“The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures.”

— Ervin László

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: p. 247.

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Ervin László 46

Hungarian musician and philosopher 1932

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“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

“[ Technology is] the instrumentality for accessing and using free energies in human societies for human and social purposes.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: pp.237-249; As cited in: K.L. Dennis (2003, p. 36).

“It is much more accurate to identify the factors of production as know-how (that is genetic information structure), energy, and materials, for, as we have seen, all processes of production involve the direction of energy by some know-how structure toward the selection, transportation, and transformation of materials into the product”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Evolutionary Economics, 1981, p. 27

“As the natural sciences have developed to encompass increasingly complex systems, scientific rationality has become ever more statistical, or probabilistic. The deterministic classical mechanics of the enlightenment was revolutionized by the near-equilibrium statistical mechanics of late 19th century atomists, by quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, and by the far-from-equilibrium complexity theorists of the later 20th century. Mathematical neo-Darwinism, information theory, and quantitative social sciences compounded the trend. Forces, objects, and natural types were progressively dissolved into statistical distributions: heterogeneous clouds, entropy deviations, wave functions, gene frequencies, noise-signal ratios and redundancies, dissipative structures, and complex systems at the edge of chaos.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Statistical Mentality" https://web.archive.org/web/20110718052233/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/index.php/article/detail/522/statistical-mentality (2011)

“Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an over-arching conclusion: as an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 500

“Authoritarian governments are now trying to ensure that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information through cyberspace fuels their economies without threatening their political power.”

Ian Bremmer (1969) American political scientist

"Democracy in Cyberspace," Foreign Affairs (November/December 2010).

“Just as organic species evolve toward the use of greater densities of a wider variety of free-energy sources in their environment, so human societies develop to access, store, and use in greater densities larger quantities of free energy through the ongoing improvement of their technologies. As a consequence societies, the same as natural systems, tend to grow larger in size, develop more intricate relations among their diverse components, and create more massive and flexible modes of interaction among them.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 125.

“In the industrial mode of development, the main source of productivity lies in the introduction of new energy sources, and in the ability to decentralize the use of energy throughout the production of circulation processes. In the new informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbolic … what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity… in a virtuous circle of interaction”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 16-17 as cited in: Andy Hargreaves (2003) Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity. p. 16

“A society’s stock of knowledge is structured in terms of what is generally relevant and what is relevant only to specific roles… the social distribution of knowledge entails a dichotomization in terms of general and role-specific relevance… because of the division of labor, role-specific knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and accessible knowledge… The increasing number and complexity of [the resulting] sub universes [of specialized knowledge] make them increasingly inaccessible to outsiders.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p.77-87

“An inequality-furthering phenomenon is technological development. But need it be? Increasingly we get the feeling that technological development is not simply something given, but that it may be guided, within limits.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

Source: Income Distribution (1975), p. 61; Cited in: Acemoglu (2000, p. 31)

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Ervin László 46

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