Addressing the Negative Consequences of the Information Age Lessons from Karl Polanyi and the industrial revolution: A note on the politics of theorizing technology

One of the great dilemmas of the information age is the tension between two dynamics: (1) the tendency of information to be free-flowing and not to lose its value as it moves and (2) the tendency to want to control that flow of information in order to profit from its value. In 1944, Karl Polanyi identified similar contradictions in the industrial revolution, except the flowing material was capital instead of information. He spent a lifetime exposing what he felt to be the negative consequences of this increasingly free-flowing capital, the hallmark of a free market economy. He advocated for a welfare state in which government intervention is necessary to control these negative effects. Given issues of the information age such as the digital divide, the commoditization of information, and security and privacy, as well as the arguments of the proponents and critics of these issues, Polanyi's concepts can provide insight into the complexities of increasingly technical and information-based societies.