Internet marketing expert, entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Seth Godin. He was one of the very first people to write about how the internet and related technologies were changing the business world at a fundamental level. In this keynote speech from about 2012, Seth describes that unplanned revolution. He describes how we've gone from a mass manufacturing, mass market, and mass media driven society, to one of thousands, maybe even millions of small niches. These "tribes" of people are smaller groups of people who come together because of a common interest, and they don't buy products made for everyone, they want products designed by, and for, their little group or tribe, their particular area of interest.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
"What revolutions do is, they destroy the perfect, and enable the impossible."
- Seth Godin, in the keynote speech above.
In the previous chapters, I told you about the first two big theories that I think best explain the underlying changes happening in society. From futurists, the late Alvin, and Heidi Toffler, we get the concept of the Third Wave. That concept tells us our society is making the transformation from an industrial-based society to an information-based society. This is a type of massive shift in how humans live that has only happened two other times in our known human history. The First Wave was when the tribal hunter/gatherer people turned into farmers, the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave was when these farmers turned into a world of factory workers, the Industrial Revolution, which began about 350 years ago. So now we're in the Third Wave, when the U.S. and other developed nations are moving from the Industrial Age into the Information Age. Except this time, this massive revolution, this huge wave of change, is happening in a single human lifetime, not over hundreds of years. So this Third Wave of change is a huge part of what's happening in our world today.
In this Third Wave, this chaotic transition into the Information Age, the old, Industrial Age businesses, systems, and institutions end. Then new, Information Age businesses, systems, and institutions are built. One way this happens is by a group of people understanding this is happening, and intentionally restructuring their business, organization, or system, into something compatible with the world of the Information Age. But that is not the way most of this change happens. In most cases, some new visionary sees this new technology and change,and sees it creating an opportunity for something new in the future. Then that person and their cohorts build a new model, based on the technologies emerging in today's world.
If this new idea catches on and takes hold, people begin to adopt it.
Change happens, and this disrupts the old way of doing things. The Industrial Age version of that thing collapses.and goes out of business.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the Apple 1 computer to show their friends at the Homegrown Club in 1975. Nine years later, after envisioning the possibilities of a world where everyone had a computer, the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984. Young Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a tiny computer software company in 1975, and a few years later they sold the MS-DOS operating system to corporate giant IBM, and got a royalty from each sale. These two little companies, and their computers and software, revolutionized business and life for nearly every person on Earth. They disrupted the old business systems in the process.
In July 1994, tech nerd Jeff Bezos decided to sell books online through a website. He sold his first book in 1995. He named his company Amazon.com, In 1999, computer enthusiast Shawn Fanning wrote a program to allow people to share files across the internet, called Napster, and completely disrupted the entire business model of the music industry, overnight. In 2003, Harvard freshman and computer geek, Mark Zuckerberg and friends were lamenting that Harvard didn't have a "facebook," like other colleges. In the early 2000's, a "facebook" was a yearbook-like, printed volume, that showed all the people enrolled at the school. Students would look through the facebooks, and pick out the other students they wanted to meet, date, and hook up with. Mark and his friends decided to make an internet version of a facebook for Harvard. He made an initial site, and later a better one called The Facebook. The idea gained popularity quickly, and that morphed into the social media juggernaut, Facebook. Each of these ideas, and many like them, started with some tech enthusiast thinking, "Hey, wouldn't if be cool if we _______?" They filled in the blank, and took action. The machines or systems they built, grew into foundational parts of a new, Information Age infrastructure, the building blocks of the Information Age. These computers, software, websites, and all the other similar inventions, disrupted the old models, and created something new. Those innovations set the stage for waves of more innovation and change across the entire society.
"I had a moment where I asked myself, 'Is this morally correct? Technology's advancing, this is going to happen anyway.'"
