A century after the “age of steam and steel,” history seemed to begin to repeat itself. Turbojets and container ships revolutionized twentieth-century transportation in much the same way as railroads and steamships had one hundred years before. And just as the speed at which information was shared and disseminated in the 1880s and 1890s was transformed by the new communications technologies, in a remarkably analogous manner three parallel innovations utterly revolutionized communications at the end of the twentieth century: (1) solid-state electrification, which made possible microprocessing and portable computers; (2) packet switching, which made possible the Internet; and (3) satellites, which made possible instantaneous global information exchange. All three were developed in tandem and brought about the Digital Revolution.
As with railroads, air travel had been possible since the early part of the century. Nonetheless, it was not until mid-century that air travel really took off. Indeed, up to the 1950s, passenger flights had been limited, and cargo flights nonexistent. In the second half of the twentieth century, both rapidly increased. Writing in the 1950s when air travel was just beginning to expand, one student of transportation history recognized the parallels to the previous century:
History repeats itself . . . If we substitute a modern date, airlines for railways, and railways for waterways and canals, we have something of the general view which today is taken of the possibilities of air cargo.1
Whereas in the 1950s, the average traveler voyaged overseas by ocean liner, by the 1960s aircraft had become the primary means of transcontinental travel.2 The extraordinary mid-century growth in the passenger airline industry was due to several innovations, including the introduction of turbo-propeller aircraft in the early 1950s, transatlantic jets in 1958, and finally the 1969 debut of the revolutionary Boeing 747—the first wide-bodied aircraft. With these serial changes, between the 1950s to 1970s “the cost of jet travel [decreased] by an average of over 5% a year”3 (see Figure 6.1). What had been regarded as a glamorous means for the rich and famous to voyage around the world had become available to the average person. In fact, from 1950 to 1970, the period that came to be known as “the jet age,” passenger flights grew tenfold.4
Figure 6.1 Average Airfare between New York and London, 1946–2015 (in 2012 dollars)
Source: Expanded from Bowen, J. (2004), “World-Shapers: The Geographical Implications of Several Influential Jet Aircraft,” paper presented at the 2004 Conference of the American Association of Geographers. Note: In 2012 dollars. Roundtrip. https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter5/air-transport/air-fare-new-york-london/.
Airfreight “represented yet another major transportation breakthrough.”5 Airmail had begun in the 1910s and was in usage throughout the 1920s. But air cargo did not come into its own as a separate industry until the 1970s, when a young Yale graduate decided to implement ideas that he had developed for one of his economic assignments. Fredrick Smith had received a “C” for his term paper in which he had argued that in the computerized age there was a need for reliable overnight delivery. Undeterred by his professor’s rebuff, Smith launched FedEx in 1973, the world’s first business dedicated to next-day delivery. Before FedEx, next-day delivery was rare and extremely costly. In general, air cargo was transported in the holds of passenger aircraft and had limited integration with ground transport. Smith created the first airline wholly devoted to cargo flights. Moreover, the airline was supported by a global logistics network based on the “hub and spoke” model that coordinated ground delivery with the routing of cargo flights.6 With its promise of next-day delivery, the industry grew exponentially. Both the volume and number of products expanded massively, as did the distances covered.7 “By 1980, the real costs of airfreight had fallen to about a quarter of its level at the beginning of the Second World War.”8 As a result, “Between 1975 and 2004, air tonnages grew at 7.4 percent per annum, much faster than both ocean tonnage and the value of world trade in manufactures in this period.”9
During the same period that air cargo was being modernized, an equally impactful revolution was taking place in shipping: containerization. The container may seem to be a humble invention, but it was actually quite revolutionary. Standardized containers allowed cargo to be loaded, unloaded, and stacked using cranes and special forklift trucks. This made transferring goods from ships to rail flatcars and then to semitrailer trucks exponentially easier and faster. Prior to containers, shipping was an elaborate and extremely costly process. In addition to the expense of crating, insuring, and storing products, the basic process of loading and unloading ships was a hugely complex and time-consuming task. Levinson describes some of what was involved:
the cargo that crossed the docks was a jumble. Consumer goods might come packed in paperboard cartons. Heavier industrial goods, such as machinery and auto parts, were encased in custom-made wooden crates. Barrels of olives, bags of coffee, and coils of steel might all be part of the same load of “general cargo.” An incoming truck or railcar brought hundreds or thousands of such items, each of which had to be unloaded and stored in a transit shed, a warehouse adjacent to the dock. When a ship was ready to load, each item was counted by a checker and hauled on to the dock.10
Containers automated the labor-intensive processes of opening, sorting, repacking, and hauling. This mechanization dramatically cut shipping costs and radically improved the speed and efficiency with which goods were transported. For all these reasons, “The container represented a radical advance in transportation [. . . similar to those of] the steamship, the canal, the railroad, and other technologies that brought economic transformation in their wake.”11
Though quantifying the absolute gains in world trade and economic growth to containerization is difficult (and are in some dispute),12 it is clear that containerization made a substantial impact. “In 1970, container ships comprised only 2 percent of the world shipping tonnage available to carry general cargoes. By 1996, that total had grown to nearly a third, with tonnage carried equal to 55 percent of general cargo trade.”13 In fact, the decade after air cargo and containerization were introduced, “the volume of international trade in manufactured goods grew more than twice as fast as the volume of global manufacturing production, and two and half times as fast as global economic output.”14 In other words, trade was being driven by something other than changes in production. As Levinson observes, “Something was accelerating the growth of trade even though the economic expansion that normally stimulates trade was weak.”15 The dramatic lowering of freight costs from both air cargo and but even more so from containerization are prime candidates.
