HENT DE VRIESquences.^45 Time will tell whether and how this process will shape third-world regions.
Could cheap and easily maintainable computers, laptops with instant access to the In-
ternet—which are currently being designed by MIT’s Media Lab under the direction of
Nicholas Negroponte (the brother of John Negroponte, former ambassador to the U.N.
and at present the national director of U.S. intelligence)—change the face of the earth,
with its inequalities in income, health, education, and democratic powers?^46 Or can this
dream—some twenty-five years after the invention of the personal computer (of which
approximately one billion are currently in use around the world, albeit unequally distrib-
uted)—be fully realized only with newer, cheaper, and more easily accessible digital tech-
nologies, such as ‘‘pocket computers’’ in the form of, say, mobile phones or ‘‘handsets
with simple web-browsers, calculators, and other computing functions’’?^47
We might be witnessing a transition paralleling that from the technology of movable
type introduced in 1448 by Gutenberg, via mass media production, through the Internet
and beyond (the blogs, etc.), whose general features will be those of generalization, inten-
sification, and trivialization: a transition from undivided sovereignty (one nation, under
God^48 ) to a multiplication and diversification of the theologico-political that simultane-
ously echoes, produces, and expresses not only transformations in the so-called first, sec-
ond, and third worlds but also the remarkably swift shift from the bipolar world of the
second half of the twentieth century, through the unipolar episode of American suprem-
acy after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to a more complicated and volatile twenty-
first-century multipolar world, characterized by the rise of non-Western nations, interna-
tional corporations, nongovernmental organizations, regional and ethnic movements, the
emergence and multiplication of new countries, and, increasingly, nonstate actors, net-
works, and so on—most if not all of them invoking ‘‘religion’’ as a referent. The undeni-
able promises of this development, given the unprecedented sharing of power and
information, communication tools and publicly heard opinions, it implies, are overshad-
owed only by its perils:
Developments in technologies with violent potential mean that very small groups of
people can challenge powerful established states, whether by piloting an aeroplane
into the World Trade Center in New York, targeting a missile at Haifa, taking on the
military in Iraq, bombing the London underground, or squirting sarin gas into the
Tokyo subway. Developments in information technology and globalized media mean
that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the
battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.... The net
effect of these very disparate trends is to reduce the relative power of established
Western states, above all the U.S.^49The British journalThe Economist, in its yearly outlook, predicts changes in the multipolar
world in these terms:
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