The 'information society' – outcome of that maze of bits, chips,
frequencies, cables, satellites, programmes and networks that have
electronically unified all human codes and allowed the exponential
growth of the message delivery service of the 'infosphere' in which we
bathe – will be given the honour of a World Summit in December 2003
organised by the UN itself, with the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU) as its main host.

By then, with three preparatory conferences and the makers of
equipment, programmes and channels licking their lips, a deluge of
panegyrics, hymns, hosannas, apologies and other eulogies to the so-
called information society will have fallen on our heads, even more
copiously than in 1998 when they tried to make us believe that the
Internet would rapidly bring to an end underdevelopment, poverty and
hunger in the world. All this recalls the golden legend of what was
christened, not so long ago, the network age; eulogies that, if one
looks at things objectively, are to a large extent deserved. For it is
on the back of the underlying technological revolution that standards
of production, conservation and distribution of knowledge have been
radically expanded and, to a certain extent, democratised.

As with all history worthy of the name, these images of the
'information society' conceal on their reverse side a dark inscription
that their protagonists would like to make vanish, but which will have
to be brought to light at the time of the Summit. This dark
inscription has to do with economics and it has to be told here, not
with the Manichean intention of blackening or destroying the golden
legend, but rather to weigh the pros and cons with full knowledge of
the facts, what in this 'information society' is good and should be
kept and what should be exposed and thrown out. Concretely, it's a
matter of two gigantic economic speculations, to a large extent
fraudulent, promoted by those who have already bought into the so-
called 'information society', which have ruined its natural
development, impoverished millions of investors, mortgaged the future
cost of services and unleashed a global economic crisis that,
according to certain analysts, could be worse than the one of 1929.
For one thing is certain: as with the case of the 'global village',
the 'information society' is already owned by a few, and there is the
very real risk that the Summit will only serve to strengthen – behind
a façade of democratic discussion – adapting the whole universe of
consumers to the will of the huge multinationals, who this time have
been officially invited to take part. (The verb 'adapt' figures in ITU
official documents.)

The free and self-regulated market is, we are told, perfectly
virtuous. It is the supreme expression of what the 19th century called
'the economic harmonies' …except when it loses its head because of
overheating or when it takes on the syndrome of speculative priapism.
Its prolonged crisis – which began in 2000 in the hi-tech sector of
information/communication, astutely promoted to the status of 'new
economy' and 'e-business' in order to swell the speculative bubble
more quickly – today continues to threaten the previous economy which
was behaving relatively well. This crisis broke out, it is important
to remember, well before 11 September 2001. Nothing very new wrote Le
Monde in an editorial: the development of railways in 1840 and
universal electrification in 1920 engendered similar speculations.
Except that, in that more unassuming epoch, the huge majority of human
beings were born and died without knowing what a Stock Exchange was.
(At the time of the 1929 crash just 1% of North Americans owned
shares, as opposed to 50% today.)

Most technological innovations in the information/communication
sector, from which we benefit every day of our lives, were born in
military laboratories before being commercialised by civil enterprises
after their 'declassification'. This was the case with Arpanet used by
the Pentagon and later to become the Internet, with one of the Reagan
programmes from Star Wars which became the Iridium Motorola project
for mobile telephony via satellite, and the US army's Global
Positioning System, today, among other applications, trivialised into
a finder of stolen cars. The commercial transformation of inventions
and discoveries often constitutes the only means of placing within
everyone's reach innovations that otherwise would remain untapped. But
this time, the auri sacra fames (terrible hunger for money) excited by
the new information and communication technologies went beyond all
bounds. It only ended after incalculable economic losses (the largest
in the history of the world's economy and with the disappointment of
many unkept promises: telephony everywhere and practically free for
everyone, high definition television on cinerama screens, Internet
business growing exponentially and genuine multimedia interactivity.

The 21st century has started and the picture is quite different.
Mobile telephony has supplanted cable telephony, but this growth has
largely taken place by saturating areas that were already connected,
peopled by financially solvent consumers, leaving the world's poorer
parts and marginalised zones in a situation unchanged for decades.
Tariffs have remained scandalously in the hands of cartels and very
high in the countries of the South, which continue to finance a huge
part of the growth of multinationals that have available an
astonishing cash-flow that allows them to buy each other out. Iridium
went bankrupt in 474 days, $5 billion1 in debt and 55,000 subscribers
instead of the 1.6 million that had been estimated. The US Defence
Department refloated it. Globalstar followed suit several months
later. Mobile telephony has been the object of such scandalous
speculation that I shall devote the last part of this text to it.

