Coronavirus: The first big test of the information age and what it could mean for privacy

The late Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell long ago predicted the coming of the "information society," which he said would soon replace industrial society. Bell foresaw scientific experts driving government policy, services taking over from manufacturing and computers becoming the main mode of interaction between people. "What counts," he wrote in his classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), "is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information." The new society, about which he was mil...