The late Alvin Toffler again. In this interview he explains his idea of the three major waves of society, and how he believes we're entering the Third Wave, the information-based age.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
"We're on our way to what I believe are going to be a series of institutional "Katrinas," we're going to see one institution after another collapse, or become totally ineffective. And it's not just the U.S.... the same thing's true in Tokyo, the same thing's true in a bunch (of countries)."
-Alvin Toffler, in 2007, the interview above, promoting his 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth. By "Katrinas" he's referring to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, then in everyone's recent memory, and which caused catastrophic damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the U.S..
The Three Theories that I think best explain today's world
All of these three theories, these concepts, have been around for at least 15 years, two of them for much longer. They are all well known in certain circles. But these ideas that can explain today's chaotic world are almost completely unknown to the majority of average people, and even many business people and people in political circles. It's another paradox of our emerging Information Age, this well thought out information is basically unknown to the people who could most be helped by it.
Hey, there are billions of web pages out there, probably tens of millions of pages of actual physical books, and millions of hours of TV shows, videos, audio books, podcasts, and other media now available. There's way to much information for any single person, or even small group of people, to ever ingest or keep track of. Plus, most people simply aren't interested in the information that could most help them live better lives. So when a very predictable event happens, most people get blindsided by it.
That's why there are weirdos, like me, who find this deep stuff fascinating, and will read through tens of thousands of pages of information, dig through thousands of hours of books on tape, lectures, and interviews, and find what we think is truly important. Then we filter all this information, condense the complicated ideas, and put the most important parts in a form that a larger number of people may want to read and ingest. My synopses of these huge, complicated concepts are intentionally pretty simplistic in this book/blog thing. I want to convey the main concepts that so many people are unaware of. Once you hear these ideas, you can dig into the deeper levels of these concepts all you want. The information is out there.
The Toffler's Third Wave
This concept comes from the 1980 book, The Third Wave, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Full disclosure, I haven't read The Third Wave itself, my understanding of the basic idea comes from reading the Toffler's later books, War and Anti-War, Previews & Premises, and Revolutionary Wealth, as well as several interviews and talks online with/by Alvin Toffler.
Looking back over known human history, we know that for tens of thousands of years, modern humans were living in small tribes and bands. They were what we call hunter/gatherers. They hunted wild animals, foraged for fruits, vegetables, herbs and such, but didn't plant crops. They often migrated with the food sources over the course of each year. They lived in small tribes, in tune with their natural surroundings. Their tools were made from stone, bones, and wood and other natural materials. While we call these people "primitive," they understood the natural world of their region in a way none of us modern humans do. You're not really an "environmentalist," until you learn to live as these people did, and truly begin to understand the natural world, and its cycles.
In any case, about 10,000 years ago, as Alvin Toffler describes in the clip above, a person somewhere near Turkey, planted the first crop that is known to us. This person, most likely a woman, started the agricultural revolution, and farming grew slowly, and ultimately spread around the Earth. This is the First Wave of civilization, as the Toffler's see it. These three waves, were/are waves of change, which is an important aspect to remember.
Agriculture changed the way people lived. For the first time, with people becoming farmers, they stayed in one place indefinitely. Instead of small tribal villages of a few dozen people, small towns and then cities began to evolve. Political structures, like kings and queens, began to emerge, and so did the specialization of work, not everyone had to be a farmer. Craftspeople emerged, people who made pottery or wove baskets or built furniture, and traded their goods with farmers for food. Many very fundamental things first emerged, like writing, government, property ownership, and money. The basic pieces of what we call civilization began at that time, according to our known history.
Most importantly, for my purposes here, is the idea that agriculture completely changed the way human beings lived, it changed the everyday lives of every single person in society. There are a lot of levels and nuances to this. But the main idea to remember is that as a new wave of change, like agriculture, sweeps over society, it changes the way every person lives, and it changes how society itself operates. Agriculture grew very, very slowly, by our standards, over a couple of thousand years, but it eventually took over nearly every part of the world.
