"Technetronic" being, as WFB explains, "a simple agglutination of 'technological' and 'electronic'." It is Mr. Brzezinski's thesis that the industrial age, "which, itself, produced many strains and tensions, did lead after a time to a number of coherent ideas as to how, more or less, to organize society, how to conduct international politics." But now, as we enter the "technetronic age," the new phenomena-but especially "the impact of modern communications, of modern means of calculations, of modern means of interacting"-have led to the breakdown of "established values, established institutions." And so we're off on a rich and, as it turns out, prophetic discussion of this "messy, congested, chaotic, fragmented, barely structured, partially orderly, partially disorderly" transition.