The core of this book's argument is that polemicist critiques and celebrations reflect a failure to understand capitalism. Both opponents and supporters of capitalism have obscured historical and present-day reality by using the term incautiously and inaccurately. Critics and advocates alike have distorted and blurred its distinctive attributes. The defining feature of capitalism is an intensification of information gathering that goes above and beyond what is possible in non-capitalist societies. This amounted to a qualitative transformation in the consistency, public accessibility, efficiency, and global reach of information flows, initially in Northwestern Europe. The emergence of the information nexus in the early modern era explains the “great divergence” in modern world economic history, as well as accounting for the strong continuities in the history of capitalism from its birth in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic to the “IT Revolution” of the current digital age.

Despite the misconceptions surrounding the word “capitalism,” we are probably stuck with it. Replacing it with something in line with my interpretation like “informationism” would be implausible. But in light of the findings in this book, our understanding of the concept has to shift in the direction of the information nexus and away from capital, commodification, and the other features mistakenly identified as unique characteristics of capitalism. Several conclusions logically follow.

As opposed to those who would argue for the existence of two forms of capitalism in the world, a good capitalism based on entrepreneurialism and big firms versus a bad oligarchic or crony capitalism, the notion of the information nexus leads me to propose a new taxonomy altogether, excluding from the ranks of capitalism any economies in which access to information is substantially blocked. The fact that contemporary China or other authoritarian societies like Putin's Russia have basically market economies with stock markets, consumer marketing, and other epiphenomena associated with capitalism misses the point. Calling them “state capitalist” makes no sense. Because of restrictions on the press, the opacity that surrounds so much economic policy, and the corruption that channels so much economic activity in these countries, we cannot describe them as capitalist if “capitalism” is defined as the information nexus.

That is not to say authoritarian market economies make all the wrong decisions and capitalist ones with a flourishing information nexus all the right ones. In the case of China, imperfect markets are preferable to Soviet-style central planning.