Reading notes of End of Millennium (Third Volume of the Information Age)
Preface to the 2010 Edition of End of Millennium
xiv Over a large expanse of the planet, and for almost one quarter of the population, there has been a transition not from communism to capitalism, but from one form of statism to another form of statism.
Xxiv The first one refers to the distinction between the space of flows as the space of power in contrast with the space of places as the space of experience. While this appears to be the prevailing spatial logic, the dichotomy is too simplistic. On the one hand, the space of global social movements, largely organized around the Internet, is also part of the space of flows. On the other hand, experience is not confined to the space of places, because human experience now has a fundamental dimension in the virtual space, as online communities and social networks have become a massive social practice that transforms the conditions under which we construct our culture and our sociability. Therefore, the key analytical perspective is to comprehend the complexity of the relationship between flows and places in every social practice, and therefore to identify different forms of hybrid space according to the different combinations between space of flows and space of places in the construction of the spatial dimension of each social practice. Thus, the conceptualization of space in terms of flows and places remains, in my view, a useful tool of analysis. But in my desire to express in simple terms a very abstract process I went too far in the distinction. We need to rethink the theory of space in terms of differential articulation, rather than systemic separation, between flows and places. 【正如online activity and offline activity不应该理解为二分法，谁替代谁、谁补充谁。在信息时代下，每一个活动都包括了online and offline的成分，或者说包括了space of flows and space of places，只不过占比多少的差异罢了。举个例子，我们网上的购物行为会受到线下商品体验、线下交流、线上的沟通交流、线上商品浏览等等许多因素的影响，而不只是在网上买一件东西这么简单。此时personal characteristics, attitudes, experience可能发挥重要作用。但对于我们地理学者而言，也许还要关注的是space of places，他们线下其他活动和经历对于线上活动影响，同时反过来对实体空间带来的影响。】
Chapter 1 The Crisis of Industrial Statism and the Collapse of the Soviet Union
P66 Moreover, the information society is not the superstructure of a new technological paradigm. It is based on the historical tension between the material power of abstract information processing and society’s search for meaningful cultural identity. On both counts, statism seems to be unable to grasp the new history. Not only does it suffocate the capacity for technological innovation, but it appropriates and redefines historically rooted identities in order to dissolve them into the all-important process of power-making. Ultimately, statism becomes powerless in a world where society’s capacity to constantly renew information and information-embodying technology are the fundamental sources of economic and military power. And statism is also weakened, and ultimately destroyed, by its incapacity to generate legitimacy on the basis of identity.
Chapter 2 The Rise of the Fourth World: Informational Capitalism, Poverty, and Social Exclusion
P70 This is why it is necessary, in assessing the social dynamics of informationally, to establish a distinction between several processes of social differentiation: on the one hand, inequality, polarization, poverty, and misery all pertain to the domain of relationships of distribution/consumption or differential appropriation of the wealth generatedby collective effort. On the other hand, individualization of work, over-exploitation of workers, social exclusion, and perverse integration are characteristic of four specific processes vis-à-vis relations of production.
P71 By individualization of labor I mean the process by which labor contribution to production is defined specifically for each worker, and for each of his/her contributions, either under the form of self-employment or under individually contracted, largely unregulated, salaried labor.
P72 I define social exclusion as the process by which certain individuals and groups are systemically barred from access to positions that would enable them to an autonomous livelihood within the social standards framed by institutions and values in a given context. Under normal circumstances, in informational capitalism, such a position is usually associated with the possibility of access to relatively regular, paid labor, for at least one member of a stable household.
