Abstract
The deepening of the information age will alter the nature of the state so thoroughly that something new emerges: "cyberocracy." While it is too early to say precisely what a cyberocracy will look like, the outcomes will include new kinds of democratic, totalitarian, and hybrid governments, along with new kinds of state-society relations. Thus, optimism about the information revolution should be tempered by an anticipation of its potential dark side. This paper reiterates the view of the cyberocracy concept as first stated in 1992, and then offers a postscript for 2008. It speculates that information-age societies will develop new sensory apparatuses, a network-based social sector, new modes of networked governance, and ultimately the cybercratic "nexus-state" as a successor to the nation-state.
This is the version of the paper that has been available at www.ssrn.com since January 2009. A dearth of comment motivates re-posting it here as a Political Networks Working Paper. Of particular interest may be the following: an early anticipation of the rise of network forms of organization; an effort to discriminate between social and organizational networks; a discussion about “government by network” in comparison to government by tribe, hierarchy, and market; and a speculation that a nexus state integrating all modes of governance will arise in the future.