The Control Revolution describes the birth of the information society in our desire to control the economic processes of production and how this led, inevitably, it seems, to the development of bureaucracy, communication technologies, computers, and research. The enhancement
The loss of control was more of an evolution than a revolution in the traditional sense. In fact, one of the greatest contributions of James Beniger’s book is a restoration of an earlier meaning of the word “revolution”: a return to a past form of governance; in this view, computers are not entirely new, but yet another indicator of societal efforts to ensure predictability and efficiency in the economy. In that
sense, the control revolution is not breaking but a forging of the chains that bind modern societies.