About 350 years ago, in the Toffler's thinking, the Second Wave of change began, the Industrial Revolution. Machines were invented that made agriculture and mechanical work easier, and amplified the work a person could do. Mechanical innovation increased, drastically amplified by the invention of the steam engine. Again, a great wave of change crashed over society, as small shops used new machines, and eventually some grew into large factories. This Second Wave happened quite a bit faster, and spread around much of the world in a couple of hundred years, where agriculture took a thousand or two thousand years, to change most of the world.
Me in an ugly selfie with a huge mill wheel of some kind, a leftover from the early Industrial Age, in Richmond Virginia, spring of 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
With the factories growing, we saw the rise of large, industrial cities. Millions of people left the farms, and moved to the cities. Time became much more important, you can't be late to a job on an assembly line, or everybody's waiting on you. Jobs were invented, for the first time in history, getting paid money for a day's work. Before, people did one trade or craft for life, operating as their own small business. Transportation, better boats, ships, trains, and eventually cars, grew much faster, and opened up huge areas of the world for development. Fossil fuels boomed, needed to power the growth, the trains, the factories, and all the vehicles. Things we take for granted, like water and sewer systems, became incredibly important as large cities developed. Newspapers, and eventually other forms of mass media evolved. Mass markets were developed to sell the products created by the mass numbers of people living in massive cities, built in massive factories. Marketing became much more important, to convince people they actually needed more stuff, to keep the growing mass consumer economy working.
Again, a huge wave of change swept over human society, and it changed the life of every single person involved, in a dramatic way. In the Second Wave, the shift to the Industrial Age, this initial change happened over a couple of hundred years, several human generations. This Industrial Age was the age that three of our current generations living were born into, the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and my posse, Generation X. For all of us over about 40-45 years old, the Industrial Age is our "normal." That's what we see as "a traditional society," just because we grew up in it. The Industrial Age was an age of mass markets, mass culture, mass media, mass education, mass religion (no pun intended Catholics), and with an incredible emphasis on conformity. At the height of the late Industrial Age, around the 1940's and 1950's, well over 50% of Americans worked in factories. The mantra was, "Do as you're told, be like everyone else, and keep your ideas to yourself."
Then came the Third Wave, the change to an information-based society. Suddenly, ideas became the great source of wealth and innovation, not land or natural resources. The Tofflers put the beginning of the information-based society at 1956. That was the first year that "white collar" office workers first outnumbered "blue collar" factory workers in the United States. But as we've seen, these revolutions in society, these waves of change, start slowly, and they build. As they build, the rate of change increases in speed. So few people really noticed that the office workers were growing into a larger group than the factory workers at the time.
What people noticed were new technologies, like the TV replacing radio, new appliances for the home, and the evolving cars. People also noticed that the push towards conformity, the institutional racism, sexism, and disrespect of all minorities in the long time White dominated society, was causing fractures, which turned into several social movements. The 1960's saw the civil rights movement for blacks, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and then the hippies, the "fuck everything, let's get high and screw" movement.
To the establishment power structure of the day, everyone seemed to be getting uppity and society seemed to be collapsing. In reality, several long oppressed groups just got to the point where they fought back against the longstanding, institutional oppression. These were the changes most obvious, as attitudes began to change, rebelling against the conformist nature of the Industrial Age.
But the the Information-based Age, as the Toffler's generally refer to it, was rooted in new technology. Where mechanical inventions that amplified human and animal labor were the root of the Industrial Age, intellectual, electronic, communication, and biological innovations are the root of the Information Age. Those started hitting society in rapid succession when us Generation X kids were young. Pocket calculators. Audio cassettes. Touch tone phones. Cable TV. Pong, the first video game. Credit cards became widespread. VCR's. Early "hobby" personal computers. Home video cameras. The fax machine. The Macintosh, the personal computer "normal people" could operate. Car phones. The Sony Walkman. Desktop publishing on home computer printers. Then came the internet, and, like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon, things jumped to light speed. In the 1990's, us humans were bombarded with a whole range of new technologies. That continues today with ever-upgrading devices, new software and systems to learn, and other exponentially increasing technologies.
