james burke

• "but as the new power increases and as virtually unlimited bandwidth causes information media, the knowledge media, the fragments of thousands of sources, some final questions: when almost all the aspects of life go virtual, what will happen to the nation state when frontiers and customs and local laws have no more meaning? if i can buy my goods anywhere on the planet, who taxes the purchase? who makes the goods? who has the jobs? in which case, what happens to my national commercial structure? my national employment strategies? my nation's ability to provide social services? my.. nation?
  
  when i can educate myself in any classroom on earth, expose myself to sources of information from a thousand different sources, what happens -and this is something very relevant right now- what happens to my local cultural values? when online electronic agents representing me go on to the web and bring back what they know i want? will i ever get anything other than total self qualification? will i ever emerge from starrin in my own utterly personal virtual reality paradise? and all i ever hear is the news i tell my agent i want to hear, what does that do to my political and social opinions? and in any case how will we run a country? because until we have solved this problem, how do we run a country when each person's individual electronic agent is out there inputting each citizen's viewpoint on every single issue in every single part of the country every single second of the day a 186.000 times a second?
  
  what happens to the old pre-internet structures like the european union or the united states, when the internet removes the limitations of space and time from international political relations and on the international level, whose law operates in cyberspace? moving from a culture of scarcity to a culture of information abundance is not going to be easy. to leave behind the comfort that specialists, only the specialists are valuable and trustworthy, to live by standards established for you by somebody else, knowing where you're standing because you've passed or failed a set of tests designed to serve a culture of scarcity."