P73 Moreover, the process of social exclusion in the network society concerns both people and territories. So that, under certain conditions, entire countries, regions, cities and neighborhoods become excluded, embracing in this exclusion most, or all, of their populations. This is different from the traditional process of spatial segregation… Under new, dominant logic of the space of flows, areas that are non-valuable from the perspective of informational capitalism, and that do not have significant political interest for the powers that be, are bypassed by flows of wealth and information, and ultimately deprived of the basic technological infrastructure that allows us to communicate, innovate, produce, consume, and even live in today’s world. 【这是对总体而言的。对于特定国家来说，政府首脑、有权势和地位的人，或者那些偶然被这些有地位的人发现的人肯定还是“接入”这个全球生产网络的，但是他们的作用不是帮助落后国家发展，而是帮助全球资本对本国人民和资源进行攫取。对于大部分欠发达地区的人民来说，他们跟这个网络社会是脱节的。】
P81 If the evolution of intra-country inequality varies, what appears to be a global phenomenon (albeit with some important exceptions, particularly China) is the growth of poverty, and particularly of extreme poverty. 【中国社会的发展不是自然和必然，而是共同努力加一点运气的结果。中国在近40年信息化和全球化大发展的过程中收益最大，也解决了十亿人口的贫困问题和发展问题。】
P83 Thus, overall, the ascent of informational, global capitalism is indeed characterized by simultaneous economic development and underdevelopment, social inclusion and social exclusion, in a process very roughly reflected in comparative statistics.
P122 If Africa’s plight is ignored or played down, it is unlikely to remain confined within its geographical boundaries. Both humankind and our sense of humanity will be threatened. Global apartheid is a cynic’s illusion in the Information Age.
P130 The United States features the largest and most technologically advanced economy in the world… But it is also a society that displayed, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, a substantial increase in social inequality, polarization, poverty, and misery… None the less, its experience with social inequality and social exclusion, in the formative stage of the network society, may be a sign of the times to come in other areas of the world as well, and particularly in Europe, for two main reasons. First. The dominant ideology and politics of most capitalist countries emphasize deregulation of markets, and flexibility of management, in a sort of “recapitalization of capitalism” that closely echoes many of the strategies, policies and management decisions experienced in America in the 1980s and 1990s. [So does China as well!] Secondly, and perhaps more decisively, the growing integration of capital, markets and firms, in a shared global economy, makes it extremely difficult for some countries to depart sharply from the institutional/macroeconomic environment of other areas – particularly if one of these “other areas” is as large as central to the global economy as the United States 【恶性竞争，水涨船高】. For European or Japanese firms, capital and labor markets to operate under different rules, and with higher production costs, than firms based in the United States, one of two conditions have to be met. Their markets, including their capital and services markets, have to be protected. Or else productivity has to be higher than in America [which is impossible]. 【相比起非洲人民的种种问题，“自私”的我可能更关注美国社会的问题，因为美国社会可能就是下一个中国社会，遇到的问题将对我们如何处理这些问题有巨大的意义。从学术上说，这个也将会是创新方向。中国现在已经在部分领域，尤其是在互联网和信息处理的应用方面走到了美国的前面，这个对于社会的影响将是巨大而深远的。】
P136 The empirical evidence supports an interpretation that links the growth of inequality and poverty in America in the 1990s to six interrelated processes: (a) the shift from an industrial to an informational economy, with structure transformation in the sectoral composition of the labor force; (b) the premium placed by the informational economy on a high level of education, coupled with growing inequality in access to good quality, public education; (c) the impact of globalization of industrial production, labor, and markets, inducing processes of deindustrialization; (d) individualization and networking of the labor process; (e) the growing immigrant component of the labor force, under conditions of discrimination; and (f) the incorporation of women into paid labor in the informational economy, under conditions of patriarchal discrimination, and with the added economic burden resulting from the crisis of the patriarchal family. 【这些改变一方面交相呼应，另一方面还会继续牵连到更深远的社会后果】
P139 The individualization of work, and the concomitant transformation of firms under the form of the network enterprise, is the most important factor inducing inequality…. This was a powerful display of entrepreneurialism, but the consequences for workers were dire.
On the other hand, the individualized bargaining process between employers and workers leads to an extraordinary diversity of labor arrangements and puts a decisive premium on workers who have unique skills, yet makes many other workers easily replaceable… only those workers who are consistently at the top of the ladder, for a long enough period, can accumulate assets.
