The Digital Economy Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence

Don Tapscott The Digital Economy Anniversary Edition: Rethinking Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 2014Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyThere are plenty of books that are sufficiently popular that they are reprinted many times. Some are published in 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 20th editions. A number of them be altered slightly or significantly and are therefore said to be revised editions. Very few books, however, merit and even fewer succeed in being reproduced in editions. To be thus honoured by one's publisher is to be given a tremendous stamp of approval. Even if the gesture is no more than a clever marketing trick, the claim is implicitly made that the book matters. It is advertised as being important. Its special reproduction implies that it may have offered fresh insights, changed people's minds, provided important new information or inspired readers in a uniquely memorable fashion.I have several such books on my shelf. One is the 40th anniversary edition of George Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). Another is the 25th anniversary edition of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1998).Democracy is not a concept that is compatible with vast technological empires.The United States is such an empire, the largest to date.George Grant, 1965Grant's book offered an interpretation of Canadian that was based on authentic principles and modes of thinking. It offered a critique of imperialism and Canadian elite complicity in what Grant elsewhere argued was the hideous and unconscionable conflict in Vietnam. It was mainly a reflection on the failure of what George Grant admitted was an absurd project; namely, the construction of a society adjacent to the most powerful and dynamic country in human history, the United States of America.Today, people may, I suppose, wonder how a conservative could reasonably argue against influence and speak openly of American imperialism; that, however, merely reveals how words like liberal and conservative have been grotesquely distorted in the late 20th century. (Hint: alleged icons like British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, political parties like the Republicans, especially in its Tea Party mutation, politically engaged multi-billionaires like the (in)famous Koch brothers and current Canadian leader Stephen Harper are, in reality, strident liberals or, more accurately neoliberals passionately committed to some of the most up-to-date ideas of the 18th century. They are (or were) enabling instruments of global capitalism, there is almost nothing that is authentically about them.All the difficulties in Marxism obviously stem from the fact that the capitalist system has persisted and restabilized itself repeatedly, over a much longer period than had been expected...- Harry Braverman, 1958Braverman's book, in the alternative, earned the distinction of starting a vigorous and crucial debate in Marxist circles. It reconceptualized the entire discourse of social class under capitalism and drew unprecedented attention to class dynamics and what has come to be known as the labour process. Agree with him or not, it cannot be denied that Harry Braverman shifted political discussion on the left as much or more than any single thinker and writer coming out of North America.Whether either man will go down in history as more than an intriguing and appealing 20th-century footnote is unknown. What each did, however, was to have an enormous effect on some of the most vital themes of our era: the nature of the Empire and the Future of Marxism. More crucially, both caused people to take practical action as a result of the ways in which each, from profoundly dissimilar ideological positions, made a difference to a significant number of supporters and detractors alike. …

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