"Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions - rearranges itself, and the people born then cannot even imagine a world in which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born, We are currently living through such a transformation"

Peter Drucker, "The Post-Capitalist Society" Chapter 1, 1993

In "The Future of Money" former Belgian central banker Bernard Lietaer suggests two examples of Drucker's "sharp transformation".

First the invention of printing, and the unimaginable change it brought about in the literacy and therefore intellectual and political influence of a large part of the population from whom books were previously too remote. The ramifications of such a change included the Reformation and its huge upheavals as nations moved away from Rome, gave primacy to their own languages, and permitted scientific scholarship previously zealously suppressed by the Vatican.

Second, the invention of the steam engine which accelerated the process of urbanization, global trade in manufactures, created a working class steeped first in poverty, oppression and misery, and then rising up with revolutionary fervour.

Lietaer, following Drucker's suggestion, suggests that the next epochal change is on us. This time he paints a picture of four great movements that he describes as huge pistons pushing towards the same centre point, and that our reaction to these movements could push us to ever greater social inequity and environmental degradation to the disadvantage of future generations or to what he calls "sustainable abundance". His four great pistons are all too evident already: climate change, an ageing population, monetary instability and the advent of the super-connected information age.

So, you'll have spotted that this actually has nothing to do with the recent book from which I've shamelessly pinched the title. I haven't read it, and it appears now to be on reprint or something as Amazon can only offer 4-6 weeks delivery, but I will no doubt find it interesting once it arrives. But the point is that this epochal change will necessitate a reinvention of the state, the nation state, and probably every nation state on the planet.

Many of the institutions, commercial and governmental at least, that we have today were forged precisely because communication and information flow between disconnected markets was difficult. They are vehicles in which we put our trust when dealing with people and businesses we could not know personally. Even money itself is a construct that enables us to trust dealings with one another, a mechanism by which someone who sells us something can give us credit without knowing too much about us.

The information age changes all of this. The synopsis of David Cameron's Google speech yesterday at ConservativeHome does pinpoint the sort of changes we have seen in information flow and how they have been reflected in changes in the mode of government or, to use their word, bureaucracy. But it goes so much further than they seem to conceive (or maybe they're just trying not to scare the Tory horses too much).

The internet and other communication technologies enable us vastly to expand the networks of people whom we know well enough to form an opinion about whether we trust them or not. Look at things like e-Bay, where many participants rely on recommendations from others when making decisions about whom to trade with. An operation like e-Bay could just as well work in fact with a new, corporate, common currency into and out of which people trade other currencies as they need to. In a different vein, bringing new participants into the global economy, look at things like Kiva, the internet based microfinance scheme where people from all over the developing world can pitch for micro-loans from investors the world over to help them set up or develop their businesses.

On a more day-to-day level we have seen the internet make trade "arbitrage" available to the individual consumer - we can now search the web for the best prices in many goods and in different currencies. There is simply less of a need for national currencies. When, as we are frequently promised, we no longer need cash even for small transactions, it will not matter what currency our bank account is denominated in, so long as timely information allows us to convert it at the till into something the seller wants - which may even not have to be "money" in the conventional sense at all.

The internet is also radically changing the way we could choose to work, even if not many of us have so far done so. We could choose to live on a desert island with an internet connection and still work for our tech firm in Britain, or vice versa, we could retreat to our village virtual workplace and carry out open heart surgery on a patient in Tonga. Where do we get paid for these different patterns of working, and in what - Tesco vouchers anyone, after all you can pretty much buy anything you'd need there if you want to? How would a government know, except through every more intrusive surveillance of our affairs, what our incomes are, where they ought to be taxed and so on?

What does a state have left, if it no longer has control of information about its citizens' earnings and trading patterns? And when we can trade with smaller and smaller businesses around the world because of our widened networks of trust, what does the global corporation have left to keep us buying from them? This was the great hope of the nineteenth century anarchists, libertarians and mutualists who hoped for an end to the money monopoly held by states and bankers, and to government protectionism, which would drive down the returns to capital and drive up the returns to labour.

In the light of these huge potential changes in the ways we work, socialise, trade and trust we have the opportunity to look again at the argument, that once seemed so settled in the early part of the twentieth century, the great Liberal reform era, for truly free trade over protectionism. Individual choice over state intervention. If there is a role for the state in all of this, it is in trying to ensure that we all have fair access to the media of such a new economy - communications and delivery networks.