P142 There is a systemic relationship between the structural transformations I have analyzed as characteristic of the new, network society and the growing dereliction of the ghetto: the constitution of an informational/global economy, under the conditions of capitalist restructuring; the crisis of the nation-state, with one of its main manifestations in the crisis of the welfare state; the demise of the patriarchal family without being replaced by an alternative form of conviviality and socialization; the emergence of a global, yet decentralized, criminal economy, penetrating society and institutions at all levels, and taking over certain territories from which to operate; and the process of political alienation, and communal retrenchment, among the large segments of the population that are poor and feel disfranchised.
P144 Informationalization spurs job growth in the higher tier of skills in America, while globalization off shores low-skill manufacturing jobs to newly industrializing countries… Many of the new jobs of the informational economy require higher education and verbal/relational skills that inner-city public schools rarely provide… Thus, there is a growing mismatch between the profile of many new jobs and the profile of poor blacks living in the inner city.
P149 Thus, there is a link between joblessness and poverty for black men, but the link is specified by racial discrimination and by their rage against this discrimination.
The ghetto as a place has become increasingly confined in its poverty and marginality… Yet, by saving themselves individually, they left behind, trapped in the crumbling structures of the ghetto, most of the one-third of poor blacks that now form the most destitute segment of the American population. Furthermore, the emergence of the space of flows, using telecommunications and transportation to link up valuable places in a non-contiguous pattern, has allowed the reconfiguration of metropolitan areas around selective connections of strategically located activities, bypassing undesirable areas, left to themselves. Suburbanization first, ex-urban sprawl later, and the formation of “Edge City”’s peripheral noes allowed the metropolitan world to exclude entirely inner-city ghettos from their function and meaning, disassociating space and society along the lines of urban dualism and social exclusion.
P158 When then hire children? According to the report, “the answer lies in where the gains from using child labor occur. In the carpet industry… Many in under, they are usually poor, small contractors who work to a very slim profit margin and who can as much as double their meagre income by utilizing child workers.” Thus, it is the networking between small producers, and larger firms, exporting to affluent markets, often through the intermediation of wholesale merchants and large department stores in these markets, that explains both the flexibility and the profitability of the industry.
P164 It is true that children have been historically victimized, often by their own families; that they have been submitted to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse by the powers that be in all historical periods… But I argue, there is something different in this beginning of the Information Age: there is a systemic link between the current, unchecked characteristics of informational capitalism and the destruction of lives in a large segment of the world’s children.
What is different is that we are witnessing a dramatic reversal of social conquests and children’s rights obtained by social reform in mature industrial societies in the wake of large-scale deregulation and the bypassing of governments by global networks. What is different is the disintegration of traditional societies throughout the world, exposing children to the unprotected lands of mega-cities’ slums.
P166 On the side of the economy, when global markets of everything from everywhere to everywhere become possible, the ultimate commodification drive, the one affecting our own kind, does not seem to contradict the strictest rule of a sheer market logic as the only guide for relationships among people, by passing values and institutions of society… However, there is structural link between unrestricted market logic in a global, networked economy, empowered by advanced information technologies, and the phenomena I have described in this chapter… The main reason why children are wasted is because, in the Informational Age, social trends are extraordinarily amplified by society’s new technological/organizational capacity, while institutions of social control are bypassed by global networks of information and capital. 【中国政府确实有很强的控制能力，西方的治理能力和治理体系在无孔不入的信息和资本当中已经被瓦解了。】
I have tried to show the complex set of linkages between the characteristics of informational capitalism and the rise of inequality, social polarization, poverty, and misery in most of the world. Informationalism does create a sharp divide between valuable and non-valuable people and locales. Globalization proceeds selectively, including and excluding segments of economies and societies in and out of the networks of information, wealth, and power that characterize the new, dominant system.
P167 This widespread, multiform process of social exclusion leads to the constitution of what I call, taking the liberty of a cosmic metaphor, the black holes of informational capitalism.
