Abstract

The rapid advances of information and communication technologies (ICTs) bring opportunities and dangers. On the positive side, they speed the sharing of information and knowledge. This directly increases productivity and, what’s more, increases market size, augmenting the incentive to produce additional information and knowledge. More ambiguously, ICTs make it possible to radically increase the centralization of previously decentralized information. While this can be valuable, centralization of information also facilitates the centralization of decision-making authority, and thereby inequality, corruption or even totalitarianism.