the growth of single- issue politics, media sound-bites, targeted mailings, and public surveillance.

In addition, the new technology has raised expectations that top leaders and their staff will eventually have access to better information, from any part and level of government, virtually on demand. But meanwhile, especially in U.S. foreign policy, the modernization of an office's communications systems has sometimes enabled it to expand its operational horizons in ways that stimulate bureaucratic rivalries.

In short, the basis exists in the government world for conceptual and structural shifts that are as profound as in the business world. Yet, by comparison, the government world appears to be changing much more slowly and uncertainly. With few exceptions, policymakers and analysts are just beginning to discern how government and politics may ultimately be affected by the information revolution.[31]

Slow Progress in the U.S. Government

Applying the new technology to government has been a stressful task for the U.S. government since the 1970s. In 1984, J. Peter Grace, who had just headed a presidential commission on waste and inefficiency in the federal government, observed that:

"Over three quarters of the federal government's white-collar work force is involved in the processing of information--from mailing Social Security payments to processing tax returns.... The federal government is the single largest user of data processing systems in the world."[32]

But his commission was appalled by the obsolescence, incompatibility, and duplication of computerized information systems scattered about the federal branch, by the rapid turnover of systems personnel, and by the "woefully inadequate" quality of the information available to federal managers.[33]

Federal offices and agencies had a terrible time in the 1980s trying to modernize their information systems and computerize their administrative activities.[34] The list included the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Patent Office, and offices in the Army and the Navy. According to a General Accounting Office official testifying to Congress in 1989, "The government spends about $20 billion each year on information technology and management, but I would be hard-pressed to identify a single ... systems development project that could be used as a model."[35]

Efforts to install advanced information systems in the White House did not fare well either. By the mid 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter took office, the White House systems were much less sophisticated than the business world's, and had been installed in a haphazard, fragmented, and uncoordinated manner. The emphasis was, and remained, on improving the efficiency of routine office tasks more than on informing the decision makers and improving their efficiency. Some analysts saw that the new technology could provide tools to develop an institutional memory and support crisis management. However, an effort to develop an integrated decision- support system for the Carter White House, and a subsequent effort under President Ronald Reagan, both ran afoul of internal power politics and staff rivalries, and were halted.[36]

Yet a case may still be made that the improvements which have occurred in the White House communications systems since the 1960s have had a significant effect on the ability of the President and the White House and National Security Council (NSC) staffs to take an increasingly operational and independent approach to the conduct of foreign policy.

"The situation room and its communications systems thus helped Presidents to seize control of the foreign-policy system. It helped the NSC staff to serve the President as he must be served, even if it offered also unfair advantages in the bureaucratic competition. But established initially to bring Kennedy and his staff more fully into the policy game, it would be employed by subsequent Presidential aides-- especially Kissinger and Brzezinski--to keep out State and Defense, sometimes even their Secretaries. The new communication networks allowed both Presidents and the White House staffers to get more deeply into the daily business of diplomacy, sometimes acting without the knowledge of the officials actually charged with those responsbilities. The machines have allowed the growth of the operational Presidency."[37]

Congress did not advance more effectively than the Executive branch in this period.

"As an organization, Congress adopted computerized information services in a slow, halting, and fragmented manner.... The key to understanding Congress's move into the computer age lies not in discovering the nature of modern information systems, but rather in delving into the nature of Congress as an organization."[38]

The House and the Senate installed separate networks to provide access to electronic mail, to computer-based issue briefs from the Congressional Research Service, and to the SCORPIO system of databases. This system, which grew out of computerizing the Library of Congress's card catalog, included files on the substance and status of recent bills, on contents of the Congressional Record, and on references to policy-relevant articles in the periodical literature.[39] The new systems could also be used to track voting records and compile data on congressional districts.

As in other parts of the government, the new technology affected the distribution of knowledge and power on the Hill. It seemed to have a democratizing effect; for example, it enabled members to challenge the traditional "resident information" in the minds, staffs, and files of committee chairs. But the Hill's new information and communications systems also seemed to reinforce incumbency, because members could use these systems, especially their databases, to help get reelected.

The information systems of the executive and legislative branches, already fragmented within each branch, were kept entirely separate from each other. However, whereas executive branch officials could sometimes gain access to the Congressional databases, its representatives could rarely get their hands on databases and simulation models used in the executive branch. Thus, in various ways, "The introduction of the computer threatened to upset the comfortable pattern of intrabranch and interbranch power holding."[40]

This picture improved during the 1980s, but not much. While it is difficult to ascertain the status of new applications in the government, it appears that many departments and agencies now have electronic mail, and are putting some basic records in electronic databases. But most of these networks and databases are rudimentary, are not interconnected, and may be jealously guarded.

The new technology has mostly been applied in ways that conform to established bureaucratic practices. The U.S. government appears to remain in a phase of trying to install the technology, to make it improve efficiency, and to decide what else to do with it. Will it change how officials obtain information, monitor policies, identify options, and make decisions? Will the reluctance be overcome for different departments and agencies to interconnect their networks, and provide access to each others' databases? Will the result be a more open and democratic process? Such questions are far from answered.

A REVOLUTION BARELY BEGUN

In sum, the information revolution is well underway, but it is also in its infancy. The beginnings of its maturation may be ten years away. The technology remains in an incipient stage of development compared to what is on the drawing boards and in the minds of the visionaries. The best and worst are yet to come in terms of the technology's effects on society, and especially on its politics.

A new technology usually has to prove itself first in terms of efficiency. Advanced information and communications systems, properly applied, are improving the efficiency and cost- effectiveness of many activities. But improved efficiency is not the only or even the best possible effect. The new technology is also having a transforming effect, for it disrupts old ways of thinking and doing things, provides capabilities to do things differently, and suggests that some things may be done better if done differently:

"The consequences of new technology can be usefully thought of as first-level, or efficiency, effects and second level, or social system, effects. The history of previous technologies demonstrates that early in the life of a new technology, people are likely to emphasize the efficiency effects and underestimate or overlook potential social system effects. Advances in networking technologies now make it possible to think of people, as well as databases and processors, as resources on a network. Many organizations today are installing electronic networks for first-level efficiency reasons. Executives now beginning to deploy electronic mail and other network applications can realize efficiency gains such as reduced elapsed time for transactions. If we look beyond efficiency at behavioral and organizational changes, we'll see where the second-level leverage is likely to be. These technologies can change how people spend their time and what and who they know and care about. The full range of payoffs, and the dilemmas, will come from how the technologies affect how people can think and work together--the second- level effects."[41]

In some areas, information technology is beginning to emerge from the efficiency-proving stage. We may thus begin to see increasing evidence of a lesson from the history of an earlier revolutionary technology, the printing press: According to its greatest historian, Elizabeth Eisenstein, it "created conditions that favored, first, new combinations of old ideas and, then, the creation of entirely new systems of thought."[42] Drucker has said that a radical technology may not displace established technologies unless the new one proves itself ten times more cost-effective.[43] Afterwards, the structural changes implied by the new technology are much more likely to occur. Indeed, a realization that institutional redesigns are needed to take full advantage of a new technology may be an important sign of maturation.

Extrapolating from the current effects of the new technology may thus not be a good guide to its future effects. As the technology lives up to its potential, new elites, institutions, and ideologies may arise.