Along with these radical changes in transportation were concomitant transformations to communications. It could be said that the Digital Revolution is very much a legacy of the Second World War. Even more specifically, that it was “largely [the] unintended outcome of military procurement decisions made by the United States Defense Department.”16 And if one were to pinpoint a date when it all commenced, the case could be made that it all began with the Soviet launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957.
The launching of Sputnik shocked the world; shock quickly turned to fear. Few in the United States government or military had anticipated the Soviets would have such spectacular space capabilities so soon. US policymakers, fearful of falling behind, quickly sought to accelerate their space and weapons programs. One of the most consequential changes was the formation of a new defense agency dedicated to winning the space race. In 1958, shortly after the Soviet success with Sputnik, the US Department of Defense formed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA poured money into the research and development of several space and communications innovations they hoped would surpass those of the Soviets. By the 1990s, the cross-fertilization of the fruits of these various endeavors had blossomed into what would be dubbed “The Information Age.”17 Thus, the “information revolution” largely originated in the United States and from there spread through much of the industrialized world.18
Among the innovations fostered under this new defense program were silicon chips, which made modern computers possible. Computers existed in the mid-twentieth century, but they were nothing like the everyday-use computers of the twenty-first century. In fact, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that early twentieth century computers are to today’s computers what giant fossilized dinosaur skeletons are to the humming bird. The first fully programable electronic computer ever built was unveiled in 1944, during World War II at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The groundbreaking “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer” (ENIAC), as it was named, weighed 30 tons, was 1,000 square feet, and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes. As late as the mid-1970s, “personal computers were more of a dream than a reality.”19
The innovation that allowed the computer to be transformed from a room-sized machine to a pocket-sized smartphone was the silicon chip.20 Before the silicon chip, electrical receivers were made up of several moving elements, all packaged together in fragile heated vacuum tubes. Unlike these bulky vacuum tube transistors, silicon allowed engineers to design streamlined, monolithic integrated circuits. That is because silicon is a semiconducting material, which means simply that silicon can be made to conduct electricity (allowing electrons to freely float, as copper wires do), or to insulate electricity (preventing electrons from freely moving along the surface, as rubber does). Silicon could therefore be sculpted into small, flat, multilayered pieces, each layer with a different electrical property. Because semiconducting material eliminated the need for separate component parts and wires, it came to be referred to as “solid-state” technology. Solid-state technology was to become the “technological architecture [that] enabled the dawning of the ‘Computer Age.’ ”21
The first silicon chip was developed in 1961. Remarkably it was alighted upon by two engineers at the same time working independently of one another, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. Perhaps less coincidentally, both were working for companies receiving US defense funds. Robert Noyce would go on to co-found the first company to revolutionize computer design, Intel Electronics. In 1973, Intel produced the first programmable processor, which, with only 4 bits, was powerful enough and yet small enough to make desktop computers feasible. By 1991, the 64-bit microprocessor had been manufactured. Containing 500-million transistors, these powerful but tiny processors made portable computers and cell phones possible.
