ИСТИНА

The advent of digital economy (DE) is making a profound impact on business activities worldwide. Information is considered the most important asset. Under the conditions of DE, instantaneous online transactions result in extremely complex goods/services-providing chains. Traditional bureaucratic corporate business finds it increasingly difficult to cope with the consequences of the development of DE. Decentralized network structures provide much support in this situation; they are “as old as the hills” but receive a new impetus in the DE era. Such networks replace conventional hierarchies and set up horizontal interactions among their elements/nodes, which represent individual entrepreneurs, their groups, firm departments, or whole firms; some of the nodes may become partial, situation-dependent, temporary bosses. The establishment of horizontal networks inside an enterprise or of networked alliances among whole enterprises is facilitated by the spread of crypto currency and the development of inter-platform interactions that are based on the blockchain principle. This talk focuses on the idea that the promotion of network structures in business and in other spheres of society results in the transition to the new network socio-economic formation. It is based on IT systems and promotes a mode of production that is primarily aimed at producing information (including know-how). This incipient network society inevitably gives rise to the following social classes: (i) network members (reticulists) having direct access to valuable information on which the activities of network structures are based, as exemplified by secret military data for “nework-centered warfare” or by confidential business information in networked interfirm alliances and (ii) outsiders (the consumetariat) that cannot directly access the bulk of valuable network-level information but consume its minor “exoteric” part shared by network members with outsiders while selling goods/services to them or hiring them as employees.