The world economy was in a phase of dramatic structural change. The large industrial enterprises, one after the other, were having financial problems and were beginning to reorganise themselves. Customisation and flexibility were the new success formulae. To accomplish this, units were scaled down through much of the production being handed over to third parties or getting robots to take over.

One result of this was that industry employed fewer people.

Other sectors began to expand instead. The first microprocessor came in 1971, and twenty years later, as the future researcher Anders Ewerman usually points out, the old industrial society was, statistically speaking, defeated. In 1991, the U.S. economy for the first time invested more money in digital technology than in mechanical.

Today we can easily follow the lines of development, but on May 4, 1979, when Margaret Thatcher came to power, there was no consensus about where society was ...