It was the genesis of the modern communications age.22 Like the telegraph, computers transformed business as usual. Computer systems allowed for better tracking of merchandise. Firms could know more precisely where goods were en route and could project when they would arrive. In fact, the combination of containerization and computers was so revolutionary that it helped bring into being an entirely new form of economic organization: flexible production.
Up through the 1970s, industrial production was still largely based on the model that Henry Ford had pioneered in the 1910s. In the “Fordist” model of production, one company controlled all aspects of production—from research and development to building all the parts and bits to assembling the final products and preparing them for bulk shipment—all of which was housed in a giant factory plant or industrial complex. But with the enormous reduction in transportation costs made by computers and containers, “Sprawling industrial complexes where armies of thousands manufactured products from start to finish gave way to smaller, more specialized plants that shipped components and half-finished goods to one another in ever lengthening supply chains.”23 Computers and containers had so increased the efficiency of handling and tracking merchandise, companies were freed from having to have factories located near a port. As a consequence, “the cost of bringing raw materials in and sending finished goods out had dropped like a stone,” altering the whole relationship between production and distribution. Multinational manufacturers could now “choose the cheapest location in which to make a particular item.’ ” Small towns, even those located far away from ports and population centers, “ ‘could entice large companies to take advantage of their cheap land and low wages.’ ”24 Within a couple of decades, companies were transformed into networks of suppliers and assembly plants that spanned the globe. Off-shoring became the new paradigm for industry. A whole new model of development, based on global supply chains, would change the lives of people around the globe: flexible production.
In addition to the silicon chip, US Defense Department’s ARAP funded research on another innovation that was critical to the digital age, the Internet. In the throes of the Cold War, a central goal of the United States Defense Department was to find ways to covertly pass data from one agency to another. Therefore, while ARAP was supporting engineers developing computers with solid-state circuits, they were also funding others who were working on how data could be securely transmitted.
In 1967, the agency launched a project they awkwardly dubbed “Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,” or ARPANET. ARPANET engaged with several universities that had engineering research centers, charging them to construct “a cooperative network of time-sharing computers.”25 To head the “Command and Control” of this new communications project, ARAP appointed in 1962 a former MIT computer engineer, J. C. R. Licklider, who was researching the possibility of constructing a global computer network. His 1960 paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,”26 spelled out many of the features of the contemporary Internet.27
The central innovation underlying the new communications technology that was to make the internet possible is packet-switching technology. Licklider, known as “Lick,” had long been interested in the “effects of interrupting speech waves—turning them on and off intermittently or masking them with intermittent noise—upon their intelligibility.”28 With packet switching, data is broken into small pieces of variable length, called a “packet.” To send a message, a number of small packets are transmitted, each of which is formatted independently of one another, and then reassembled at the destination into one file. Because the packets are formatted separately, they do not have to be transmitted in order to be correctly received. This was advantageous because anyone intercepting the message would not know how to assemble the packets properly, rendering the message indecipherable.29 Another advantage of packet switching was that, unlike telephone transmission which requires each user to be individually connected to a particular telephone line, with packet switching bits of data could be sent across any number of different lines at any time, making it both harder to trace as well as easier to transmit large amounts of information.
The first indication that a computing network would be viable came in 1969, when four “computer nodes” at four research institutions—UCLA, Stanford, UC-Santa Barbara and University of Utah—sent messages to one another. The “Inter-net,” shorthand for interconnected computer networks, had been born. From this modest start, the vast potential of the “Internet” was immediately recognized. However, it first had to be made accessible to the average person. Over the course of the 1980s, several companies created systems with this goal in mind, among them Archie, Gopher, WAIS, and the World Wide Web. But it was the simple point-and-click mechanism of the Web that won the day.30 The critical turning point came in 1990, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), made public the codes he had innovated for the Web—Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Uniform Resource Identifier (URL), and Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Internet was now available to anyone with a computer and a phone line. Internet use “took off like a rocket.”31 “The arrival of the Web in 1990 was to the internet like the arrival of the international combustion engine to the country lane.”32 In 1993, there were approximately 130 active websites, by 1995 according to some estimates the number of sites had increased almost 100-fold to 15,768.33 By 2005, the Internet had over a billion users worldwide.34
Another innovation critical to US strategic military interests and central to the dawning of the Information Age is satellite technology. Shortly after the Soviets sent the beach-ball-sized Sputnik into orbit in 1957, the United States launched its own satellite, Echo 1. It did not take long for the commercial potential of satellite communications to be capitalized upon. The first satellite capable of two-way communications was developed by AT&T in partnership with NASA as well as with the governments of France and the United Kingdom. Telstar 1 was fired into orbit in 1962.35 It was the first satellite to transmit live images to both side of the Atlantic, by receiving microwave transmissions and redirecting them to the earth. Telstar 1’s success signaled the birth of a new global communications industry. Only two years later, eleven countries signed an agreement to operate satellite communications conjointly—Austria, Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Vatican, and West Germany. They formed the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization (Intelsat), whose goal was to develop a global satellite communications system. In 1965, the consortium sent its own satellite into orbit, Intelsat I. It was, in fact, Intelstat 1’s transmission of scratchy black-and-white images of the Apollo 11 lunar landing that held the world spellbound in 1969.
