By Jay Ogilvy

Manuel Castells is fond of quoting Kranzberg's law: "Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral." But unlike many cryptic commentators on the digital age, Castells backs up the vague theorizing with statistical verification, documenting the globalization of computing technology and criminal activity, the rise of POP hosts and the fall of patriarchy. No wonder this Barcelona-born UC Berkeley sociologist - and his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Blackwell, 1996-98) - has been embraced as a kind of Max Weber for the webcentric world. For his part, Castells, 56, calmly embraces personal and political end-of-millennium contradictions; that, for example, pure technical innovation has "falsified" an Orwellian dystopia while pure economic reform has fomented Russian upheaval. Onetime chair of an advisory committee on the transition of the former USSR, a sometime Marxist radical libertarian who now says anarchism may be the most relevant philosophy, and a self-described obsolete social democrat, Castells will address next year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on the promise - and perils - of the network society. Wired caught up with Castells while workmen were rewiring his corner office overlooking Berkeley's campus.

Wired: In The Information Age, global networking technology is pulling us together, while nationalisms, ethnicities, and passionate causes are pulling us apart. Which way will the pendulum swing?

Castells: There is a long tradition, the illusion of progress from the Enlightenment, that history has a predetermined direction. But the idea that by definition technology will lead to human progress - well, technology can produce horrors as well as paradises. We will have - we already have - a great world for a relatively small élite that enjoys extraordinary creativity induced by new technologies and new wealth generation.

This is the hypermobile media world of "real virtuality"?

Civilizations have always been built around symbolic exchanges, but we are now much further in our historical evolution - our system of virtual representation is one of our strongest dimensions. We live in a pure cultural world, an interaction of ourselves with ourselves - real virtuality. But the purely human world in which the instinct of survival is not the driving force can be very nasty - our bad instincts as well as the good ones will go unrepressed.

Is this what you mean by the black holes of informational capitalism?

By "black holes" I mean areas of social exclusion that can be marginalized and the system doesn't suffer at all. They're not valuable as producers, consumers - in fact, if they would disappear, the logic of the overall system would improve. If you are outside the network, in other words, you don't even exist.

Leading, you say, to a new, unequal world order and the birth of the "Fourth World."

Many, many segments of societies, countries, and regions are being excluded. Africa lives in a technological apartheid. Yes, maybe it could leapfrog, but for the moment you don't have the minimum technological and educational infrastructure. Instead of pulling at least southern Africa out of this black hole, the new democratic South Africa is increasing its economic development by using the other countries as markets, annihilating potential industries there.

Creating "the perverse connection of last resort" - globalized crime.

An increasing number of people not only are being disconnected, but are reacting to their disconnection. We have the global criminal economy swallowing up entire states: Mexico, for example; Russia is in a similar process. Markets are a fundamental element to ensure the dynamism of an economy, but society needs institutions, society needs values, society needs rules that can interact with the markets productively. In the short term, I fear a nationalist, populist reaction in Russia. This is a script for a nightmare.

In terms of a new class struggle?

Social classes are less and less relevant collectives. In most of our history, individuals were considered as pre-units in social terms. The network society restores some level of power and initiative to individuals and networks of individuals through movements of information. In that sense, in terms of the classic philosophies, the one that is most relevant to our world is anarchism.

You insist that "all Utopias lead to terror," yet you also call for social coordination. Which invites the question: To plan or not to plan?

To plan the nonplan: that is to equip yourself. If you have a goal in a very complex world of interdependencies and then try to define all the actions that lead toward this goal, you're going to build a rigid bureaucracy that will collapse.

Yet you call for a convergence of "cultural identity, global networking, and multidimensional politics." Isn't that a plan?

Look, the process of change needs knowledge, and research is a necessary tool. On the other hand, to jump from having an analysis to establishing goals and implementing the path toward these goals from a purely theoretical scheme, be it ideological or research based, almost by definition will fail or build a machine that by its rigidity will ultimately fail.

You were in Paris in 1968, then here near the hub of Silicon Valley for the digital revolution. Any connection?

Revolutions have some imprint from the place and time where they were born. Looking back, Silicon Valley, starting in the late '60s, developed a very strong character, libertarian open-endedness and at the same time political naïveté. The ultimate irony in the placeless world is that some places organize the rest. In Nanterre, and the May '68 movement, most of the leaders were what I would call, including myself, radical libertarians - but it was a bit deeper than today's libertarian trend for the cultural and business élite. We cared about the problems of social exclusion.

So the difference is a sense of political connection?

The cultural battles of our time are the most important battles for business, for people, and for politics. Ultimately society comes back to you - the logic of networks is only one part. If we are able to connect the logic of networks with the logic of culture and identity and then establish bridges and transmit creativity and diffuse information, then we have a very dynamic equilibrium.

But isn't the network society the best way to pursue that balance?

If we decide that everything has to be linked up through computers, and that's the way society should be organized regardless of the cost ... Any ideology that says this is the one best way to organize the world could lead to a new form of terror, even the terror of networks. We need Utopias - on the condition of not trying to make them into practical recipes.

Jay Ogilvy (ogilvy@gbn.org) , cofounder and vice president of Global Business Network, is the author of Living Without a Goal and Many Dimensional Man.