3. BEYOND BUREAUCRACY: CYBEROCRACY

Throughout history, information has been essential to government, and different types of governments may be distinguished by the ways in which they acquire, process, transmit, and control information. Yet information per se has rarely been considered a key organizing principle in theory or practice.[44] Cyberocracy implies that information and its control will be elevated to a key principle.

The term needs to be defined. A precise definition is not possible at present, but in a general sense cyberocracy may manifest itself in either or both of two ways:

1. narrowly, as a form of organization that supplants traditional forms of bureaucracy and technocracy;
2. broadly, as a form of government that may redefine relations between state and society, and between the public sector and the private sector.

This section briefly elaborates on the first, Section 5 on the second. In between, some infrastructural factors are discussed that may affect the outcome.

Although the shape of a full-fledged cyberocracy remains obscure, it should spell major changes in the nature and conduct of government. It should not mean that a nation's intelligence services, think-tanks, media, or other sources of informational power dominate government, although the information revolution has increased their visibility and importance. The major impact will probably be felt in terms of the organization and behavior of the modern bureaucratic state.[45]

Bureaucracies enable governments to generate, process, distribute, and store information. Even the Egyptian, Roman, and other ancient empires were administered in part by bureaucracies. Yet the terms "bureaucracy," "bureaucratic," and "bureaucrat" are not ancient; they date from the 1830s and 1840s. The growth of formal bureaucracy is a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the modern bureaucratic state is one of mankind's recent accomplishments. For organizations in both the public and private sectors, the bureaucracy represents an important, modern technology of control.[46]

To some extent, a cyberocracy would be a bureaucracy changed by computers. This new form presumes the diffusion of advanced information and communications systems throughout a nation's government (and its public and private sectors generally). It also implies the rise of elites who rely on those systems and work to use them to their fullest capabilities.

But it would be a mistake to define a cyberocracy as a computerized bureaucracy, or a "cybercrat" as a bureaucrat with a computer. The new technology opens the doors to new capabilities and possibilities; it implies that things may be done differently. This difference may stem less from the computer someone may have than from the access it may provide to networks and databases outside one's office, and potentially across all branches and levels of government, in the private as well as the public sector, and internationally as well as domestically.

While bureaucracies are organized along thematic lines, big budgets and staffs are generally considered more important than information as bases of bureaucratic power. Moreover, the hierarchical structuring of bureaucracies into offices, departments, and lines of authority may confound the flow of information that may be needed to deal with complex issues in today's increasingly interconnected world. Development of a "cybercratic state" may mean that "big information" becomes a more important source of power and authority than a budget.

Cyberocracy must surpass bureaucracy and its 20th century iteration, "technocracy,"[47] if new techniques of acquiring and using information are to take hold. Bureaucracy depends on going through channels and keeping information in bounds; in contrast, cyberocracy may place a premium on gaining information from any source, public or private. Technocracy emphasizes "hard" quantitative and econometric skills, like programming and budgeting methodologies; in contrast, a cyberocracy may bring a new emphasis on "soft" symbolic, cultural, and psychological dimensions of policymaking and public opinion. Bureaucrats command offices and channels. Technocrats command scientific expertise and analytical skills. Cybercrats may not only command all that their predecessors commanded, but also redraw the boundaries of appropriate, authorized behavior.

Cyberocracy may mean that the traditional notions of bureaucratic boundaries are broken and that the public and private sectors become increasingly permeable to each other. The new technology makes possible a degree of networking and bypassing that would play havoc with the traditions of a hierarchical bureaucracy, but that may become hallmarks of future organizational processes.

One key to being a cybercrat may be the ability to tap multiple sources of information in electronic form, available inside and outside the official system, from both public and private sectors, in ways that bypass or break the conventional boundaries of bureaucracy. Another key may be the ability to readily communicate and consult, individually or in teams, with selected individuals inside and outside of government who may be able to contribute to a policymaking process, even though those individuals may be far removed from one's immediate office area. Policy consultation and coordination may become more extensive than ever, but may unfold in ways that defy traditional bureaucratic conceptions. At stake, then, is not only access to information, but also control of how information is used to influence policymaking and to direct behavior.

A wholly new information and communications infrastructure will be required for such a system.

MIND-BENDING NEW INFRASTRUCTURE

Cyberocracy will require handy systems for selectively acquiring and representing complex information about how a particular political, economic, social, or other system may be performing, and for assessing policy options about how to affect the performance of a system. It should be possible to call up and use within minutes or hours the kinds of information that may now take days or longer to assemble.

Thus it is still too soon for cyberocracy, for it has technical requirements that are not yet met. But they are under development and may be available in little more than ten years. Better computer hardware and software are needed, as well as much better communications networks and data banks.

Computer Hardware and Software

The technology is still at a stage where we are very conscious of it; it is not yet "transparent" to us.[48] Desk-top, lap-top, and palm- top computers must be made much more powerful and convenient than today's models.[49] Even the desk-top varieties should probably have flat-console screens. Storage capacity should be massive by today's standards. Software for working with mixed media must be fully realized, so that text, sound, and graphics may be easily mixed and transmitted together. And what works on one machine should be workable on another. According to John Walker, the visionary president of Autodesk, Inc.,

"What is happening today is that all of the barriers, hardware and software, that once distinguished personal computers from engineering workstations are being erased.... As the current technological transition matures, we will enter an era in which the easily-drawn distinctions among "PCs", "workstations", and even "mainframes" begin to disappear. There will be, instead, a continuum of computing capability and cost that ranges from pocket pen-based portables to parallel supercomputers, all of which can be accessed by users with a common user interface, and which run a wide variety of industry standard applications."[50]

Technologists at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) forsee adding active "badges," "tabs," "pads," and display-size "boards" to the list of technologies for creating "ubiquitous computing" that is seamless and invisible.[51]

Also, new techniques are needed for "envisioning information."[52] This will not only enhance data representation and analysis, but also result in human-computer interfaces that are smarter, friendlier, and more realistic and informative than at present. For example, an Information Visualizer that was under experimental development at Xerox PARC offered real-time, three-dimensional, interactive animation in color.[53] An objective of such efforts is to provide visually easy but richly detailed ways of finding, representing, and scanning information that might otherwise be located in a volume hundreds of pages thick or an array of filing cabinets. Some designers aim to eventually develop ways to watch data "flow" over time, as might be the case with a model of an organization, of international financial flows, or of a physical, chemical, or bioligical process. According to Walker, the challenge is

"to build, inside a computer, models of things that exist in the real world. Whether you call it computer aided drafting, or solid modeling, or computational chemistry, or desktop video, or virtual reality, this concept is at the heart of the technological adventure of the second half of the Twentieth Century and will form the centerpiece of the industrial revolution of the Twenty-First."[54]

Many of these capabilities may be available in a few years, for the power of microprocessors is expected to continue doubling every two years, as it has done since the early 1980s. By the end of the 1990s, it should be possible to make desk-top computers that are more powerful than today's supercomputers.[55]

