Games change culture?

I feel like I would need to re-read Galloway about nine times before I fully understand him, but this passage in particular confused me:

“Acts of configuration are a rendering of life: the transformation into an information economy in the US since the birth of video games as a mass medium in the 1970’s has precipitated massive upheavals in the lives of individuals submitted to a process of retraining and redeployment into a new economy mediated by machines and other informatic artifacts… The new “general equivalent” of information has changed the way culture is created and experiences. The same quantitative modulations and numerical valuations required by the new information worker are thus observed in a dazzling array of new cultural phenomena, from the cut-up sampling culture of hi-hop to the calculus curves of computer-aided architectural design” (16-17).

I start out following him just fine in the passage before this one, but he loses me here. How exactly is culture being changed here? By what? In what context? What is this “general equivalent?” It seems like I’m missing quite a bit of context for his claims.