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14 Manuel CastellsTHE RISE OF THE NETWORK SOCIETYEvery new social structure has its own genesis, dependent on spatiotemporalcontexts. Naturally, there is a relationship between the historical process ofproduction of a given social structure and its characteristics. However, it ispossible to analyze this social structure as a given, without considering indetail the processes that led to its formation. In fact, this is the option taken inthis chapter, which is focused on the theory of the network society rather thanon its history. Nonetheless, I will summarize some of the analysis of the genesisof the network society, presented in my earlier writings (Castells, 2000b,c), with one specific purpose: to dispel the notion that either technology orsocial evolution led inevitably to the network society, as the later incarnationof modernity, in the form of postmodernity, or as the information/knowledgesociety as a natural outcome in the long evolution of the human species. Wehave ample evidence that there is no predetermined sense of history, and thatevery age and every power claims ethnocentrically and historocentrically itsright to be the supreme stage of human evolution. What we observe throughouthistory is that different forms of society come and go by accident, internalself-destruction, serendipitous creation, or, more often, as the outcome oflargely undetermined social struggles.True, there has been a long-term trend toward technological development thathas increased the mental power of humankind over its environment. But the juryis still out on the outcome of such a process measured in terms of progress,unless we consider as minor issues the highly rational process of mass murderthat led to the Holocaust, the management of large-scale incarceration thatcreated gulags out of the hopes for workers’ liberation, the nuclear destructionof Hiroshima and Nagasaki to finish off an already vanquished nation, or thespread of AIDS in Africa while pharmaceutical companies and their parentgovernments discuss payment for their intellectual property rights.And, to remain in the realm of analysis, nothing predetermined the trajectorytaken by the information and communication technology revolution.Personal computers were not in the mind of governments and corporations atthe onset of the revolution: it was done by people. And the crucial technologyof the network society, the Internet, would have never come to be a globalnetwork of free communication if ATT had accepted in 1970 the offer of theAmerican Defense Department to give it free to that corporation; or if VintCerf and Robert Kahn had not diffused over the Net the source code of theIP/TCP protocols on which the Internet is still based. Historical evolution is anopen-ended, conflictive process, enacted by subjects and actors who try tomake society according to their interests and values, or, more often, producesocial forms of organization by resisting the domination of those who identifysocial life with their own desires enforced through violence.