Communications Networks and Conferencing Systems

The United States and other advanced societies are on the cusp of a shift in significance--from what may be done with a computer in a single office or organization, to what may be done as a result of connecting a computer to communications networks, conferencing systems, databases, and modelling and simulation systems elsewhere within and far beyond the boundaries of that office or organization. Vast computer communication networks and "internets" are spreading rapidly around the United States and the rest of the world. The best networks provide for electronic mail, news-related discussions, group conferencing, and remote logins to and file transfers from distant sites. These capabilities must spread to other networks, and many of these networks should be expanded and interconnected so that a user may communicate anything in electronic form (text, audio, video) with almost anybody, anywhere, anytime. Things are moving well in this direction--a "worldnet" is beginning to exist--and except for the "anybody" part, may be attainable not long after the turn of the century.[56]

It will take at least another decade to construct the full range of expected public and private, local and worldwide infrastructures, and to interconnect them where politically possible. Progress is coming from the spread of fiber-optic cables and satellite systems that can carry broad-bandwidth, multi-media transmissions. Fiber- optic cables have been laid under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, linking North America, Europe, and Asia. Cables have also been laid by telephone companies across the landmass of the United States and Canada and will be laid in Mexico. Lines are beginning to run into office buildings in the United States, and connections to some homes, for broadcast media as well as network communication purposes, are expected within little more than ten years. Japan has a far more aggressive program than the United States for thoroughly rewiring its country with fiber-optic cables.

The fiber-optic "highways" and "railroads" laid to date are not likely to become obsolete soon. Some commercial fibers now spanning the United States can carry transmissions at a rate of 1.7 gigabits (billion bits) per second per fiber, which is equivalent to 25 thousand voice channels per fiber. Increasing their capacity will depend not on laying higher-quality fibers but on improving the laser transmitters and photodetector receivers; the existing "fiber's intrinsic information- carrying capacity is almost 1000 away from where we are now."[57]

A key objective for many visionaries is to upgrade and expand the most important network linking research centers and universities in the United States, the NSFNET/INTERNET (the successor to the ARPAnet). This is the most important computer network in the United States; including its spread to sites abroad, it is also the most important in the world-- some foreigners have even begun arguing that it is a world rather than a U.S. network. The future of the INTERNET is thus crucial to the future of the information revolution. The issues include the upgrading of the INTERNET's technological infrastructure, its extension beyond the high- prestige sites that it currently serves to other schools and communities in the United States, and its adaptation to commercial usage.

The resolution of these issues is underway. Last year, Congress approved The High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, a bill sponsored by Senator Albert Gore that aims to upgrade the network's lines this decade with fiber-optics to a capacity of up to 3 gigabits per second, more than 60 times their current best carrying capacity and 50 thousand times the ARPAnet's original capacity.[58] The act will also improve the usage of the network by creating on it the National Research and Education Network (NREN). This year, Sen. Gore has introduced a follow- on bill, The Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992, to ensure that the technology developed under last year's act is applied widely in the areas of K-12 education, libraries, health care, and industry, particularly manufacturing.

The INTERNET is intended to serve public, non-commercial purposes, but it is under increasing pressure to allow purely commercial traffic. Thus, Advanced Network & Services (ANS), a joint venture since 1990 of the IBM, MCI Communications, and Merit Network corporations that has a term contract to maintain the NSFNET, has been installing new lines in some areas and providing expanded services and new connections to it for commercial purposes through a privately-owned subsidiary, ANS CO+RE Systems, Inc., which was created in 1991. ANS CO+RE and the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), a rival association of seven networks that carry commercial traffic, agreed this June to work toward permanent interconectivity as a step toward creating what is being called the "Commercial Internet."

Satellite communications capabilities are also being dramatically upgraded and expanded. For example, during the Gulf War the major news media relied on suitcase-size portable satellite telephone systems from Mobile Telesystems Inc. (MTI) that use the IMARSAT network.[59] Moreover, parts of the U.S. military were so short of telecommunications equipment that they resorted to commercial suppliers.[60] This decade, Motorola aims to install a system--Iridium--that will use 77 small, low- orbiting satellites to enable subscribers to communicate to and from anywhere on the planet on portable cellular telephones. Also, the Soviet Union had planned to install a packet radio system for worldwide communications called Gonetz (Messenger) that would use 30-36 satellites.[61]

The ultimate goal is the construction of an end-to-end Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), once the governments, industries, and other bodies involved agree on worldwide standards and protocols. Such an agreement may occur this decade or soon afterwards, bringing a quantum jump in electronic mailing, file transferring, and conferencing capabilities. ISDN will enable users to switch at will between voice telephony and data transmission; to transmit text, audio, and video; and to engage in multimedia conferencing over long distances, all without having to use a modem. Today, it would take days to transmit an electronic copy of the text of the Encyclopedia Britannica from a library to a home (assuming a transmittable copy existed). Tomorrow, with a fiber- optic ISDN, it will only take seconds or a few minutes, graphics and related audio included.[62]

While the computer has received enormous attention because of its potential to transform social relations and empower individuals, the new communications networks are expected to have equally profound effects in the future:

"Networking has the power to allow everyone to participate in a worldwide marketplace--will we be able to ensure that everyone has equal access to it? Networking makes it feasible for people in organizations to share information freely and frequently--will we be able to release ourselves from "chain of command" organizational structures to take advantage of this capability? Networking will give people access to vast libraries of historical and up-to-the- minute written, visual, and oral information--will we be able to develop tools to allow people to chart their own courses of learning and discovery through so much information? Networking has the potential to connect all the world in one global electronic civilization--will we be able to sustain a diversity of cultures?"[63]

Data Banks and Information Utilities

Tomorrow's policymakers and analysts will need quick access to data banks the likes of which are but a gleam in the eye today. The number, variety, and sophistication of on-line databases is rapidly increasing. But because of expense and other matters, only a few people, mostly research and reference librarians, enjoy direct access. Moreover, much of what is available is quite current; few materials more than ten years old have been put in electronic form. And techniques for searching through these databases remain rudimentary, normally depending on selected key words; the user often ends up with far more, or far less, than he or she really wants.[64]

A cyberocracy will require that entire libraries of print materials (books, periodicals, reports, memoranda, survey data, time-series data, etc.) be readily available in electronic form. This will be necessary for historical as well as current materials, in order to broaden the available temporal horizons. And it will be necessary not only for the materials that may be associated with particular offices, but also for materials that may be needed from public and private sources beyond the office confines, in order to broaden the available spatial horizons.

Some companies have begun to market CD-ROMs (compact discs, read- only memories) that contain encyclopedic amounts of literature. But a more interesting and promising effort, led by the Thinking Machines Corporation in association with the Dow Jones, Apple Computer, and KPMG Peat Marwick corporations, seeks to develop a nationwide data network based on Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) that permit a user to view diverse information utilities as a single coherent system. It will enable computer users to access multiple libraries simultaneously, including the Library of Congress, and conduct searches and retrieve entire texts. It may also enable individuals to create personalized electronic newspapers. This use of WAIS has been under development and testing on the INTERNET. Widespread public access will be possible if the INTERNET is improved and expanded along the lines of NREN, including new links to schools and communities that are currently not connected.[65]

While the focus today is on the data base, this may not be the case in the future. Visionary technologists foresee the possibility of "expert systems," "intelligent agents," and "knowbots" that can peruse vast data banks and "information utilities" according to the specified needs of the user. They also see the possibility of "mirror worlds" and "reality windows" that may be used to show what is happening.[66] The technology may still be used to access facts, but pioneer computer technologist Alan Kay goes farther:

"The retrieval systems of the future are not going to retrieve facts but points of view. The weakness of databases is that they let you retrieve facts, while the strength of our culture over the past several hundred years has been our ability to take on multiple points of view. That's what simulations allow you to do. Databases will be replaced by active simulations that no longer contain embalmed slices of a company at different points of time but active simulations of the company."[67]

One way to accomplish this is expected in the form of new computer architectures based on neural networks that will "combine concepts of parallel architecture with those of artificial intelligence and machine learning" and that can be programmed to simulate "judgment" according to the user's criteria.[68]

Standards and Protocols

Today's computer chips, operating systems, software interfaces, communications networks, and databases come in so many designs that technical issues about "connectivity" and "interoperability" need to be resolved before universal communications can be achieved. International standards and protocols must be set, and facilities must spread, so that users may connect whatever hardware and software they prefer to all important communications networks and data banks, not only at the office or home, but almost anywhere in the world that they work (including airports, hotels, libraries, and other people's offices).

