Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 05/2012

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Anthony Olcott

May 2010

Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

Abstract

It is eerie to reread The Communist Manifesto while contemplating the profound and deeply unpredictable effects of the new information revolution. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw dialectical materialism and the iron laws of history as driving change, not the Internet and the digitization of information, but their jeremiad, that “all that is solid melts into air,” looks startlingly prescient in regard to huge swaths of the information industry. Book publishing, TV network news, newspapers, and even traditional universities are, if not melting into air, then at least finding their revenue bases eroding, their customer bases migrating, and the positions of prestige they once occupied shrinking toward nothingness.