Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber Page B

the
corporate body;
and
    The new information sector, what I will dub the infotainment telesector, comprising those who create and control the world of signs and symbols through which all information, communication, and entertainment are mediated, including wordsmiths and image-spinners like advertisers, moviemakers, journalists, intellectuals, writers, and even computer programmers, as well as—to the degree they are in the sign/image business also—teachers, preachers, politicians and pundits, and others who minister to the
individual human and collective corporate soul
.
    These three subsectors, each with its own professional (or not so professional) class of employees, stand to each other roughly as the three basic economic sectors (natural resources, industry, and service) stand to each other—in a hierarchy that is also an economic ladder. The new information subsector is on the frontier of economic development and corporations or nations that control it are prospective world leaders likely to dominate the next century. The traditional service subsector is the third world of the services domain, with its dependency at the lower end on relatively unskilled labor and uncomplicated work. It is a first but also quite possibly a terminal step on the stairway to power; it is certainly no ticket to global dominion. Doctors and transportation experts, though part ofthis first subsector by virtue of the direct consumer services they deliver, are also information technicians who, by the measure of their training and the science on which their service is premised, belong at least in part to the most advanced information subsector as well—just as fast-food workers can be seen as low-skilled manufacturing laborers (they “make” hamburgers). Between the two subsectors that define the parameters is the powerful new world of bankers, accountants, lawyers, and programmers who serve the great corporate entity, part real, part virtual, that is McWorld’s global market. Although highly profitable and professionally rewarding, this sector can be overrated. For it neither delivers services directly to the mass of the world’s people nor controls the crucial information and telecommunications services on which it wholly depends and that potentially can govern their minds and souls. It is global business’s janitor and while it is well paid and makes the machine go it can tell it neither where nor how. That is the task of the infotainment telesector, from which McWorld draws its informal and mostly unarticulated governing norms.
    Old-fashioned class analysis associated modes of production with class structure: Marx thus suggested that the ancient slave-master relationship was founded on the sovereignty of human labor (he who mastered labor was master of his world and eventually the political master as well), that the feudal relationship was rooted in sovereignty over land (he who owned the land ruled the world), and that the capitalist relationship rested on sovereignty over capital (he who capitalized machinery and bought labor bought into the ruling class). To the extent there
is
such a relationship between control over the economic mode of production and access to political power (and surely, though it is not as neat as Marx would have it, there is
some
relationship), it is the infotainment telesector of the service economy that is acquiring a certain postmodern sovereignty. She who controls global information and communications is potentially mistress of the planet. Sovereignty here is exceedingly soft, however, entailing rule by persuasion rather than by command, influence via insinuation rather than via coercion. This form of power, scarcely visible, is not easily rendered accountable. Its implications for democracy are in some ways far more disturbing than those that can be inferred from the anarchy bred by Jihad (see Part III ).
    Since, as the commercial with which MCI sponsored the 1994 Orange Bowl proclaimed, “the