You get today's Luddite Award.

Again.

But sure, I'll play.

Information has created a world in which large corporations can operate on a global scale where manufacturing is located in the countries with the cheapest labor thus driving down wages even further.

You might want to check out the history of the East India Trading Company if you think that corporations operating on a global scale taking advantage of cheap local labor is a new development.

Information technology has opened the door to the speculative economy where investors divert their money to non-productive investments depriving the real economy of much needed capital. It has also affected the stock market and the concentration of wealth.

Speculation is also nothing new.

As well, information technology has deprived us of some of our civil, political and legal rights. Just look at the 2000 and 2004 elections or the unregulated surveillance of citizens.

Information technology could have prevented these issues just as well as it aided in causing them.  It is a tool, and in this case, the wrong people were wielding that tool.

It's not information technology that illegally scrubbed thousands of registered voters from the registration lists in Florida in 2000.  Katherine Harris did.  It's not information technology that made the 2004 election in Ohio inscrutable.  Ken Blackwell and Diebold did that.

In addition, it has created a plethora of products such as the increasingly miniaturization of computers, cell phones, and GPS. Their great contribution to consumerism is the much faster rate of both perceived and real obsolescence creating a much greater market for newer generations of these products.

And it's also brought us Ebay and Craigslist and Amazon which have created a much broader market for used goods.

On the bright side, information technology has fashioned a new tool for activists who can now network and plan on a global scale.

Certainly one small benefit among the many huge and tangible benefits of the information revolution.  But the vast majority of the benefits are social, not just political.

Information technology is a very significant revolution in human evolution, one that may accelerate our race towards extinction or generate more hope for awareness and change.

I fail to see how it's an extinction threat, unless you're a grey-goo'er.

Here's the basic fact you're missing:

There are two basic components to commercial success: information and capital.  A hundred years ago, the balance was tipped almost completely toward the side of capital; today, it's tipping swiftly toward information.  Within a few decades, capital is going to become effectively inconsequential.

Information technology creates a level playing field with effectively zero barrier to entry.

Certainly we have to be wary about putting too much trust in any technology without safeguards, but your apparently dim view of information technology is completely unwarranted.  On balance, the information revolution has been the most socially positive economic paradigm shift since agriculture.

reply your post deserved. Now please shut down that computer, switch off your cell and ipod, turn off the electricity, and head off to the mountains..and then please come back after seven days to write about your experience without modern technology..I'm looking forward to it..