Other things that happened in the 1980s

The network society is the essential element of post-industrial society in the information age: it is the interplay between the latest truly pervasive technological revolution and network organization across economy, civil society and the state that defines the essential structures and processes of post-industrial society, substituting the industrial interplay between machine technology and large-scale bureaucratic organizations. The post-industrial society is, however, also a risk society arising from changes in the interplay of technology and regulation, or more generally technology and politically provided security. When viewed in this way, the epochal difference between industrial society and post-industrial society occurs the moment that the security provisions and compensation schemes of industrial society are nullified by the ‘central paradox of risk society’: that ‘risks are generated by the processes of modernization which try to control them’ (Beck, 1998: 10). When does moment occur? In the preceding chapter, I placed the emergence of network society in the 1980s, albeit keeping in mind that we are dealing with prolonged processes of social transformation. Based on the same logic, the 1980s is not the worst place to look for the emergence of risk society either.

Perrow published his reflections on the effects of living with high-risk technologies in 1984, the same year that the Bhopal chemical disaster occurred, but inspired mainly by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. Two years later, Beck published the original German version of Risk Society in the horizon of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The same year, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster occurred, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) was officially recognized as a disease and the publication of Engines of Creation announced the ‘coming era of nanotechnology’ (Drexler, 1986). What came to be known as the AIDS epidemic appeared in 1979. The first genetically engineered plant saw the light of day in 1983, although the first plant (a tomato) was approved for commercial release in 1994. In 1983, the Beirut barracks bombing occurred, killing 307 of the 659 people killed between 1982 and 1986 in 36 suicide attacks in Lebanon. The Exxon Valdez ran aground in the Alaskan Gulf in 1989.