Just as the telegraph had made possible the first period of modern mass communications, satellites brought cable television into being. Soon after the launch of Intelsat, terrestrial cables were developed to facilitate the delivery of satellite content to individual homes. An entirely new form of accessing information and entertainment was born. Cable television utterly transformed mass media. The change began incrementally but quickly picked up steam. In 1973, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began distributing its video programming to Canadian customers using Telesat’s Anik A satellite. HBO followed suit in 1975, distributing video programming to US customers by satellite. The commercial and technical success of these ventures led to greater use and acceptance of satellite broadcasting. By the mid-1980s, there was an explosion of live reporting via satellite. Cable Networks were established worldwide. A decade later, satellite communications had become the primary means of distributing television programming around the world.
Even though these new communications technologies were being developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the “internet age” did not really come into being until 1991. That was the year that AOL, the first popularized email service provider, was launched. When email was introduced to the world in the 1960s (yet another offspring of ARAP), its use was largely restricted to university research centers. Very few people knew what it was or how it worked. It took the development of accessible software products in the early 1990s, such as America Online (AOL), Hotmail, and Yahoo, for email usage to blow up. The radicalness of the change was akin to the expansion of the post in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Individuals could share information more quickly than ever imagined. To mark the change, the term “snail mail” briefly entered the lexicon, a disparaging contrast between the traditional postal system and the rapidity of personal communication that email provided.
During the same period, cell phone usage was inaugurated that would a few decades later remake society in its own image. If computers were a rare commodity in the 1960s, portable cell phones were nonexistent. Although car phones were around as early as the 1930s, these early phones were too large and cumbersome to carry around in a pocket or purse. Motorola introduced the first handheld phone model in 1973. An indication of its size is that the first “portable” phone was dubbed the “brick.” Ten years later, an updated commercial version of the “brick” was rolled out. With a sale’s price set at US$ 4,000, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was almost exclusively used by business executives. It was also extremely cumbersome. Approximately 9 inches long, weighing in at 2.5 pounds, and with a battery life of less than half an hour, it was neither compact nor easily transported. Truly portable phones that were available to the general public did not appear until the late 1990s, when the first pocketable flip-phone came on the market. From then on, changes to cell phone technology came fast and furiously. In 2000, smartphones enabled users to access email and the Internet wirelessly. By 2019, a Pew study found that more than five billion people owned cell phones worldwide, approximately half of which were smartphones.36
Perhaps, the greatest impact of these communications technologies was not in highly industrialized countries, but rather in the “Global South.” Prior to the 1990s, much of the developing world was cut off from daily communications. For many countries, constructing national phone cables and wiring homes individually was simply too costly. Satellites offered direct connectivity at a fraction of the cost. With just a few communications towers, areas formerly off the grid could be connected to the wider world. By the 2010s, satellites had made it possible for populations living in remote parts of Bolivia, faraway Polynesian Islands, and the Saharan desert to have access to Google and Facebook.37
The impact of satellites, however, went far beyond changes in information sharing and entertainment media. To begin with, like the telegraph, satellites had an immediate impact on international trade. With the efficiency and speed of information, “Advances in telecommunications greatly reduced the cost of international commerce and so expanded the scope of global financial markets.”38 According to WTO trade statistics, “the value of world merchandise exports rose from US$ 2.03 trillion in 1980 to US$ 18.26 trillion in 2011, which is equivalent to 7.3 per cent growth per year on average in current dollar terms” and when considering the degree of change in volume terms, “world merchandise trade recorded a more than four-fold increase between 1980 and 2011.”39
It was not long before the Internet itself became a medium of trade, further revolutionizing retail. Just as the railroads and low-cost printing had opened up the possibility for mail-order catalogs, at the turn of the twentieth century, computers, satellites, and the Internet brought “e-commerce” into being. In 1994, a small start-up company, Amazon, launched the first online bookselling site. At the time, the idea of shopping on the Internet was foreign to most people. Within a few years, Amazon had begun to undermine brick-and-mortar titans of the book trade, such as Barnes and Nobles, Waldenbooks, and Crown Books.40 One year after Amazon made its debut, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar introduced the first virtual Auction Web “dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace.”41 Over the next ten years, online shopping took the world by storm and by 2017 Internet commerce was fully globalized.
