In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engines and electricity cut pathways for the extension of the information nexus and capitalism across the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. After World War II, with the dawning of the digital age, capitalism spread and intensified as new technologies and new means of data processing reconfigured, sped up, and deepened the transmission of information globally. Although the birthplace of the new information technologies (IT) was the United States, seminal contributions came from the United Kingdom, and major Japanese innovations also molded the era and helped to globalize it. The military and economic advantages these technologies bestowed on capitalist nations was one motivation for the Russian Communist Party's push for reform from above that unintentionally led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. With their economic model in ruins, former socialist states had no choice but to adopt market (or quasi-market) economies, first among them being China, whose meteoric rise our notion of the information nexus can contextualize. Digital technologies have provided elements of the capitalist information nexus to India and underdeveloped nations in Africa, where pioneering developments are taking place. But is the “IT revolution” truly revolutionary? And can we apply the term capitalism to digital-age states that interfere with the functioning of the information nexus? The current chapter addresses those issues after providing an overview of the technologies responsible for this third phase in the history of capitalism.

Computing and telecommunications: The “digitization of just about everything”

The computer as we know it has its direct origins in a mechanical tabulator designed by the American engineer and statistician Herman Hollerith for the US Census Bureau in 1890. Crunching data registered on punch cards, his machine shaved years off the time it had previously taken the government to complete the census. Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Company merged with other firms and in 1924 was renamed International Business Machines. Under the decades-long presidency of Thomas J. Watson, Sr., IBM led the global production of computing equipment. As the company fattened due to sales in the 1930s to the American Social Security Administration, it opened branch offices around the world.