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Challenges of the Global Information Society 343
to; for additional information, see Castells and Himanen 2002;
Himanen and Castells 2004b; Wong 2004):
1. The “Silicon Valley model,” i.e. the American neo-liberalist model
—the predominant model (United States)
2. The “Singapore model,” i.e. the Asian state-run model in which
the objective is to attract multinational companies to the region
—an emerging model (also in China and India)
3. The “Finnish model,” i.e. a European combination of the information
society and the welfare state, which is represented in its
most advanced form in the case of Finland.
Outside these regions and models, the status of the poorest developing
countries continues to weaken. For example, most of the African
countries between the Sahara and South Africa are becoming pauperised.
One-fifth of the world’s population subsists on less than a dollar
a day and has no access to health care or education. A continuously
widening knowledge divide underlies the increasing welfare divide.
Each of the above models has currently problems that can be characterized
with the following scenarios:
1. The Silicon Valley model refers to the neo-liberalist scenario of
“leaving the weak behind.” Although this scenario is technologically
and economically dynamic, it comes with a high social
price. For example, the Silicon Valley area itself produced 60
millionaires a day at the end of the 1990s, but they had to move
to fenced residential areas, because a society that leaves some of
its citizens in the margin is a society of fear. One-fifth of the
population lives below the poverty line, has no health insurance
and is functionally illiterate. In Silicon Valley, the opportunities
to receive education depend on the economic position of your
family, so a class of marginalised people has emerged, for which
crime is the only means of survival (particularly the sale of narcotics
to those who have succeeded). Paradoxically, the world’s
biggest proportion of the population that is in prison is in
California, a leading region in terms of development! In addition,
sending someone to prison for a year is more expensive for
society than sending them to Harvard to study! The adoption of
the Silicon Valley model would mean unfettered neo-liberalism.