Those who held power were the landowners. In the Industrial Age, the key forms of property were machines and factories. Those with the most power were those with the capital to finance them. But in the Digital Age, the most important property increasingly takes the form of information, which is intangible. And this kind of intellectual property is extremely difficult to protect in the digital environment of computers.
People can make millions of exact copies of, say, a copyrighted document, for almost no cost.
This is happening right now on a large scale in Russia and many Asian countries. American software, music and movies are being illegally copied and sold on the cheap. The implications of these changing notions of property are huge, and we have no idea how to handle them. We're overdue for an economic theory that more accurately describes how our economy works. Our gauges of economic activity are almost all rooted in a manufacturing economy and are ill-suited for measuring such important things as productivity in our service economy.