Ali Alyadar, ally of Shawn Fanning, Napster creator
In July 1994, tech nerd Jeff Bezos decided to sell books online through a website. He sold his first book in 1995. He named his company Amazon.com, In 1999, computer enthusiast Shawn Fanning wrote a program to allow people to share files across the internet, called Napster, and completely disrupted the entire business model of the music industry, overnight. In 2003, Harvard freshman and computer geek, Mark Zuckerberg and friends were lamenting that Harvard didn't have a "facebook," like other colleges. In the early 2000's, a "facebook" was a yearbook-like, printed volume, that showed all the people enrolled at the school. Students would look through the facebooks, and pick out the other students they wanted to meet, date, and hook up with. Mark and his friends decided to make an internet version of a facebook for Harvard. He made an initial site, and later a better one called The Facebook. The idea gained popularity quickly, and that morphed into the social media juggernaut, Facebook. Each of these ideas, and many like them, started with some tech enthusiast thinking, "Hey, wouldn't if be cool if we _______?" They filled in the blank, and took action. The machines or systems they built, grew into foundational parts of a new, Information Age infrastructure, the building blocks of the Information Age. These computers, software, websites, and all the other similar inventions, disrupted the old models, and created something new. Those innovations set the stage for waves of more innovation and change across the entire society.
"A couple of geeks, who sketched out some software... (laughing) could destroy Sears Roebuck?"
- Bob Simon, 60 Minutes host, in 1997 segment about Amazon
Because of this disruption, the old, established, Industrial Age business and institutions began to lose their viability, and then their market share, and then their market share in their industries. The old dinosaurs began to die off. New technologies and industrial robots made it cheaper to do many industrial jobs, and many factories lost profitability. At the same time, the rise of more international trade, and larger, multi-national corporations, made it viable to shift manufacturing to regions, and other countries, with a cheaper labor force. This technology and outsourcing disrupted the U.S. manufacturing sector, and began the major collapse of the Industrial Age. These underlying technologies and social shifts had been happening for many years already. But they began to reach critical mass in the 1970's, as us Generation X kids were staring at the TV for hours. This series of technological and social shifts is what the Tofflers explored in their first bestselling book, Future Shock, in 1970, and then in The Third Wave in 1980, and in their subsequent books. So that's one major shift that's happening right now, The Third Wave, the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
At the same time, another huge transition was beginning to take shape, the end of the Acquisitor Age, as defined by P. R. Sarkar in The Law of Social Cycle. As the Industrial Age began to be disrupted, the United States was also shifting into a higher gear of corruption, in the business and political world. A small group of people in the fundamentalist Christian world began to intensely focus on political power in the mid 1970's. This happened at the same time that computer and other technologies were beginning to take hold in the business world. Behind the scenes organizations, like The Family, headed by Doug Coe, and the beginnings of the Moral Majority by Jerry Falwell, Sr., brought Southern-style cronyism into the national political sphere in a big way. This rise of the Christian Right, and similar groups, took control of the Republican Party. They began to exert tremendous influence and force on the mainstream business world of the United States, as well as everyday Christians of all denominations. As technology looked toward the future, white Conservative Christians yearned for the security they felt in the past.
Cronyism is corruption, at the most basic level, and can be fairly benign, or catastrophically detrimental, depending on the situation. In essence, it favors people who show devout loyalty to a leader or group, as opposed to people who who are fundamentally competent at their jobs. This leads to bloated, poorly run companies, organizations, and networks, who succeed primarily by rigging the game in their favor, rather than focusing on being good at the game itself. This can work for decades... until someone comes along with a new business model or disrupting technology, which changes the paradigm.
Cronyism is corruption, at the most basic level, and can be fairly benign, or catastrophically detrimental, depending on the situation. In essence, it favors people who show devout loyalty to a leader or group, as opposed to people who who are fundamentally competent at their jobs. This leads to bloated, poorly run companies, organizations, and networks, who succeed primarily by rigging the game in their favor, rather than focusing on being good at the game itself. This can work for decades... until someone comes along with a new business model or disrupting technology, which changes the paradigm.
So in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, we had one track of Industrial Age crony capitalism getting more and more corrupt, part of the corrupt aspect of the late Acquisitor Age that P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle predicts. At the same time, we had evolving new technology, and emerging businesses run largely by younger, unexperienced business people, that were beginning to disrupt one industry after another. These two major forces grew parallel to each other for years.
In the late 1970's we also had the rise of a shareholder's rights movement, which shifted the focus of public companies from longer term thinking, to a more short-term, quarterly profit oriented mentality, with a focus on making the most money for shareholders. This rise, and the greed it spawned, helped create the atmosphere for President Ronald Reagan to sign the Tax Cut bill of 1986. This made much, much larger corporate and personal fortunes possible, enabled larger corporations, and led to the exponential rise of wealth inequality.
