POLITICS AND THE MAKING OF THE GLOBAL INFORMATION ECONOMY

Market fundamentalists have argued their case loudest just as its shaky foundations have been most clearly exposed. Rising inequality, exploitation, and exclusion have shown the claim of global markets to provide widespread prosperity to be hollow. In the United States, bastion of the market, financial speculation and corporate crime accompanied by ballooning executive compensation have shown up the failure of markets for corporate control to provide genuine accountability.

The “dot.com” boom, and the ICT sector more generally, was the shining jewel in the crown of the market fundamentalists. Driven on by entrepreneurial innovation, financial markets, and telecommunications liberalization, the ICT sector was said to be the leading sector of the “new economy”, leading growth and driving organizational change. But as the ICT boom has faded to widespread layoffs and industry consolidation, a tension has been exposed within the new economy between the social structures that sustain innovation and the financialization that cannibalizes those social foundations (Lundvall et al., 2002). This current crisis does not spell the end of the “information age”, which is surely only in its early infancy (Freeman and Louca, 2002). It does expose some of the contradictions at the core of the market fundamentalist vision of the information economy, a vision made real in the 1990s by the Washington Consensus.

But underneath this mythology of the market, the making of the global information economy rests on very different underpinnings.