Just as happened with telegraphy, the enhanced speed of information sharing brought about by the internet altered almost every sector of the economy, but most especially international finance. As late as the 1960s, financial trading was carried out using the same technology that had been established in the 1870s: ticker tape! This meant trading continued to be conducted manually.42 After the 1970s, traders were able to place orders for financial products over a computer network. Systems quickly evolved that allowed for the almost instantaneous execution of trades. So much so that by the 2010s fortunes could be gained or lost through High Frequency Trading in just milliseconds.
Computerization of financial markets began in the early 1970s, when the New York Stock Exchange introduced the “Designated Order Turnaround” system (DOT). The following year, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations, better known as NASDAQ, was rolled out. NASDAQ used cutting-edge information-systems technology to create a completely digital trading arena. Other automated trading platforms followed. The first fully automated futures exchange was launched in 1988, Swiss Options and Financial Futures Exchange (SOFFEX). Even the great old man of trading, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), which was the world’s first futures exchange established in 1848, created an electronic trading platform in 1992. CME Globex provided users twenty-four-hour access to global markets. Over the course of the early 2000s, the proliferation of platforms dedicated to online trade continued worldwide.
As in the previous century, the new technologies tranmogrified the entire structure of the global financial system. Clear boundaries that had existed between “distinctive functions like banking, brokerage, financial services, housing finance, consumer credit, and the like” became “increasingly porous.”43 Indeed, “Whole sectors that were once non-traded (and thus impervious to foreign competition)—such as banking, retail, medicine or education—[were] rapidly transforming through e-banking, e-commerce, e-medicine or e-learning into some of the most globally tradable sectors.”44 At the same time, wholly new markets in commodities, stocks, currencies, and debt futures sprung up.45 Soon, the global financial system had become “so complicated that it [surpassed] most people’s understanding.”46 In a Financial Times article from 1987, the author’s expression of awe inspired by the dramatic changes occurring at the end of the twentieth century mirrored the wonderment John Maynard Keynes expressed a century earlier:
“Banking,” said the Financial Times (8 May 1987), “is rapidly becoming indifferent to the constraints of time, place and currency.” It is now the case that “an English buyer can get a Japanese mortgage, an American can tap his New York bank account through a cash machine in Hong Kong and a Japanese investor can buy shares in a London-based Scandinavian bank whose stock is denominated in sterling, dollars, Deutsche Marks and Swiss francs.”47
Like the end of the nineteenth century, the rapid expansion of trade and finance also led to the formation of new international fora. In 1971, the World Economic Forum was created in Geneva, Switzerland. Better known as Davos, after the location of its first conference in 1973, the forum was created to be a platform through which “the world’s leading companies” could come together “to shape a better future.”48 A year later, in 1972, the first International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC) was held in Washington, DC. The organization would ultimately produce the Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) we use today. In the same year, 1972, The United Nations held its first conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden. It was to be the genesis of modern international environmental conventions. Not long after, the first world conference on women was held in Mexico City in 1975, with representatives from 133 governments and 6,000 NGOs.
However, arguably the most transformative international body created in response to the fundamental changes occurring in the global economy during the second half of the twentieth century was the Word Trade Organization (WTO). The impact of the WTO on global trade was similar to the effect of the “Cobden-Chevalier agreement” at the end of the nineteenth century. Founded during talks held in Uruguay at the 1990 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) meeting (subsequently referred to as the “Uruguay Round”), the WTO was a game changer—and purposely so. The new system was designed to open countries to the market as much as possible. In fact, the WTO was created to supplant the trading order that had guided world affairs since the 1940s, when the Bretton Woods agreements were established after World War II.
