Computerization, Centralization, and Concentration

Summary

One of the most dangerous canards of the digital revolution is the one according to which distribution, decentralization, and democratization are the characteristic hallmarks of contemporary mass computerization.

To writers of earlier ages (Huxley, Orwell, Lem, Weizenbaum, Wiener, Mumford, Ellul, Roszak, just to name a few), such sentiments would seem shocking, because what they understood was the opposite: that computerization leads to–in fact, is usually specifically done to enable–the centralization and concentration of power.