Us older folks, who grew up dialing rotary dial phones, were not just overwhelmed by the increasing pace of change, our lives became continual change. This didn't just happen in our home lives, the new technology was one one of the main drivers of the collapse of the factory system. The factories that employed half of the people in the U.S. began to shut down at a rapid pace. No one knows the exact numbers. But about half of those good paying factory jobs were lost to new technologies, like industrial robots and other technology, and about half were lost because of outsourcing jobs to other countries. It was cheaper for major corporations to shut down a factory full of high paid, Midwestern workers, and move that job to a place with cheap labor. In the 1970's, jobs moved first to the American South, then the big waves of outsourcing followed, taking jobs to Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and eventually, China.
As the Information Age washed over American society, and that of other industrial nations, we saw the rise of the geeks. Once the dorky kids that got picked on in high school, some of them turned into a new wave of multi-millionaires and billionaires, becoming the entrepreneurs with the ideas that built the Information Age. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others rose to levels of incredible wealth faster than anyone in human history ever had. This happened because they had the fundamental ideas that were the backbone and infrastructure for this new era. So we had the paradox of the most rapid fortunes in history being built at the same time we had tens of millions of average working Americans (and workers in other countries), losing the jobs they planned to work for their entire lives.
Again this is one basic aspect of the Tofflers Third Wave concept. The big point I want to make here is that this is what is happening right now. We are still in the middle of this huge shift from the Industrial Age, that was going strong in the 1970's, into a completely different, Information Age. This changes how everything in society works. It's a huge wave of many types of change, and it's not over. We still have a legal system, a government system, an education system, political parties, non-profit groups, and many other institutions from the Industrial Age. This is something that has only happened two previous times in known human history. The First Wave took well two thousand years or more, to sweep around the world. The Second Wave took several human generations, a couple of hundred years, to sweep around the world. This Third Wave of change is happening in a single human lifetime.
There is a reason our world is so chaotic. This is a massive amount of change to deal with. No group of humans has ever had to deal with this level of societal change in such a short time. There is no road map, no one has done this before. We're making it up as we go. This huge, incredible, increasingly fast wave of change affects the life of every single person. The technology genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in. We are never going "back to a simpler time." There are really good reasons that things seem so crazy, and frantic, and chaotic. It's because they are.
Hundreds of millions of people, myself included, are experiencing the "future shock," that Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted in their first book, Future Shock, in 1970. Huge swaths of our society are struggling to simply survive and cope with this incredible level of change. Tens of millions of people have already been left behind by the change, and don't seem too motivated to try and catch up.
Yet, 50 years after Future Shock was published, most people still don't realize that this is why things are chaotic. Simply knowing, and acknowledging, "OK, we're in this massive wave of change, THAT'S WHY the world seems real crazy, " helps. It gives us a sense of why things are tough, and a place to catch our breath, and begin working towards coping with this onslaught of change. Realizing just how big of a period of unprecedented change ALL OF US are in, can help us plan to build the remaining aspects of the Information Age in a way that works for everyone, as much as possible.
As an Old School BMX bike rider, I take pride in the fact that a couple of avid bike riders, who owned a bike shop in
Dayton, Ohio, are the guys who invented the first airplane. With that, they also invented the aviation industry. Orville and Wilbur Wright, getting air in North Carolina, 1903. Public domain photo, meme by Steve Emig.