Many international efforts are under way to deal with these issues. For example, the International Standards Organization's Open Systems Interconnection (ISO-OSI) standard has been adopted by 100 computer, communications, and software vendors concerned about interoperability. Other steps have been taken by organizations like the Open Software Foundation, which was created by seven computer manufacturers, and by an umbrella group, X/Open Company Ltd., that includes U.S. and European manufacturers, customers, and international standards organizations. A key stake is whether, and whose version of, the Unix operating system may ultimately prevail as a world standard.

In the early 1990s, new chip designs for reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC) led to one of the latest rounds of efforts to decide common standards. The ACE (Advanced Computing Environment) consortium represented the key effort; it formed in 1991 with 21 companies led by the Compaq Computer Corporation and expanded to include dozens of other companies. But ACE did not include Sun Microsystems Inc. or the Hewlett-Packard Company, leading producers of RISC-based work stations. Nor did it include the leading chip manufacturer, Intel, which had RISC designs of its own. Meanwhile, two other companies not in ACE, IBM and Apple Computer Inc., proceeded to sign a letter of intent to cooperate with each other to develop their own RISC-based designs. In mid 1992, after a year of shifting fortunes, ACE's plans were foundering, its leading member, Compaq, left it, and the quest for standards was in flux again.

These efforts to promote open systems and inter-firm cooperation clearly mask intense rivalries for market advantages. "Standards bodies and industrial alliances are the continuation of competition by other means," says one commentator, paraphrasing Karl von Clausewitz.[69]

Meanwhile, the advent of CD-ROM discs, and their attractiveness for storing and retrieving data used by the U.S. government, especially its intelligence agencies and military forces, is raising another set of interoperability issues. A consultant summarizes the challenge as "The ability to purchase any CD-ROM title and be able to access it on any CD- ROM drive, using any microcomputer system, operating under any operating system, using any retrieval interface."[70] U.S. government agencies are reportedly banding together to put pressure on industry to come up with a common standard.

In short, much remains to be accomplished in the areas of connectivity and interoperabilty before something like ISDN can become a reality. But again, sometime late this decade remains a reasonable estimate. The implications verge on the philosophical:

"Machines everywhere will be bridged together to form a pool of intelligence and power. In the end, of course, it matters only that the power that emerges works to the benefit of mankind. If experience is any guide, more communication is better. The more things are open, the more we are interconnected, the better off we are. This is the promise of future communications."[71]

ADVENT OF CYBERSPACE

As the new technologies--the hardware and software, communications networks, and information utilities--become interconnected, they may form a globe-circling "cyberspace." This term, which is from science fiction in the 1980s, still lacks a clear definition and may not survive debate. But it is taking root as a preferred term for envisioning the electronic stocks and flows of information, the providers and users of that information, and the technologies linking them as a new realm or system that has a functioning identity as significant as an economic or political system. The term generally refers to the whole world, but it may also be used to refer to a corporation, university, government, nation, region, or some other spatially limited environment.[72]

Major New Domain of Power and Property

Today, the term refers mainly to the computerized communications networks, conferencing systems, and related databases that are being developed, expanded, and in some cases, interconnected rapidly in the United States and around the world. These include:

• private networks for financial data transmissions among banks and other financial and credit institutions;
• private networks that serve global and multinational companies, like Apple's AppleLink, IBM's VNET, the Xerox Internet, and the networks of companies like General Electric and Dupont;
• private networks used by the media to prepare their broadcasts and publications, such as the BASYS system used by the Cable News Network (CNN);
• public data networks that are accessible for a fee, such as Sprintnet (formerly Telenet, owned by U.S. Sprint), TYMNET (owned by McDonnell Douglas), and to some extent the Moscow Teleport (which bridges between users and networks in the United States and the Soviet Union);
• cooperative networks--the favorites of most visionaries-- that link universities and research centers, like the INTERNET, BITNET, UUCP, and USENET (the latter houses hundreds of "newsgroups" for information-sharing and discussion about diverse interests and activities);
• subscription networks that create "virtual communities" and provide access to databases, electronic mail, and conferencing systems for their members, like Prodigy Services, which is a joint venture of IBM and Sears, Roebuck & Company; the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), a marvellous gathering-place that emerged from progressive movements in Northern California; and the Institute for Global Communications (IGC), which overlaps with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), is the home-base of activist networks like PeaceNet and EcoNet, and enables Amnesty International's Urgent Action Project to issue e- mail alerts to its supporters;
• networks that governments maintain for their purposes, ranging from the U.S. State Department's increasingly modern systems to local government systems like the Public Electronic Network (PEN) in Santa Monica, California, which enables citizens to establish special interest groups, and the "City Hall On-line" system forthcoming in Colorado Springs, Colorado;
• community-based networks, like the Cleveland Freenet, that provide electronic mail, topical conferencing, and databases to serve local needs independently of the local government, and that may provide access to the INTERNET and other community-based networks. Some definitions of cyberspace also include other infrastructures for electronic information and communications, such as the telephone system, radio, television, and cable broadcast systems, satellite communications systems, private security systems, truck location and dispatch systems, etc.

The key definitions envision cyberspace as not only a wholly new kind of "information infrastructure" but also as a "virtual reality." The latter is another new term in search of definition, but it basically means that a user may be able to access cyberspace through hardware and software that render the impression of being in a three-dimensional environment containing three-dimensional representations of the people, places, objects, and data in which the user is interested and with which he or she may proceed to interact.[73]

Today, this new realm is in a nascent phase of construction. Much of what exists is partitioned and compartmentalized--from home to home, office to office, organization to organization, and nation to nation. Nonetheless, out of sight of much public attention, cyberspace may already be the fastest-growing, new domain of power and property in the world. Just the networks mentioned above--and there are many others-- embrace hundreds of thousands of computer nodes, millions of users, and billions of dollars worth of activities. Developing and integrating this new realm nationally and globally may become one of the great undertakings of the turn of the century.

