ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the author central themes—;;the connections between cities and global systems—;;and put the information revolution in the context of humankind's long struggle to overcome the costs of entropy. By the 1990s, three forces had converged to undermine the old industrial paradigm: the global spread of manufacturing to virtually every corner of the world; the global spread of information technology and the communications media; and the decline of state socialism as a viable option to organize na-tion-states, heralding a convergence of the world's economies toward some variant of the capitalist model. The information revolution confronts us with a fundamental dilemma that is built into people systems of production, consumption, knowledge, and control. To put it simply, people ability to construct complex, rapidly changing global systems for production and consumption has far outdistanced people ability to monitor, explain, comprehend, predict, or control their behavior.