In the postwar era, the architects of the Bretton Woods had tried to devise an international system that could balance the need to promote international trade against the importance of protecting domestic economies. Accordingly, the Bretton Woods agreements included provisions that would give participating states some flexibility in instituting protective social policies or trade tariffs if they deemed them critical for their national economies (see Chapter 13). But the WTO marked a dramatic conversion in the international trade regime. The organization set out to greatly limit the ability of domestic governments to interfere with the market in any way, whether by imposing tariffs to protect their labor markets, or shielding their environments from industrial development. To do so, a new legal and normative framework that restricted state-led protectionist measures was inaugurated. Even today, the organization’s “overriding purpose is to help trade flow as freely as possible” by lowering trade barriers that include “customs duties (or tariffs) and measures such as import bans or quotas that restrict quantities selectively.”49 The WTO also empowered large global business concerns to devise and enforce an expansive liberal agenda across the globe. Its imposition of free-market liberalism was, thus, even more comprehensive than the British gold standard in the 1870s. The era of neo-liberalism had commenced.
The establishment of the WTO marked the beginning of the neo-liberal era. However, there were other ways in which the new forms of interconnectivity were changing people’s conception of the world. Just as “Internationalism” came to signify new forms of progress and liberal ideals, so too did the term “Globalization” at the end of the twentieth century. And, just as a century earlier the telegraph symbolized for J. A. Hobson and his contemporaries the new internationalism, the World Wide Web became synonymous with this new form of interconnectivity. In the 1990s, there was talk of the Internet having spawned a new “global village” and “global civil society.”50 The great potential of the Web was particularly feted by leftist intellectuals, who celebrated the Internet for its transformative powers. The Internet was held to be revolutionary because it was an “inherently international medium,”51 that was “constructed collectively” with “no central authority to determine its overall structure” and for which “the barriers to creating material [were] relatively low.”52 Many proclaimed that the Internet was paving the way for “new forms of democratic political agency.”53 Academics wrote of how the Web was helping to forge a “sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organizations, networks, and individuals . . . operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies.”54 It could be said that the Internet was believed to hold the promise of fulfilling the long wished-for leftist vision of people’s empowerment enshrined in the anthem of the Communist Internationale: “Let us gather together, and tomorrow/The Internationale/Will be the human race.”
The hoopla surrounding the emancipating potential of the Internet and globalization prompted Ronaldo Munck to write somewhat derisively about the “GCS [Global Civil Society] myth.”55 Yet, it was true, at least in part. As the century came to a close, the unifying potential of the Internet seemed to be coming to fruition. The new technologies made possible a proliferation of nonprofit international organizations that rivaled those of the belle époque. Over a decade, International Nongovernmental Organizations (INGOS) multiplied at an astonishing rate, from around 6,000 in 1990 to approximately 25,540, in 2000.56 Moreover, the new INGOS were unifying people around the world. Peoples from Europe, the Americas, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa were able to join forces to fight for everything from human rights and the environment to fair trade practices, Indigenous rights, and fair labor standards.57
All in all, the technologies of the 1960s and 1970s—from airplanes and containers, to satellites, computers, the Internet, and cell phones—revolutionized travel and communications worldwide. Commerce, finance, individual intercourse, and mass media were forever transformed as global communications became exponentially faster and the barrier of physical distance was eroded. People’s very understanding of their place in the world and their relation to one another would never be the same.
The parallel transformations that occurred in the second half of both centuries are striking: from mail to email, mail order to e-commerce, mass newspapers to satellite news, and ticker tape to automated trading. Not least of which was the analogous rise in global trade and the dramatic push toward economic liberalism. For the second time in history, the compression of time and space radically altered the very texture of human life. And once again, these dramatic changes in interconnectivity seemed to be ushering in a new era of global cooperation and coordination.
But sadly, unbeknownst to the people living in the last decade of both centuries, there was a sinister side to the marvels of these new eras. The promise of progress and peaceful interconnectivity would in both epochs lead to something much bleaker. Within a couple of decades, countries with advanced economies would be plagued by spectacular wealth inequalities. Dramatic shifts in production would strike the “heartland” much harder than the urban centers. Changing opportunities would draw migrants to developed countries, just when global economic shocks were beginning to hit their national economies. Global finance’s control over national economic agendas would only magnify the pain caused by all these changes. Collectively, these displacements set off the second half of Polanyi’s “double movement.”