These black holes concentrate in their density all the destructive energy that affects humanity from multiple sources. How people, and locales, enter these black holes is less important than what happens afterwards; that is the reproduction of social exclusion, and the infliction of additional injuries to those who are already excluded.
P168 These black holes often communicate with each other, while being socially/culturally out of communication with the universe of mainstream society.
P169 Likewise, why people enter black holes, why and how territories become excluded or included, is dependent on specific events that “lock in” trajectories of marginality… Whatever the reason, for these territories, and for the people trapped in them, a downward spiral of poverty, then dereliction, finally irrelevance, operates until or unless a countervailing force, including people’s revolt against their condition, reverses the trend. [which is really hard.]
At this turn of the millennium, what used to be called the Second World (the statist universe [the Soviet State]) has disintegrated, incapable of mastering the forces of the Information Age. At the same time, the Third World has disappeared as a relevant entity, emptied of its geopolitical meaning, and extraordinarily diversified in its economic and social development. Yet the First World has not become the all-embracing universe of neo-liberal mythology. Because a new world, the Fourth World, has emerged, made up of multiple black holes of social exclusion throughout the planet. The Forth World comprises large areas of the globe, such as much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and impoverished rural areas of Latin America and Asia. But it is also present in literally every country, and every city, in this new geography of social exclusion.
P170 And it is populated by millions of homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick, and illiterate persons. They are the majority in some areas, the minority in others, and a tiny minority in a few privileged contexts. But, everywhere, they are growing in number, and increasing in visibility, and the selective triage of informational capitalism, and the political breakdown of the welfare state, intensify social exclusion. In the current historical context, the rise of the Fourth World is inseparable from the rise of informational global capitalism. 【社会学家善于抽象和构建概念。信息时代的“黑洞”实在是一个空间概念，地理学家可以做的贡献是在实体空间中去落实这个抽象的空间概念，为其填补空间含义与空间信息。可能更为重要的是如何在一个流动的空间中去定位这个“黑洞”。】
Chapter 3 The Perverse Connection: the Global Criminal Economy
Chapter 4 Development and Crisis in the Asian Pacific: Globalization and the State
P221 My view is that, throughout the process of fast development, between the early 1960s and late 1980s, Asian economies were protected by their states from the whirlwind of global financial markets – and even, to some extent, from global trade competition – while, on the other hand, Asian firms sheltered in their economies were becoming global players in trade and investment. When the scale of these economies, the size of these firms, and their interconnection with global capitalist networks led to a two-sided integration in the global economy, states could no longer protect control movements of capital, goods, and services. Thus, they were bypassed by global economic flows, and were not in a position to regulate or command their economies under the pre-existing rules, made obsolete by their own success.
P225 This multidimensional crisis results precisely from the success of the Japanese model of development, which induced new economic, social and cultural forces that came to challenge the priority of the nationalist project, and therefore, the developmental state.
P251 And because Japan chose a different road, rooted in tis institutions of cultural nationalism, there will be no Pacific institutions of political integration, which are and will be consistently rejected by the Chinese, the Koreans and the Russians.
Only the superseding of the nationalist developmental state, in Japan and elsewhere, could create the conditions for new identities, new institutions, and new historical trajectories.
P262 Systematic state intervention in the economy, as well as the state’s strategic guidance of national firms and multinational corporations located in the country’s territory, were fundamental factors in ensuring the transition of industrializing economies to each of the stages they were reaching in their developmental process.
P264 Singapore shifted gradually from traditional services (regional trade) to manufacturing (mainly electronics assembly), then to advanced services (offshore finance, communications, business services). 【产业发展轨迹】
P272 A critical factor in enhancing economic productivity was the high yield of labor through a combination of low wages, decent education, hard work and social peace… Social control… repression… The state did provide a safety net in the form of subsidized health and education, but not housing… However, the most important factor in keeping social peace was the industrial structure itself, made up of thousands of small companies, many of which were based on family members and primary social networks, sometimes linked to part-time agricultural activity.