"Once several national information infrastructres are in place, countries will tie them together, much as national power grids, airline routes and telephone circuits have been linked in the past. The result will be a global information infrastructure that will help the people of the world buy and sell information and information services and share knowledge and creative energy--we hope to the benefit of all."[74]

Issues and Analogies for the Future

Cyberspace means different things to different people, but for many the political, economic, and other stakes already seem enormous. Recent debates are fraught with questions about who will have access, who will benefit, and who will control it. To what extent should it be developed as a public utility, as a strategic resource, and/or as an educational service? Should its development be left to the government? To private enterprise? To what extent should it be open to public access? Treated as private property? To what extent should the freedoms expressed in the First Amendment apply?

These debates hark back to issues identified a decade ago in a classic study by Ithiel de Sola Pool. U.S. law, he pointed out, has evolved separately in each of three domains of communications: print media, common carriers, and broadcasting. Print media have been governed by the First Amendment. Common carriers, which include the telephone, the telegraph, the postal system, and some computer networks, have been governed by principles of "universal service and fair access by the public to the facilities of the carrier," on equal terms without discrimination. But the domain of broadcasting, which includes radio, television, and cable, has resulted in a highly regulated regime; here, frequencies are allocated, broadcasters are selected, and licenses are issued by government agencies. Although fairness is an objective, "The principles of common carriage and of the First Amendment have been applied to broadcasting in only atrophied form. For broadcasting, a politically managed system has been invented."[75]

Pool foresaw that the advent of electronic communications implied both the creation of a new domain and a convergence of all the domains into "one grand system."[76] The concern he raised--it resounds in today's debates about the effects of the new technologies and the development of cyberspace--is that the historical trend toward political regulation will continue; the traditions of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment may be subverted in the future information society.

"In that future society the norms that govern information and communications will be even more crucial than in the past.... The onus is on us to determine whether free societies in the twenty-first century will conduct electronic communication under the conditions of freedom established for the domain of print through centuries of struggle, or whether that great achievement will become lost in a confusion about the new technologies."[77]

The outcome Pool hoped for included universal interconnectivity, basic rights for public access, and clear standards for easy use.

Related efforts to define and debate the issues posed by the prospect of a new infrastructure often turn to analogies, metaphors, and models from past U.S. experience. One that merits attention is that of the "commons." But for the most part "highway" and "railroad" analogies have framed the debate about proposals to re- wire the United States with fiber-optic cables and undertake NREN and other large-scale projects. Each analogy has different connotations. Proponents of the highway analogy generally favor government-led development of the communications and information infrastructure as a public asset and national resource, while proponents of the railroad analogy want it developed as a private enterprise by firms like IBM, MCI, and their joint venture, ANS. The highway model is reportedly the norm in Japan, Europe, and other parts of the world, and U.S. critics of private enterprise worry that application of the railroad (or a toll-road) model may lead to monopoly controls, limited and costly access, and the exclusion of many people.[78] But a case can also be made that privatization in the context of anti-trust law may provide better results than government bureaucratization of the development process.[79]

While most discussions view cyberspace as something that does not exist and hence must be constructed--the case with the preceding analogies--still another analogy views it as a frontier that virtually exists and beckons for exploration, colonization, and development.

"The colonization and settlement of North America by Europeans provides a useful model for thinking about the growth of cyberspace. Like sixteenth century Europeans, we too have found a New World (new to us, anyway). As cyberspace develops, we believe that the notions of colonization and settlement will prove more useful in describing and analyzing what is happening than the notions of design and creation."[80]

In this view, different "cyberspace colonies" will be (indeed, they already are being) carved out by many different kinds of actors, many of them initially misfits and adventurers from ordinary society. As the colonies grow, they may be expected to develop different forms of government, citizenship, and property rights. They may also be expected to improve their (electronic) resource bases and transportation systems, to compete for immigrants and settlers, and to expand their boundaries toward each other. As this occurs, the colonies will increasingly enter into trade relations and diplomatic negotiations with each other. Conflict and crime may increase as the colonies face issues of whether to oppose each other or to interconnect. In the end, if all goes well according to the originators of this analogy, traditional American principles of decentralization, pluralism, and tolerance may provide the bases for the integration of a national and perhaps global cyberspace.[81]

This may sound fanciful, but it provides another, illuminating way of reiterating a significant point: Cyberspace is an important new domain of power and property. Its development may affect not only individuals and organizations, but also relations between state and society, and between their public and private sectors. Cyberspace and cyberocracy are coming into existence at the same time, and each will affect the development of the other.

RESTRUCTURED PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL SPACE AND TIME

As the information revolution alters people's consciousness of the world around them, their perceptions of space and time are affected. These may seem like subjects for metaphysics and the physical sciences, not the social sciences. Indeed, the physical sciences rest on hard- fought concepts of space, time, and momentum. But while few social scientists use such terms, a persuasive case may be made that "Every political theory that has aimed at a measure of comprehensiveness has adopted some implicit or explicit proposition about 'time,' 'space,' 'reality,' or 'energy.'"[82]

A curious, important effect of the information revolution is that people are thinking anew about their perceptions of social time and space and their role in shaping consciousness and behavior.[83] Marshall McLuhan was one of the first analysts to raise this a quarter century ago:

"Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and pours upon us instantly and continuously concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism.... Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space" has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening."[84]

This impressive, enthusiastic view has resounded in subsequent discussions about the effects of the information revolution. Yet it begs for examination. The nature of the change is more complex and ambivalent than McLuhan says. The truth that he illuminates ignores other truths and possibilities.

It is widely believed that the new technology is making the world smaller. Now people may easily communicate with, form relationships in, and acquire knowledge from distant places. But a case may also be made that this means the world is bigger, for the technology expands people's horizons, makes them more aware of distant places, and enables them to see that what happens far away may have more bearing on their lives than they previously realized. From a global (i.e., macro) perspective the world may be smaller; but from an individual (i.e., micro) perspective, it may just as easily seem bigger.

It is also widely observed that the technology lies behind the undoing of many established barriers, borders, and boundaries. Thus, financial data transmissions now ignore national borders; the democratic upheavals in Eastern Europe lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall; and geographically scattered scientists, activists, ethnic diaspora, and other groups form "epistemic communities," "electronic tribes," and "virtual communities" on computer networks. But a case may also be made that the technology enables new barriers and boundaries to be defined and erected. For example, single-issue groups and religious factions use computerized mailing lists to campaign against their opponents, draw sharp dividing lines, and polarize the public. Wealthy elites use cellular telephones, fax machines, and computers to live in increasing splendor away from the rest of humanity. Government and corporate leaders erect virtual walls of technology to protect secrets and defend against terrorist attacks--while terrorists aim to turn public opinion against such leaders by scaring them into isolation. Some individuals and groups may use the new technology to narrow their sources of information to pet topics, removing themselves from exposure to broad media that have shaped national culture and consensus for decades.

Thus the new technology is having complex, ambiguous, ambivalent effects on people's spatial orientations. Many traditional social, economic, and political barriers are coming down because of it. But in other cases, the traditional barriers may be reinforced, and new ones may be erected.

The information revolution is also changing people's time horizons. Since McLuhan, many analysts have argued that the new technology is enabling people to conquer time. For example, financial transactions clear almost instantaneously around the world now. People send faxes and electronic mail anywhere in minutes. CNN and other television networks broadcast in real time the sights and sounds of SCUD missiles over Israel. Government officials move with apparent composure from one immediate crisis to the next.