On the tech side, the rise of personal computers and all the other transformative technologies led to the first geek mega-entrepreneurs, like Steve's Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, Michael Dell at Dell Computers, and the others who have followed. This disruption by technology led to the fastest building of huge fortunes in human history, by the most successful of the tech entrepreneurs. For the first time ever, we had self-made billionaires in their 20's. Last year, in 2019, 21-year-old young woman and reality star, Kylie Jenner, became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. At 21 years old. You can argue with the "self-made" part, but not with her business' sales. So much for the billionaire boys club.
So, on one side of the coin, we had growing cronyism and greed in the Industrial Age business world, leading to huge fortunes, the exponential rise in power of Wall Street, and opportunities for all kinds of corruption. On the other side of the coin, at the same time, we had brand new mega fortunes being built by the early Information Age companies, who were disrupting some of the Industrial Age industries.
This is the late Acquisitor Age in The Law of Social Cycle. While many large corporations have gone bankrupt, or are struggling to survive, the largest group of losers in this period are The Laborers. A small number of people built mega fortunes, some with corrupt practices, some simply by using the laws and business friendly environment, and some by creating huge businesses built on new technology. As this happened, the high paying American factory jobs mostly disappeared. Some of the American Middle Class learned tech skills, and moved into high paying tech jobs. But a much larger number of people were left with working much lower paying service jobs. These low paying service jobs now make up around 45% of the American workforce (see 2nd chart). Real wages have been stagnant for average people for about 40 years now.
After 40 years of stagnation, the seeds for a populist uprising exploded into the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and since into large populist movements on both the political Left and the political Right. This brings us into the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, predicted by Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles. We're in a time of historical levels of wealth inequality, peak corruption, and massive discord among the working class Laborers. In short, were at the point where the shit hits the fan, and the fan is on high.
As I saw these trends emerge over the last 25 years, and I began to realize that these two social theories largely explained what was going on, I began to ask myself questions.
What happens now?
What else will be disrupted?
How long can this era of massive disruption go on?
I realized that, ultimately, everything, every single aspect of our Industrial Age society, has to fall away. It all has to be intentionally restructured or disrupted, and rebuilt, into a new Information Age world. That's when I began to piece together my idea of The Big Transition. This is my personal thinking, resting on the foundation of the Tofflers' Third Wave concept, and P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle. The Industrial Age didn't end in, say 1984, with the release of the Apple Macintosh personal computer. No one flipped a switch and said, "OK, the Industrial Age is over. Give up your high hourly wage assembly line job, as of tomorrow you'll be a tech worker, sitting on a giant kickball at a desk, writing computer code." I realized, this transition has been going on since 1956, according to the Tofflers. It started very slowly, and has been increasing in speed, slowly at first, and now much faster. It's a sticky, chaotic, disruptive transition. It's messy. It pulls the rug out from under many traditional power structures, as industries and institutions are disrupted. People go nuts when shit they don't expect disrupts their job, their lifestyle, their source of income, and their power in their local area or the larger world. In short, The Big Transition is a fucking crazy mess, it's been going on for 64 years now, and still has at least 15 or 20 more years to go.
The Big Transition, and the disruption that's a key part of it, caused the Factory Apocalypse of the late 20th century, and the Retail Apocalypse we're seeing now. It led to the fracturing of both political parties into smaller, more divisive groups. The Big Transiton is the explanation for the depression-like era we're heading into right now. It's the explanation for the Financial Apocalypse, which is what the next few years will feel like for most people. The Big Transition is the explanation for the coming College Apocalypse (seriously, it has begun), the current Political Apocalypse, the Real Estate Apocalypse, and the coming disruption of our legal system, our government systems, our transportation systems, and everything else that hasn't transitioned through major Disruption yet. Yes, this sounds horrible. But now we have models to look to. We've seen the changes in the music industry, the publishing industry, the TV and movie industries. We've seen Amazon win over the once dominant mall department stores, the same way Sears & Roebucks disrupted small town general stores 120 to 130 years ago, with mail order catalogs. We have an idea where things are headed now, and that it is possible to survive major disruption. It's not easy. It's not fun, but it's possible.
Because there is so much disruptive change on so many fronts, most people are busy dealing with their own piece of it. For whatever reason, partly because of my interest in The Third Wave concept, and the Law of Social Cycle concept, I'm one of the few who has stepped back, to look at this all from a much bigger perspective, a much wider angle. All of these massive changes are part of what I now call The Big Transition. It all ties together, and from a eye in the sky view, all these different levels of change and disruption make sense.