P276 Thus, flexibility of manufacturing, and competitive prices on the basis of relatively low production costs, were the main factors explaining Hong Kong’s growth.
On the one hand, flexibility was the result of an industrial structure characterized by small business.
P277 The fundamental contribution, however, of Hong Kong’s government to the flexibility and competitiveness of small business was its widespread intervention in the realm of collective consumption (housing, education, public health, mass transportation, social services, and subsidized foodstuffs).
P281 Differential factors: Multinationals are fundamental to Singapore, but they played a secondary role in Taiwan’s industrialization, and they were, and still are, minor players in South Korea and Hong Kong.
Nor is the sectoral specialization of the economies a common feature. It was not the concentration of industrial effort on textiles or on electronics that explained competitiveness, since South Korea, and Taiwan to a lesser extent, gradually diversified their activities into a variety of sectors. 【但是雁行理论和产业转移也是得到证明的。】… So the only common feature of the four development processes is the adaptability and flexibility of firms and policies in dealing with world market demand. But this flexibility was performed either by a simultaneous presence in several sectors (Taiwan), or by a succession of priority sectors (as in South Korea), or by upgrading the traditional sectors (as in Hong Kong).
P282 Last but not least, the myth of social peace as a major component of the development process in East Asia does not stand up to observation.
P283 I also find commonalities in my observation of Asian development. The first common factor concerns the existence of an emergency situation in the society, as a result of major tensions and conflicts, both national and geopolitical.
P284 Another consequence of this context, dominated by the Asian Cold War, was the importance of American and British support for these governments and for their economies.
A second major common factor is that all four development processes were based on an out ward orientation of the economy, and, more specifically, on their success in exporting manufactured goods, particularly targeting the US market.
P285 A third common factor is the absence of a rural, landowning class, non-existent in Hong Kong and Singapore, and obliterated (or transformed into industrialists) in South Korea and Taiwan by the American-inspired land reforms of the 1950s. 【坚实的土改政策，这也是当前印度缺失的。】
A fourth common factor in the development of the four countries was the availability of educated labor, able to reskill itself during the process of industrial upgrading, with high productivity and a level of wages that was low by international standards. 【仰仗大量的政府投资】… Disciplined, efficient, relatively cheap labor was a fundamental element in Asian development… In all four countries labor discipline was imposed by repression.
P286 A fifth common factor in East Asian industrialization was the ability of these economies to adapt to the informational paradigm and to the changing pattern of the global economy, climbing the ladder of development through technological upgrading, market expansion, and economic diversification. What is particularly remarkable is their understanding of the critical role played by R&D and high-technology sectors of the new global economy.
Behind most of the critical factors common to the experiences of the four East Asian “tigers” is what seems to be the most significant of all commonalities: the role of the state in the development process. The production of high-quality labor and its subsequent control, the strategic guidance through the hazardous seas of the world economy… these are all critical policies whose success determined the feasibility of the development process. 【积极的政府干预】
P287 [Developmental state] A state is developmental when it establishes as its principle of legitimacy its ability to promote and sustain development, understanding by development the combination of steady high rates of economic growth and structural change in the productive system, both domestically and in its relationship to the international economy. 【发展才是硬道理。以经济建设为中心。】
P288 When the societal project respects the broader parameters of social order (for example, global capitalism), but aims at fundamental transformations of the economic order (regardless of the interests or desires of the civil society), I propose the hypothesis that we are in the presence of the development state. The historical expression of this societal project generally takes the form of the building, or rebuilding, of national identity, affirming the national presence of a given society, or a given culture, in the world.
Thus, ultimately, for the developmental state, economic development is not a goal but a means.
P293 By vassal state, using the analogy with feudalism, I understand a state that is largely autonomous in the conduct of its policies, once it has abided by the specific contribution it has to make to its “sovereign state”.
P294 This “vassal” condition created a security umbrella, relieved much of the burden of the defense budget of these countries, and played a role in the critical initial stages in facilitating access to world markets.
