In the Information Age, corporations will necessarily be required to fulfill more of a functional primary role in sustaining society, a job that is currently held by the Nation State, and previous to that was maintained by the Church[1] or Feudal Lords.  Much in the same way the Serfs had a symbiotic relationship with their Ruler, citizens the same with the Nation State, in the Information age it will be between corporations and increasingly autonomous individuals.

Corporations will need to act much more responsibly if they wish society to maintain itself sufficiently enough to maintain consumers, confidence in monetary exchange systems (currencies) that develop in the Information Age, and the entire reliability of the socio-commercial process in the face of emerging marketplaces.  As privatization continues to expand on a global basis, living people are becoming much more reliant on private corporations for their food, water, maintenance of roads, even prisons. 

If corporations wish to have healthy prosperous consumers capable of buying their products, then they will need to maintain the harmony of the social eco-system by picking up some of the slack created by the devolution of the Nation State, also referred to as the collapse of the welfare state my Lord Mogg Reese and James Dale Davidson in their book "The Sovereign Individual."

The current process of change (state devolution) is a natural process of human evolution, change happens every time there is a transition of ages, and with it comes new types of 1) commerce, 2) currency, and 3) civil command (Ruling) systems whom have the "response-ability" to keep civilization running by protecting peoples asses and assets.  Look at following comparison chart.

In the Information Age this role of civil command systems will shift from Nations to Corporations just as it switched from the Church in the Agricultural Age over to the Nation State with the dawn of the Industrial Age. 

Through the development of human laws over the last 12000 years, fictional entities  (governments, corporations, or citizens,) have achieved the status of a "Person" so that they can interact with us "natural people" in an imaginary world.  The word "Person" in law is defined as:

"Persons also are divided by the law into either natural persons, or artificial persons. Natural persons are such as the God of nature formed us; artificial are such as are created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, which are called corporations or bodies politic."

Clearly natural people and artificial people are not equal, one is real and the other is a figment of the mind, that is the truth in nature, not in legal systems however.  This is why we need to stay aware of what is real (the Territory) and what is a fiction.  

Nation-states and it's sub-institutions called "Corporations" (as the are IN-corporated "in" the corporate Nation State jurisdiction) may be only legal people - fictions - as opposed to living people, but they impact us with a very real and binding force that is backed up by guns, seizure of assets, interruption of critical life services, and even incarceration of our living bodies.  This power relationship between Individuals (living people) and Legal People (fictions) will change as we immerse ourselves into the Information Age.

The immersion into the new age has begun, today we are in a transition period, we have even given a name, "globalization," which we define as: "that time period between the end of the Industrial Age and the emergence of the Information Age."  The difference between this age change and others is the speed with which it is happening, and the exponential times in which we live.  The book the Sovereign Individual summed it up best:

"The transformation will not only revolutionize the character of the world economy, it will do so more rapidly than any previous phase change‑ Unlike the Agricultural Revolution, the Information Revolution will not take millennia to do its work. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, its impact will not be spread over centuries. The Information Revolution will happen within a lifetime.

What is more, it will happen almost everywhere at once. Technical and economic innovations will no longer be confined to small portions of the globe. The transformation will be all but universal. And it will involve a break with the past so profound that it will almost bring to life the magical domain of the gods as imagined by the early agricultural peoples like the ancient Greeks. To a greater degree than most would now be willing to concede, it will prove difficult or impossible to preserve many contemporary institutions in the new millennium. When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers."

If what we believe is true, the Information Age will require us to become more self-reliant, that is less reliant on public services and more so on private corporations for our basic life services. This is already true in the case of Water and public road Privatization, among other things.

"Privatization is the sale of public assets such as a state-owned railroad or water utility to the private sector--is common worldwide.  No services are exempt: banking, electric power provision, oil and gas production, healthcare delivery, water delivery, education, telecommunications, and transportation services are all frequently privatized by national, provincial, and local governments." (World Bank 2001:183,188)

When we look historically, we'll find that the during the Agricultural Age the Church was in control, either directly or through Monarchs, Kings, or other titled individuals who answered to the Church.  With the advent of the printing press people came to find a "direct truth" in the most widely printed book - the Bible - that they didn't need to go through the Priesthood to get to God, but that they could in fact go directly through Christ himself, this enflamed the Reformation causing the outward deterioration of Church power.