Under the influence of computers, will social institutions become more centralized, or less?
As many have pointed out, computers can easily be made to support centralized, authoritarian structures. As many others have pointed out, computers can easily be made to support decentralized, democratic (or even anarchic) structures. This peculiar flexibility points toward unfamiliar and dangerous potentials we haven’t yet reckoned with. The digital logic upon which networked technology is erected wants to be universal, ever more rigorous, more tightly woven. Logic, that is, wants to be articulated with logic, until there is perfect, overall consistency. Such logical consistency–with all its coercive possibilities with respect to the evolution of human social structures–is quite compatible with a kind of fragmentation and centrifugal movement. This suggests that there are anti-human potentials of technology we haven’t yet learned to recognize–potentials that are neither centralizing nor decentralizing in the traditional sense–or are both at the same time. The beehive may give us a