The second element explaining the success of the developmental strategy was the construction of an efficient, technocratic, state apparatus 【国家装置，官僚系统】.
Yet, the fundamental element in the ability of developmental states to fulfill their project was their political capacity to impose and internalize their logic on their societies.
The first explanation is a simple one: repression.
P295 An important element was that the traditional, dominant social classes were either destroyed, disorganized, or made subordinate to the state.
P298 (Singapore) Property values were kept under control, by and large… Unlike Hong Kong, land revenues had a limited role in government finance, so the government had little interest in pursuing the risky adventure of becoming itself a speculative landholder.
P303 A second observation is that manufacturing competitiveness, in Taiwan and Singapore, continued to be at the root of their relatively solid economic performance, while the deindustrialization of Hong Kong, and the loss of competiveness of the South Korea chaebol, weakened their economies. An advanced service economy still needs a solid link to a dynamic manufacturing sector – postindustrialist myths notwithstanding. 【极力避免脱实入虚】
P316 Thus, the dramatic turn-round taken by the Central Committee, at Deng’s initiative, was aimed at ensuring China’s entry into the capitalist global economy and into the informational paradigm, using the lessons from the Asian tigers. However, this new developmental path should proceed in a way that would preserve “socialism;” that is, the power, control, and influence of the Communist party, as the representative of the Chinese people… This is why the “Singapore model” was, and is, so popular among Chinese Communist leaders. The idea of a fully-fledged economic and technological development process without yielding to the pressures of civil society, and keeping the capacity to maneuver in the global arena firmly in the hands of the state, appeals strongly to a party whose ultimate raison deter is the assertion of China as a world power.
P317 This complex act of balance is being accomplished, with reasonable, but not certain, chances of future success, by intertwining regional developmental states with a nationalist project of China as a great power, able to liberate itself for ever from the foreign devils.
P321 Overseas Chinese business networks are indeed the main intermediaries between global capital, including overseas Chinese capital, and China’s markets and producing/exporting sites… It is because China’s multiple link to the global economy is local, that is, it is performed through the connection between overseas Chinese business and local and provincial governments in China, the sui generis capitalist class that Hsing calls the bureaucratic entrepreneurs.
P328 Thus, with little incentive to undermine communist control, and considerable risk in trying to do so, the new urban middle class, while disliking the state, can shrug off its dislike as long as its families keep prospering.
P330 At the turn of the millennium, however, China had to face a number of difficult problems, whose effective resolution will condition its future, as well as the fate of the Pacific in the twenty-first century… I have been able to identify at least four such problems. Perhaps the most immediate is the massive rural exodus provoked by the modernization and privatization of agriculture… This mass of uprooted migrants can hardly be assimilated to the notion of a “civil society”. They are unorganized, lack cultural and political resources to represent an articulate force of opposition.
P331 A second major problem refers to the existence of bitter interprovincial conflicts.
P332 The third major problem confronting China is how to move toward a market economy while avoiding mass unemployment and the dismantling of the safety net.
P333 The fourth problem is of a different character, but I consider it critical for the feasibility of the “Singapore model,” which Chinese Communist leaders seem to be seeking to implement.
P334 The question is… whether the current technological revolution, based on information technology, can be developed in a closed society, in which endogenous technology is secluded in the national security system, where commercial applications are dependent on foreign licensing or imitation, and most fundamentally, where individuals, private business, and society at large, cannot appropriate technology and develop its uses and its potential; for instance, by freely accessing the Internet. I think not, and the experience of the Soviet Union seems to prove it….
I realized that Chinese officials had an outdated, industrialist notion of what technology is… This is simply wrong… In the informational paradigm, the uses of technology cannot be separated from technology itself. The machines can easily be bough everywhere, except for specific military hardware. What is essential is to know what to do with them, how to program, reprogram, and interact, in a largely serendipitous process that requires an open, uncensored network of interaction and feedback. The essential technology is in our brains and experience.