But the the Information-based Age, as the Toffler's generally refer to it, was rooted in new technology. Where mechanical inventions that amplified human and animal labor were the root of the Industrial Age, intellectual, electronic, communication, and biological innovations are the root of the Information Age. Those started hitting society in rapid succession when us Generation X kids were young. Pocket calculators. Audio cassettes. Touch tone phones. Cable TV. Pong, the first video game. Credit cards became widespread. VCR's. Early "hobby" personal computers. Home video cameras. The fax machine. The Macintosh, the personal computer "normal people" could operate. Car phones. The Sony Walkman. Desktop publishing on home computer printers. Then came the internet, and, like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon, things jumped to light speed. In the 1990's, us humans were bombarded with a whole range of new technologies. That continues today with ever-upgrading devices, new software and systems to learn, and other exponentially increasing technologies.
Us older folks, who grew up dialing rotary dial phones, were not just overwhelmed by the increasing pace of change, our lives became continual change. This didn't just happen in our home lives, the new technology was one one of the main drivers of the collapse of the factory system. The factories that employed half of the people in the U.S. began to shut down at a rapid pace. No one knows the exact numbers. But about half of those good paying factory jobs were lost to new technologies, like industrial robots and other technology, and about half were lost because of outsourcing jobs to other countries. It was cheaper for major corporations to shut down a factory full of high paid, Midwestern workers, and move that job to a place with cheap labor. In the 1970's, jobs moved first to the American South, then the big waves of outsourcing followed, taking jobs to Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and eventually, China.
As the Information Age washed over American society, and that of other industrial nations, we saw the rise of the geeks. Once the dorky kids that got picked on in high school, some of them turned into a new wave of multi-millionaires and billionaires, becoming the entrepreneurs with the ideas that built the Information Age. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others rose to levels of incredible wealth faster than anyone in human history ever had. This happened because they had the fundamental ideas that were the backbone and infrastructure for this new era. So we had the paradox of the most rapid fortunes in history being built at the same time we had tens of millions of average working Americans (and workers in other countries), losing the jobs they planned to work for their entire lives.
Again this is one basic aspect of the Tofflers Third Wave concept. The big point I want to make here is that this is what is happening right now. We are still in the middle of this huge shift from the Industrial Age, that was going strong in the 1970's, into a completely different, Information Age. This changes how everything in society works. It's a huge wave of many types of change, and it's not over. We still have a legal system, a government system, an education system, political parties, non-profit groups, and many other institutions from the Industrial Age. This is something that has only happened two previous times in known human history. The First Wave took well two thousand years or more, to sweep around the world. The Second Wave took several human generations, a couple of hundred years, to sweep around the world. This Third Wave of change is happening in a single human lifetime.
It's OK to be freaked out by the rapid change in our society, no one group of humans has ever had to deal with massive change happening this fast. Ever.
There is a reason our world is so chaotic. This is a massive amount of change to deal with. No group of humans has ever had to deal with this level of societal change in such a short time. There is no road map, no one has done this before. We're making it up as we go. This huge, incredible, increasingly fast wave of change affects the life of every single person. The technology genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in. We are never going "back to a simpler time." There are really good reasons that things seem so crazy, and frantic, and chaotic. It's because they are.
Hundreds of millions of people, myself included, are experiencing the "future shock," that Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted in their first book, Future Shock, in 1970. Huge swaths of our society are struggling to simply survive and cope with this incredible level of change. Tens of millions of people have already been left behind by the change, and don't seem too motivated to try and catch up.
Yet, 50 years after Future Shock was published, most people still don't realize that this is why things are chaotic. Simply knowing, and acknowledging, "OK, we're in this massive wave of change, THAT'S WHY the world seems real crazy, " helps. It gives us a sense of why things are tough, and a place to catch our breath, and begin working towards coping with this onslaught of change. Realizing just how big of a period of unprecedented change ALL OF US are in, can help us plan to build the remaining aspects of the Information Age in a way that works for everyone, as much as possible.
Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom. I even left in the original typos that I missed. My ideas about the 2020's make more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos. You can check out more of my writing at my Substack:
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