But a case may also be made that people's time horizons are being distorted because of the new technology. In many ways, it has been used to overload people with information about current developments, narrow their focus, and pressure them to act quickly. Too many things seem to be happening instantaneously and simultaneously. Too many people seem captivated by an intensified awareness of the immediate present and its crises, a sense of detachment from the past, and an anticipation of an accelerating rush into the future. Many seem to be abandoning a sense of history and tradition. Whereas for some activities, like financial transactions, the world has become a single fluid time zone, in other respects people are increasingly sensitive about the gaps in temporal progress and its pace in different parts of the world.

In other words, many people are not conquering time, not even the present moment--they are being conquered by it. While some think they are saving time, others feel they are being deprived of it. While some think they are increasingly able to grasp the future, others feel they are losing their grip on it. Partly because of technology, information (not to mention disinformation) is flowing faster than many people feel they can absorb, sort, make decisions, and obtain additional information that may be needed to make the right decision and control the outcome.

The maturation of the technology and its use may address many of these points. Some practitioners and visionaries recognize the need to develop computerized methods that will enable users to control the flood of information about the present, illuminate what is most important, introduce historical perspective, and simulate alternative futures. The result may be to stretch the time perspective, something quite different from the "allatonceness" that McLuhan acclaimed.[85]

If one accepts the spatial and temporal shifts that McLuhan lauds, a united, even happy "global village" is still not the only possible implication. Like McLuhan, Daniel Bell has commented that technology is resulting in "the eclipse of distance and the foreshortening of time, almost to the fusion of the two." But in his view, instability is a likely implication. Societies, the United States in particular, are undergoing a "loss of insulating space" as conditions and events in one place are quickly, demandingly communicated to other places. Political systems are becoming more "permeable" than ever to destabilizing events, and people are more able to respond directly and immediately. In some societies--Bell was worried about the United States--this may raise the likelihood of contagious mass reactions and mobilizations, and make the rulers strengthen centralized controls to keep that from occurring.[86] In other words, the information revolution is an important factor behind both the integration and the disintegration that may be seen occurring all around the world today.

The new technology is having, and will continue to have, important but complex, ambiguous, and ambivalent effects on people's perceptions of space and time. These perceptions form an important bridge between people's values and their behavior. This is relevant to the analysis at hand, because the development of cyberspace implies some reconstruction of political space and time.

TOWARD THE CYBERCRATIC STATE

Section 3 discussed cyberocracy as a descendant of bureaucracy that may break the boundaries of that traditional form of administration and management. The technical, infrastructural, and epistemological considerations discussed in Section 4 show that the stakes and issues are broader than the redesign of individual offices or office areas to benefit from the new technology.

Almost by definition, cyberocracy will mean that a government has an official cyberspace, with varying degrees of interconnection among its parts. Cyberocracy might be defined as a form of organization that has a well-developed cyberspace, conducts many key activities there, and is structured as though its cyberspace were an essential factor for the organization's presence, power, and productivity. Technology may appear to be the driving consideration; but how these new forms of organization and infrastructure are developed will depend as much on sociopolitical and other considerations.

In this future environment, government personnel may keep most office work in electronic form, have electronic records that extend back decades in time, and use computerized models to visualize and assess trends and policy options. They may be on one or more networks for electronic mail, news feeds, conferencing, and document preparation with other officials, as well as for access to external information utilities and networks that belong to the government or its contractors and to which access is authorized.

A network may be confined to an office area, extend throughout a department or agency, or span different parts of the government; there may be many networks for different purposes and participants, and these may be interconnected to varying degrees through gateways of controlled access. The extent to which a cybercrat has access to networks that reach beyond his or her office into other parts of the government may be an important issue. Another may be the extent to which he or she has access from the office to public and private networks, conferencing systems, and databases that are outside the government, maybe in a foreign country.

Cyberocracy may raise issues about relations not only between people and offices in particular areas, but also between different office areas, agencies, and departments of the government, between the public and private sectors in general, and between state and society. It may prove to be no mere variation on bureaucracy or technocracy; the technology implies more than improved efficiency for old institutional designs. Cyberocracy may radically change, in ways we do not perceive, how states and societies interact, how governments are structured, and how offices and people within those governments deal with each other, outside organizations, and individual citizens.

A key issue for theory and practice may be the pros and cons of interconnection. Technology provides a capability for interconnecting individuals, organizations, and sectors on an unprecedented scale. As already noted, the technology alone will not determine how it gets used, or what the outcomes are; that will depend on broad cultural, political, and other conditions. In some areas, and for some states and societies, extensive interconnection may be desirable. But elsewhere, that may be not be the case.

The first cyberocracies may appear as overlays on established bureaucratic forms of organization and behavior, just as the new post- industrial aspects of society overlay the still necessary industrial and agricultural aspects. Yet such an overlay may well begin to alter the structure and functioning of a system as a whole. Just as we now speak of the information society as an aspect of post-industrial society, we may someday speak of cyberocracy as an aspect of the post-bureaucratic state.[87]

Nations where the political and cultural commitment to bureaucratic forms is relatively low, and freedom of information high, may have the easiest time evolving a cybercratic state. Nations where the state is highly bureaucratized, and bureaucratic behavior is ingrained culturally and politically, may have difficulty developing such a state, although the new technologies may be amply used for political control.

There will be no single type of cyberocracy. Some variations may occur because different departments and agencies within a government perform different tasks and have different requirements. For example, the kind of cyberspace that the U.S. State Department may want may be quite unlike what the Internal Revenue Service may want. Furthermore, national variations may appear because of differing cultural and other conditions. Thus Japan and United States will probably develop very different types. This may take time to become clear.

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

Since the 1960s, the information revolution has given rise to a host of recurrent questions that reduce to a string of polarities and contradictions: What will this revolution favor more: Open or closed systems? Decentralization or centralization? Big or small government? Federal, state, or local government? The public or the private sector? Inclusionary or exclusionary communities? Individuals or institutions? State or society? Privacy, or security and surveillance? Freedom or authority? Democracy or new forms of totalitarianism?

The literature offers exhortations and evidence in all directions, but no definitive answers. Most of what has been thought about such questions appeared in writings in the 1970s; and with few exceptions, recent writings provide little additional clarification or insight.[88] New research would help, especially if it were conducted carefully in the knowledge that we may be in a confusing transitional phase. Indeed, some of today's trendier points--e.g., the information revolution empowers individuals, favors open societies, and portends a worldwide triumph for democracy--may not hold up as times change.

The best answer may ultimately be "all of the above" depending on the situation and the society affected by the new technology. Open as well as closed types of states may continue to arise. Centralized and decentralized institutions may flourish in the same state. And complex, hybrid patterns may occur; for example, decisionmaking capabilities in some governments may become more centralized and more decentralized at the same time.

In any case, these are good questions, and they are relevant to a discussion of cyberocracy. The following sub-sections consider some prevalent notions in the literature about how government may be affected by the information revolution. These involve three themes:

• the rise of new elites
• the restructuring of organizations
• relations between public and private sectors.

Section 6 then examines whether the information revolution may favor democracy or totalitarianism.

This preliminary study can do no more than selectively examine some general, potential implications of these themes for cyberocracy. Some readers may feel that other important themes are neglected, for example, the implications for relations between different branches and levels of government, between the government and the citizenry, and between the governments of different countries. But in my literature survey, I have found less written about these themes than about the three treated here. If the concept of cyberocracy merits continued discussion, other themes may be addressed in future work.