P335 I will not go so far as to say that without democracy China cannot truly gain access to the information technology paradigm, so vital for its grand design: political processes cannot be reduced to simple statements. But, without some form of open society, it probably cannot, for reasons argued in volume I, and in chapter 1 of this volume.
To sum up, China is muddling through the contradiction of developing information technology in an information-controlled society. But this pragmatic policy will face a much greater challenge when Chinese companies need a higher level of technological innovation, one that cannot be satisfied by reverse engineering. [Which is now!]
P337 Enough evidence has been presented in this chapter to support the argument that the developmental state has been the driving force in the extraordinary process of economic growth and technological modernization of the Asian Pacific in the past half-century.
P341 If China succeeds in managing globalization, and marshalling society, in its transition to the Information Age, it means that the developmental state is alive and well for at least one-fifth of humankind. And if nations and states around the world feel increasingly powerless vis-a-via global financial markets, they may look for alternatives and find inspiration in the Chinese experience…. It may well happen, instead, that China loses control of its economy, and a rapid sequence of alternative deflation and inflation wrecks the country, triggers social explosions, and induces political conflict. If so, the developmental state will have run its historic course, and global flows of capital and information may reign uncontested… 【日本和亚洲四小龙在发展主义国家政策上的成功对于全球影响都较为有限，更何况日本、韩国和香港基本上放弃了控制的策略，台湾也基本转向西方新自由主义。因此，作者将希望寄托在中国身上，当然也指出了另一种策略——网络国家（欧盟）的可能性（下一章）。截止魔幻的2020年，中国在信息社会和全球化中的治理能力似乎快速的得到验证，这种国家主义的策略在应对危机和经济韧性上表现出强大的实力，这将给未来全球不同国家的治理提供借鉴。但是，我们仍然要有忧患意识，中国在技术实力、创新创造的氛围与以美国为代表的西方国家相比还有很大的不足，以及当物质基础和生活条件达到一定水平后自然形成的对公平、权利甚至政治民主的需求 so called civil society，这将是我们国家未来要应对的挑战。】
Chapter 5 The Unification of Europe: Globalization, Identity, and the Network State.
P358 Indeed, national controls are easily bypassed by the new mobility of capital, people, and information, while European police controls are slow to develop, precisely because of the resistance of national bureaucracies to give up their monopoly of power, thus inducing an historical no man’s land where crime, power, and money link with each other.
P361 The whirlwind of globalization is trigging defensive reactions around the world, often organized around the principles of national and territorial identity. In Europe, this perceived threat materializes in the expanding powers of the European Union.
P363 As paradoxical as it may sound, it is possible that only the institutional and social articulation of both identity principles can make possible the development of a European Union as something other than a common market.
P365 It is through this kind of basic life mechanisms that the real Europe is coming into existence – by sharing experience on the basis of meaningful, palpable identity.
P367 The network state. It is a state characterized by the sharing of authority (that is, in the last resort, the capacity to impose legitimized violence) along a network… Nodes may be of different sizes, and may be linked by asymmetrical relationships in the network, so that the network state does not preclude the existence of political inequalities among its members.
P368 However, regardless of these asymmetries, the various nodes of the European network state are independent on each other, so that no node, even the most powerful, can ignore the others even the smallest, in the decision-making process.
And the European Union may be the clearest manifestation to date of this emerging form of state, probably characteristic of the Information Age.
European unification, in a long-term perspective, requires European identity.