High definition television (HDTV) and digitalisation of images have
for now remained in limbo, officially because of drawbacks in image
compression technology, with a good number of European operators on
the verge of bankruptcy owing to disproportionate investment. The
enormous interests in play decided, by all accounts, to place the much
publicised 'multimediality' on hold; PCs incorporating voice telephony
mysteriously disappeared from the market; and some 'authority'
continues to delay the marriage of TV and PC. Thanks to its
usefulness, the Internet survived the voracity of those who had to
tried to turn it into the mother of all speculations, even though the
net is compromised up to the hilt by the present crisis in
'technological indices' on the stock market. Twelve hundred of its
largest firms collapsed in the USA alone between 2000 and 2001, and
analysts have predicted for 2002 'a catastrophic year'.

The diagnosis is unanimous: the current malaise of the global economy
originated in a colossal speculative bubble – supported by various
governments – inflated on two huge technological advances sequestered
by the market: the Internet and mobile telephony.

Internet speculation

Internet speculation was a mix of never-before-seen stock market
delirium and a good dose of political Machiavellianism. Its origin,
the USA, de facto owner of the network. (Thirteen major providers; the
quasi-monopoly of Cisco over switchboards or 'routers'; the largest
portion of the almost 2,000 million sites; 70% of all electronic
addresses reserved in advance and available under the IP4 code; the
global assignment of addresses and identification tags; the Échelon,
Carnivore, Fluent and Oasis systems that spy on practically all
content: and, it is hard to believe, at one time the platforms for 95%
of the intra-European and intra-Asiatic links are North American.) The
industrial, Governmental, stock market and media conglomerate, with
President Clinton at its head, launched a huge offensive aimed at
making humanity believe that the future was called Internet, that
greater part of investments would take place over the network and that
only e-business would take off exponentially.

Simultaneously, more good news was spread by the UNDP and the World
Bank: even the safety of poor people was no longer a question of
water, health and protein, but of a good connection to the network. It
was the beginning of an era of gigantism without precedent in the
history of the global economy. Between 1998 and 1999 six of the 12
largest business mergers, totalling $465.3 billion, took place among
firms linked to the Internet. Microsoft capitalised 471 billion in
1999, Intel 285, Lucent 211, Yahoo 188, AOL 164, MCI 162, Oracle 85…
In March 1999 Cisco's capital reached the monstrous sum (is there any
other epithet?) of $555 billion, almost half the annual GDP of France.
In the face of this the largest enterprises in the old economy – of
whom it used to be said that every time they sneezed they gave the
country a cold – appear derisory. The tycoons of the new economy
bragged of having multiplied by four the world rate of stock exchange
movements. One of the great American myths reappeared, that of a Far
West, with new freedoms to conquer. It was supported by a political-
economic attempt to turn the global economy for all time into a
satellite of Wall Street.

This gigantism only lasted a few months. In January 2001 Walt Disney
Co. – quite a symbol – shut down Go.com, which amalgamated all the
company's activities, after having declared a loss $1 billion. On 24
April, in order to sweeten the bitter pill of 12,000 redundancies
created by the loss of 400 out of the 555 billion dollars capitalised
the previous year, John Chambers, manager of Cisco, reduced his annual
salary of $157,000,000 to one symbolic dollar. Shares in Lucent went
up in smoke; 210 American dot com companies collapsed in just a few
weeks; speculative enterprises of the 'hit and run' kind robbed
millions of savers of their savings. A veritable e- crash said Le
Monde in one of its editorials in January 2001.

The catastrophe did not end there and got worse. In January 2001
Teligent, 360 Network, PSInet, Covas, Exodus and Excite@Home had to
submit to chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy law and 2002 began
with a similar trend for Qwest, Carrier 1, Level 3, Viatel and
Globalstar. Simultaneously, Alcatel announced losses of 4.96 billion
Euros (the largest in the history of the French economy), Vivendi
Universal (the new French-American Pantagruel) cumulative debts of 10
billion Euros at the end of April 2002, and AOL-Time – the biggest
media group in the world – losses for the first quart jÅ