RISE OF NEW ELITES

For decades, analysts have expected the information revolution to create new elites,[89] and a new stratification between the "information-rich" (or "haves") and the "information-poor" (or "have- nots"). Awkward terms like "knowledge elites" and "knowledge workers" have gained currency to label the new strata that live off the expanding information sectors.

A principal contributor to thinking about the new knowledge elites, Daniel Bell, concluded that:

"The fear that a knowledge elite could become the technocratic rulers of the society is quite far-fetched and expresses more an ideological thrust by radical groups against the growing influence of technical personnel in decision making. Nor is it likely, at least in the foreseeable future, that the knowledge elites will become a "cohesive class" with common class interests, on the model of the bourgeoisie rising out of the ruins of feudalism to become the dominant class in industrial society. The knowledge class is too large and diffuse.... What is more likely to happen ... is that the different situses in which the knowledge elites are located will become the units of corporate action.... The competition for money and influence will be between these various situses...."[90]

His points are sound, but do not lay the matter to rest, for he defines knowledge elites in primarily technical terms. Other analysts who take a less technical approach to the new elite continue to detect insidious possibilities.

One of the latest warnings comes from Harvard political economist Robert Reich, who has added the equally awkward term "symbol analysts" to depict a growing gap between a new elite and a new mass.

"Of course, wealthier Americans have been withdrawing into their own neighborhoods and clubs for generations. But the new secession is more dramatic because the highest earners now inhabit a different economy from other Americans. The new elite is linked by jet, modem, fax, satellite and fiber-optic cable to the great commercial and recreational centers of the world, but it is not particularly connected to the rest of the nation. That is because the work this group does is becoming less tied to the activities of other Americans. Most of their jobs consist of analyzing and manipulating symbols--words, numbers or visual images. Among the most prominent of these "symbol analysts" are management consultants, lawyers, software and design engineers, research scientists, corporate executives, financial advisers, strategic planners, advertising executives, television and movie producers, and other workers whose jobs titles include terms like "strategy," "planning," "consultant," "policy," "resources" or "engineer."[91]

Reich sees a gap growing in many cities between these symbol analysts and the broad mass of local service workers whose jobs depend on the symbol analysts. For him, "The stark political challenge in the decades ahead will be to reaffirm that, even though America is no longer a separate and distinct economy [from the rest of the world], it is still a society whose members have abiding obligations to one another."[92]

Reich's points are serious, but the implication that the new infrastructure benefits mainly the rich and powerful provides a partial picture. For example, elites in political and professional organizations that have previously lacked influence may use the new technology to help form coalitions with geographically distant, like- minded elites elsewhere, including in foreign countries.[93] Some of the heaviest users of the new comunications networks and technologies are progressive, center-left, and socialist activists, through entities like the Association for Progressive Communications. Cyberspace is going to be occupied by all kinds of people, with all kinds of ideologies and agendas, from almost all areas of society.

It is also a mistake--one that Reich does not make--to expect that computer whizzes who act like a priesthood and lack social consciousness will end up running the new infrastructures of society and government. This view lingers because of some early analyses of computers and their implications. The development of cyberspace will generate new elites, in consonance with other trends in society. And the defining attributes of these elites may include a knowledge of, and a dedication to the use of information and communications technologies. But these technologies are ever easier to use. As the skill requirements decline and the number of skilled people increases, the social, political, and other attributes of the new elites may become increasingly diverse.

Today's knowledge elites are not necessarily tomorrow's cybercrats. Some knowledge elites, especially in universities and research centers, may have nothing to do with cyberspace or cyberocracy. Some cybercrats who have technical or other knowledge and skill may also be knowledge elites. But cybercrats may also arise who have no interest in knowledge per se, even though they are skilled at using computers, databases, models, and networks.

Individually, there will probably be as many different types of cybercrats as there are bureaucrats, technocrats, and other types of officials. What may distinguish the new generation of elites is that they will tend to define issues and problems in informational terms, and to look for answers and solutions through their access to cyberspace and their knowledge of how to use it to affect behavior. The new elites may include propagandists and manipulators, as well as people of high public integrity and democratic consciousness.

ORGANIZATIONAL RESTRUCTURING

According to many accounts from the business world, the information revolution is causing the flattening of organizations, the collapse of hierarchies, increased decentralization, and reductions in the number of middle-level managers. Technology and management innovations are said to be undermining traditional hierarchical and recent matrix forms of organization. Success in the new business environment is said to depend increasingly on organizing project-oriented "teams" and "clusters" of individuals from different parts of a hierarchy who function semi- autonomously until a project is completed. But while some work and management units operate more autonomously than ever, other units span more boundaries than ever (e.g., the case of strategic planning). One new notion is that organizations should be redesigned around networks instead of hierarchies, and that these networks should be kept in flux. Another notion is that well- managed networks of small companies may increasingly outperform big centralized companies.[94]

Such views have prominent champions, notably Peter Drucker and Alvin Toffler, and important shifts are occurring in management theory and practice.[95] But it is easy for enthusiasts to overstate them and claim that more is changing than may be the case. Complex organizations depend on some kind of hierarchy. Hierarchy does not end because work teams include people from different levels and branches. The structure may be more open, the process more fluid, and the conventions redefined; but a hierarchy still exists, whether one is looking at management in the United States, Japan, or another country entering a post-industrial, post- bureaucratic phase. The fact that the world is going through a very turbulent, in many ways revolutionary period of change means that many kinds of hierarchies are being disrupted and overturned; but this may be a transitory phase, until the information revolution and a new world order result in a new set of hierarchical relationships.

Decentralization is another important trend for many states and societies. The evolution of technology has matched the trend, for the initial emphasis on centralized data-processing and networking through mainframe computers, often run by managers who acted like a priesthood, has given way to the current emphasis on distributed data-processing and networking through small computers linked by local area networks. But decentralization is not the only possibility or solution in all cases.

As management scientist George Huber points out, asking whether the new technology may increase or decrease centralization is too general a question, and perhaps the wrong one. In some cases, the new information technologies may enable an organization to become even more centralized, or decentralized, than it is. Huber's hypotheses also suggest that the computer-assisted communications and decision-support technologies may lead to the reverse: greater decentralization for highly centralized organizations, and greater centralization for decentralized ones.[96] In addition, operations researchers have shown how organizational decision support systems (ODSSs) may enable decentralized organizations to rest on strong, centralized bases of information.[97]

The question of whether decentralization or re-centralization will prevail becomes even more complex if one asks how the new technology and related management innovations may enable organizations to become both more centralized and more decentralized at the same time. Indeed, many analysts have noted that the real question is how to have both. The answer may lie partly in a concept identified by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. While the new technology fosters decentralization, it may also provide greater "topsight"--a central understanding of the big picture that enhances the management of complexity.

"If you're a software designer and you can't master and subdue monumental complexity, you're dead: your machines don't work. they run for a while and then sputter to a halt, or they never run at all. Hence, 'managing complexity' must be your goal. Or, we can describe exactly the same goal in a more positive light. We can call it the pursuit of topsight. Topsight--an understanding of the big picture is an essential goal of every software builder. It's also the most precious intellectual commodity known to man."[98]

While many treatments of organizational redesign laud decentralization, it alone is not a decisive issue--the pairing of decentralization with topsight may be what offers the real gains.