However, the notion of European identity is problematic at best. 【在这个时代中，“似乎”科技发展超前于社会发展。欧洲的社会组织结构（网络国家）跟上了时代的步伐，但是文化结构和认同结构还在发育当中。科技和物质有关，其实这也暗含了马克思经济基础上层建筑的论断，以及生产过程的社会化？——在这个时代中似乎生产过程组织关联起来了，但是生产的个人化倾向又增强了。】
P369 So, by and large, there is no European identity. But it could be built, not in contradiction, but complementary to national, regional, and local identities. It would take a process of social construction that I have identified, in Volume II, as project identity; that is, a blue print of social values and institutional goals that appeal to a majority of citizens without excluding anybody, in principle. That was what democracy, or the nation-state, historically represented at the dawn of the industrial era… What are the elements that actually appear in the discourse, and practice, of social actors opposing globalization and disfranchisement without regressing to communalism? Liberty, equality, fraternity; the defense of the welfare state, of social solidarity, of stable employment, and of workers’ rights; concern for universal human rights and the plight of the Fourth World; the reaffirmation of democracy, and its extension to citizen participation at the local and regional level; the vitality of historically/territorially rooted cultures, often expressed in language, not surrendering to the culture of real virtually.
Conclusion: Making Sense of Our World
P377 I shall synthesize the main features of transformation for each dimension.
Relationships of production have been transformed, both socially and technically. They are capitalist, but of a historically different brand of capitalism, which I call informational capitalism.
P377 Productivity essentially stems from innovation, competitiveness from flexibility.
Under this new system of production, labor is redefined in its role as producer, and sharply differentiated according to workers’ characteristics. A major difference refers to what I call generic labor versus self-programmable labor. The critical quality in differentiating these two kinds of labor is education, and the capacity of accessing higher levels of education; that is, embodied knowledge and information. The concept of education must be distinguished from skills.
P379 Global financial networks are the nerve center of informational capitalism.
P380 The consequences of these developments on social class relationships are as profound as they are complex… a tendency to increased social inequality and polarization… This tendency toward inequality and polarization is certainly not inexorable: it can be countered and prevented by deliberate public policies.
A second meaning of class relationships refers to social exclusion.
P382 The truly fundamental social cleavages of the Information Age are: first, the internal fragmentation of labor between informational produces and replaceable generic labor. Secondly, the social exclusion of a significant segment of society made up of discarded individuals whose value as workers/consumers is used up, and whose relevance as people is ignored. And thirdly, the separation between the market logic of global networks of capital flows and the human experience of workers’ life.
P383 Power relations are transformed as well… The main transformation concerns the crisis of the nation-state as a sovereign entity, and the related crisis of political democracy… In other words, the new structure of power is dominated by a network geometry, in which power relationships are always specific to a given configuration of actors and institutions. 【突然想到：2000-2010左右的研究强调的是中国社会的现代化（工业化、郊区化、现代生活方式等）带来的时空行为模式的改变，接下来的研究应该瞄准的是信息化的影响了。】
P385 The most fundamental transformation of relationships of experience in the Information Age is their transition to a pattern of social interaction constructed, primarily, by the actual experience of the relationship…
Change in relationships of production, power, and experience converge toward the transformation of material foundations of social life, space, and time.
P390 The global economy will expand in the twenty-first century, using substantial increases in the power of telecommunications and information processing. It will penetrate all countries, all territories, all cultures, all communication flows, and all financial networks, relentlessly scanning the planet for new opportunities for profit-making. But it will do so selectively, linking valuable segments and discarding uses up, or irrelevant, locales and people. The territorial unevenness of production will result in an extraordinary geography of differential value-making that will sharply contrast countries, regions, and metropolitan areas. Valuable locales and people will be found everywhere, even in sub-Saharan Africa… But switched-off territories and people will also be found everywhere, albeit in different proportions. The planet is being segmented into clearly distinct spaces, defined by different time regimes.
P395 I consider social action and political projects to be essential in the betterment of a society that clearly needs change and hope.
P396 If people are informed, active, and communicate throughout the world; if business assumes its social responsibility; if the media become the messengers, rather than the message; if political actors react against cynicism, and restore belief in democracy; if culture is reconstructed from experience; if humankind feels the solidarity of the species throughout the globe; if we assert intergenerational solidarity by living in harmony with nature; if we depart for the exploration of our inner self, having made peace among ourselves. If all this is made possible by our informed, conscious, shared decision, while there is still time, maybe then, we may, at last, be albe to live and let live, love and be loved.