Information society

An information society is a social formation in which the production, distribution, and manipulation of information have become the primary structural features of economic and political organization. Unlike industrial societies, where the central resource is material capital, the information society treats information itself — its generation, control, and circulation — as the decisive source of power and wealth. The concept is not merely descriptive; it is a claim about the fundamental transformation of social structure, where the mass media system and digital platforms have displaced traditional institutions as the primary coordinators of social reality.

The information society is not merely a society with more information. It is a society in which information has become self-referential: the system produces information about information, creating recursive loops that can sustain themselves without reference to an external material world. This is the structural condition that makes propaganda and platform capitalism possible — not as pathologies but as normal operations of a system that has learned to treat information as its own environment.