Furthermore, the demise of middle management may be a suspect notion. Many companies have reported reductions; in some, this stems from installing computer networks to track information that used to employ numerous clerks and middle managers. But this reduction may be a transitory trend. Former AT&T Lab director Arno Penzias suggests that middle managers may be needed more than ever, particularly to maintain links between different working groups in large organizations. "As I see it, these growing needs for the services that middle managers provide are the key driving forces behind the dramatic changes taking place in the employee mix of information technology companies."[99]

As cyberocracy develops, will governments become flatter, less hierarchical, more decentralized, with different kinds of middle- level officials and offices? Some may, but many may not. Governments may not have the organizational flexibility and options that corporations have.

In the U.S. government, interagency working groups and task forces have been a common phenomenon for over a decade. This has not meant less hierarchy and middle-management, but it has meant a more networked form of organization. At the apex, the White House and the National Security Council are operationally stronger as a result of their growing information and communications capabilities; in some instances officials there have designed and implemented some policies and operations without apprising other parts of the government. But the latter are catching up and catching on; more, not less, coordination and consultation should be expected in the future. The notion of enhancing decentralization and improving flexibility and performance through clustering small business companies around a central company has a governmental counterpart in the privatization of public services and procurement, although this has not proceeded far yet.

In other words, the post-bureaucratic state may end up configured quite differently from the traditional bureaucratic state. If so, future studies of political rivalries and struggles in a government redesigned for the information age will read quite differently from contemporary studies of bureaucratic politics.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR RELATIONS

The development of the new infrastructures should raise issues about relations between the public and the private sectors. One issue is access by officials to public and private communications networks, conferencing systems, and data banks located outside government circles. For now, this is barely an issue; in some instances a limited capacity exists--for example, to get copies of media reports, or to enable an official to communicate with an international agency--but few officials are interested. Eventually, however, officials at all levels may want access to external networks to help answer questions or exchange views. For a cyberocracy, such access would seem desirable (albeit for some countries and governments more than others). Should an official be able to connect to any service he needs in the public or private sector? Or should diverse, separate networks and utilities be built to accommodate official needs, including for privacy and security? Such questions, rarely asked today, are bound to grow in importance.

A second, more general issue is the effect on definitions of, and relations between, the public and private sectors. The boundaries are blurring between the two sectors; and at the same time, new fusions are resulting from efforts to create public-private partnerships to address many policy problems. According to political scientist Theodore Lowi, writing presciently twenty years ago about the potential political impact of the information revolution, "the blurring and weakening of the public-private dichotomy could be the most important political development in the coming decades."[100] A related question--it gets asked particularly by librarians--is whether social imperatives or proprietary interests should govern how information gets organized, stored, and distributed.[101]

For many observers, a major phenomenon of our times is the trend toward the privatization and deregulation of economic activities around the world. In many countries the private sector has been expanded and strengthened, while the public sector has seemed to diminish in scope if not strength. But while this trend has received heavy attention, there are indications of an obverse parallel trend: many political activities that were once considered private (or could be conducted as though they were private) are increasingly public (and publicized). For example, an election or case of corruption that might have been treated as a private affair in some country years ago may now be turned by the media into a world-wide event. Computer networks installed by local communities and governments, like Santa Monica's PEN, may enable previously isolated individuals to make contact and organize a caucus or political action group that nobody expected. Records of electronic mail messages in the U.S. government, and of police computer and radio discussions in major cities, may be released to the press in connection with sensitive legal proceedings.

In these respects, both the private and the public sectors are being opened up, expanded, and redefined. The more this proceeds, the more the lines between them are blurred, and the two are fused. The information revolution lies behind much of this.[102] In addition, the advent of cyberspace is leading to the creation of new areas of private and public activity. Here too, distinctions between public and private and between commercial and non-commercial are blurring. For example, the research-oriented NSFNET/INTERNET is not supposed to carry commercial communications. However, some commercial actors have long had access to it (evidently for activities deemed non-commercial), and a Commercial Internet is being fused to it. A few years ago, questions were not easily answered about whether subscription systems like the WELL (where the question was often discussed) should be allowed access to the INTERNET; but a few months ago, the WELL joined it.

Where will this lead? Will it mean that traditional distinctions between public and private become relics of the industrial age? At a minimum, people may need to think less in terms of turning to government or the private sector to solve a problem, and more in terms of building cooperative partnerships across public and private boundaries and across all levels of government. This seems to be both an implication of the information revolution and a task that cannot be achieved without its tools, given the degree of consultation and coordination that may be required.

Beyond that, political scientist Roger Benjamin suggests not only that the public-private distinction may be outmoded, but also that the development of post-industrial societies will raise the importance of "collective goods" and services that stand between but are different from public and private goods and services, traditionally conceived. In this view, institutional redesigns will be needed in the United States and elsewhere to deal with the changing nature of goods and services that people demand.[103] Daniel Bell once pointed out that "the nation- state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life.... In short, there is a mismatch of scale."[104] But Benjamin and others argue that scale is not the key issue; the whole relationship between what is public and what private, and thus between state and society, may be headed for redefinition, domestically and internationally. Bell might well agree, for he too has argued that information and knowledge are tantamount to collective goods.[105]

The implications for cyberocracy are unclear and speculative. They may mean a continuation of "big government," but they may also mean greater interconnection, consultation, and collaboration between the public and private sectors, if not the creation of a whole new sector that is separate from but also mediates between those two traditional sectors. This new sector may turn out to be crucial for cyberocracy to work. Meanwhile, it is difficult to see how smaller government will be the result since vast data collection, storage, analysis, manipulation, and dissemination capabilities may be required. Perhaps governments will need fewer middle-managers and clerks in the future. Perhaps many data collection and storage activities can be turned over to agencies outside government boundaries. But personnel with new skills will also be required. And it may be increasingly difficult to tell where the boundaries of government stop.

FROM HIERARCHIES TO NETWORKS

A theme emerges from these considerations: The information revolution appears to be making "networks" relatively more important, and interesting, than "hierarchies" as a form of organization.[106] This may have profound implications for the cybercratic state, both for how it is organized internally and for the kinds of external actors it must respond to.

The information revolution, in both its technological and non- technological aspects, sets in motion forces that make life difficult for traditional, hierarchical institutions. These forces disrupt and erode hierarchies, diffuse and redistribute power, redraw boundaries, broaden spatial and temporal horizons, and compel closed systems to open up. This creates troubles especially for large, bureaucratic, aging institutions, but the institutional form per se is not obsolete. It remains essential, and the responsive, capable institutions will adapt their structures and processes to the information age. Many will evolve from traditional hierarchical to new, flexible, network-like models of organization.[107]

Meanwhile, the network phenomenon is not only modifying an old form--that of large hierachical institutions--but also giving rise to a new form. The very forces that cause troubles for old institutions-- e.g.,, the erosion of hierarchy--favor the rise of multi-organizational networks of small organizations. Indeed, the information revolution is strengthening the importance of all forms of networks--social networks, communications networks, etc. The network form is very different from the hierarchical form. While institutions (large ones in particular) are traditionally built around hierachies and aim to act on their own, multi-organizational networks consist of (often small) or