What really happened in the 1980s?

The fourth and latest technocratic revolution begins in the 1980s, a decade usually recognized as a watershed in political history for reasons such as Thatcher, Reagan, the end of Keynesian economic policy and the mixed economy, welfare state retrenchment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of history and so forth. In one way or another, the common narrative of the key events in the 1980s is the rise of liberalism, less state and more market, or at least the acceptance of free market capitalism as the limit of the state. The most decisive technocratic event of the 1980s, however, had little to do with changes in the balance of power in a zero-sum game between state and market, but rather with a third form of organization: the network. Recalling the general observation that technocratic revolutions occur during times of rapid technological innovation and progress, the importance of the 1980s lies rather in the onset of the information age and the emergence of network society. Of course, no type of society or social order arrives fully packaged within the span of a decade, but in hindsight it is reasonable to view the 1980s as the decisive step towards a situation where:

Many of the key technological innovations were of course in place much earlier, and the embryonic informational revolution was, as noted by Bell and many others, already under way in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It is only ‘since the mid-1980s’, however, that ‘microcomputers cannot be conceived of in isolation: they perform in networks, with increasing mobility’ (Castells, 2010a: 43).