Think of the spreadsheets with the production figures of the Five-Year plans, the intelligence services' miles of files, the Leaders' collected speeches, the endless series of forms and applications which had to be filled out at the drop of a hat. This was a social format that got entangled in paperwork, a Leviathan too big to be computerized. All the memory of the world could not have held the data overload that was heaped up in the archives. Yet the urge to program reared its head again in the 1980s in the person of Gorbachev. He discovered that contemporary social programs require a different hardware than society.
Planning is now merely PR material which presents a corporate image.
When the investors had Gorby's chain investigated, the marketability of the Soviet Group was finished. In the West, the school of life has given up learning from the past a long time ago. Historiography has been completed, from the nano- to the cosmic level. All phenomena and objects have been fitted into a chronology which runs from the first attosecond after the Big Bang, the cigar, the bathroom and bedroom, anorexia, teddy bears, the sublime, medieval cuisine and going to the beach to the image of the vagina, death and the fine nose of the nighthawk. All of history is reprocessed into information and made into news.