The Big Transition is the chaotic and sticky shift from the Industrial Age into the Information Age, which is paralleling the mental shift from the Acquisitor Age through the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, and into the Warrior Age. These two major societal shifts have converged. This mega transition started in 1956, according to the Tofflers, and I estimate it will continue until at least 2040. In effect, us Generation X people are living our entire lives in a period of transition.
Our Dystopia is not a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a handful of people driving rat rods around, like in The Road Warrior movies. it's not an Orwellian worldwide totalitarian state, like in 1984 or V for Vendetta. Our Dystopia is The Big Transition. We get the (good or bad) luck of living in a period of continual change, on multiple levels, that just doesn't seem like it will ever end. It's multiple changes happening at once, on every possible level, and it's happening faster than at any time in known human history. Change is our "normal." Welcome to our Dystopia. Wait 20 minutes, something will be different. That's our world right now.
In the late 1970's we also had the rise of a shareholder's rights movement, which shifted the focus of public companies from longer term thinking, to a more short-term, quarterly profit oriented mentality, with a focus on making the most money for shareholders. This rise, and the greed it spawned, helped create the atmosphere for President Ronald Reagan to sign the Tax Cut bill of 1986. This made much, much larger corporate and personal fortunes possible, enabled larger corporations, and led to the exponential rise of wealth inequality.
On the tech side, the rise of personal computers and all the other transformative technologies led to the first geek mega-entrepreneurs, like Steve's Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, Michael Dell at Dell Computers, and the others who have followed. This disruption by technology led to the fastest building of huge fortunes in human history, by the most successful of the tech entrepreneurs. For the first time ever, we had self-made billionaires in their 20's. Last year, in 2019, 21-year-old young woman and reality star, Kylie Jenner, became the world's youngest self-made billionaire. At 21 years old. You can argue with the "self-made" part, but not with her business' sales. So much for the billionaire boys club.
So, on one side of the coin, we had growing cronyism and greed in the Industrial Age business world, leading to huge fortunes, the exponential rise in power of Wall Street, and opportunities for all kinds of corruption. On the other side of the coin, at the same time, we had brand new mega fortunes being built by the early Information Age companies, who were disrupting some of the Industrial Age industries.
This is the late Acquisitor Age in The Law of Social Cycle. While many large corporations have gone bankrupt, or are struggling to survive, the largest group of losers in this period are The Laborers. A small number of people built mega fortunes, some with corrupt practices, some simply by using the laws and business friendly environment, and some by creating huge businesses built on new technology. As this happened, the high paying American factory jobs mostly disappeared. Some of the American Middle Class learned tech skills, and moved into high paying tech jobs. But a much larger number of people were left with working much lower paying service jobs. These low paying service jobs now make up around 45% of the American workforce (see 2nd chart). Real wages have been stagnant for average people for about 40 years now.
After 40 years of stagnation, the seeds for a populist uprising exploded into the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and since into large populist movements on both the political Left and the political Right. This brings us into the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, predicted by Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles. We're in a time of historical levels of wealth inequality, peak corruption, and massive discord among the working class Laborers. In short, were at the point where the shit hits the fan, and the fan is on high.
As I saw these trends emerge over the last 25 years, and I began to realize that these two social theories largely explained what was going on, I began to ask myself questions.
What happens now?
What else will be disrupted?
How long can this era of massive disruption go on?
I realized that, ultimately, everything, every single aspect of our Industrial Age society, has to fall away. It all has to be intentionally restructured or disrupted, and rebuilt, into a new Information Age world. That's when I began to piece together my idea of The Big Transition. This is my personal thinking, resting on the foundation of the Tofflers' Third Wave concept, and P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle. The Industrial Age didn't end in, say 1984, with the release of the Apple Macintosh personal computer. No one flipped a switch and said, "OK, the Industrial Age is over. Give up your high hourly wage assembly line job, as of tomorrow you'll be a tech worker, sitting on a giant kickball at a desk, writing computer code." I realized, this transition has been going on since 1956, according to the Tofflers. It started very slowly, and has been increasing in speed, slowly at first, and now much faster. It's a sticky, chaotic, disruptive transition. It's messy. It pulls the rug out from under many traditional power structures, as industries and institutions are disrupted. People go nuts when shit they don't expect disrupts their job, their lifestyle, their source of income, and their power in their local area or the larger world. In short, The Big Transition is a fucking crazy mess, it's been going on for 64 years now, and still has at least 15 or 20 more years to go.
