John Chambers, Cisco's CEO and innovator, was, primarily, a salesman, and it shows. - Manuel Castells

Internationally, the Echelon program, created by the United States and the UK during the Cold War, seems to have been converted into industrial espionage, according to the French government agencies, by combining traditional eavesdropping and interference of telecommunications, with interception of electronic messages.

Realpolitik does not disappear in the Information Age. But it remains state-centric, in an era organized around networks, including networks of states.

Globalisation is highly selective. It proceeds by linking up all that, according to dominant interests, has value anywhere in the planet, and discarding anything which has no value or becomes devalued, in a variable geometry of creative destruction and destructive creation of value.