ABSTRACT
The computer revolution has become central to the rise of a technological counter-revolution has become a core problem that what sorts of social and political processes generate quantitative data as a rhetorical tool. The brave new world of logical positivism anticipated and understood well the place of technology in discarding pseudo-problems. The impact of the computer revolution has been highly differentiated. For the demand for certainty, implicit in the reduction of knowledge to information, is the historical cri de couer of the anti-intellectual of the for whom choice and abundance is itself an enemy of the march of civilization. The amorphous nature of knowledge in contrast to the specificity of information or data makes it easier to market the latter and denigrate the values of the former. Knowledge, tends to be on a slow track, since it yields ideas at a level of abstraction and normative import more subject to erosion over time than obsolescence in short bursts of time.