The Big Transition, and the disruption that's a key part of it, caused the Factory Apocalypse of the late 20th century, and the Retail Apocalypse we're seeing now. It led to the fracturing of both political parties into smaller, more divisive groups. The Big Transiton is the explanation for the depression-like era we're heading into right now. It's the explanation for the Financial Apocalypse, which is what the next few years will feel like for most people. The Big Transition is the explanation for the coming College Apocalypse (seriously, it has begun), the current Political Apocalypse, the Real Estate Apocalypse, and the coming disruption of our legal system, our government systems, our transportation systems, and everything else that hasn't transitioned through major Disruption yet. Yes, this sounds horrible. But now we have models to look to. We've seen the changes in the music industry, the publishing industry, the TV and movie industries. We've seen Amazon win over the once dominant mall department stores, the same way Sears & Roebucks disrupted small town general stores 120 to 130 years ago, with mail order catalogs. We have an idea where things are headed now, and that it is possible to survive major disruption. It's not easy. It's not fun, but it's possible.
When things look bad on many fronts, creativity and new ideas can lead to amazing places. The Wright Brothers bike shop in Ohio, around 1905 or so. A couple of bike shop owners created the aviation industry. Every big thing starts as an idea in one person's brain. Big ideas can come from some pretty unlikely places.
Because there is so much disruptive change on so many fronts, most people are busy dealing with their own piece of it. For whatever reason, partly because of my interest in The Third Wave concept, and the Law of Social Cycle concept, I'm one of the few who has stepped back, to look at this all from a much bigger perspective, a much wider angle. All of these massive changes are part of what I now call The Big Transition. It all ties together, and from a eye in the sky view, all these different levels of change and disruption make sense.
The Big Transition is the chaotic and sticky shift from the Industrial Age into the Information Age, which is paralleling the mental shift from the Acquisitor Age through the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, and into the Warrior Age. These two major societal shifts have converged. This mega transition started in 1956, according to the Tofflers, and I estimate it will continue until at least 2040. In effect, us Generation X people are living our entire lives in a period of transition.
Our Dystopia is not a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a handful of people driving rat rods around, like in The Road Warrior movies. it's not an Orwellian worldwide totalitarian state, like in 1984 or V for Vendetta. Our Dystopia is The Big Transition. We get the (good or bad) luck of living in a period of continual change, on multiple levels, that just doesn't seem like it will ever end. It's multiple changes happening at once, on every possible level, and it's happening faster than at any time in known human history. Change is our "normal." Welcome to our Dystopia. Wait 20 minutes, something will be different. That's our world right now.
Blogger's note- 8/12/2022- I just went back and re-read this chapter, fixed a few typos, and made a few minor changes. I had the idea for "Dystopia" in October of 2019, and started writing it in late October, and wrote most of the rough draft ideas in November 2019, while living homeless in the Studio City area of Southern California. That's in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles city proper, and just over the hill from Hollywood. I created this blog with 20 chapters, in late December of 2019, and wrote it, chapter by chapter from late December 2019 through early June 2020. While I was researching and writing this, I learned that Los Angeles in November of 2019 was the setting of the 1982 movie Blade Runner, which seemed a really weird, synchronistic coincidence. I'm not sure exactly when I wrote this chapter, but I think it was in late January or early February of 2020. Covid-19 was just popping up on our radar here in the U.S., but the shutdowns had not begun. I wrote the last chapter in early June 2020. I was homeless while writing most of this, but a friend let me stay at her place in Newport Beach form late December 2019 to mid-February 2020. I wrote several of the chapters there.
Now, 2 1/2 years later, it's much more apparent for other people that something really crazy is happening in our society. In my opinion, as I wrote above, there's a lot more to come. Change. That's our Dystopia... change.
As for the Orwellian side of things. Yes, Big Brother is watching. But so is "Little Sister," and she has faster thumbs. Orwell didn't expect everyone to have a worldwide media publishing computer in their pocket. Heh, heh, heh. 2022 appears to be the new 2008. Things are about to get REALLY interesting...
I drew this drawing of Harley Quinn in December of 2019. Click on it and read the little pencil line I wrote beneath the drawing.
Blogger's note: 9/12/2023- I have not changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom. I even left in the typos I missed initially. As of late 2023, I'm doing most of my writing on Substack. Check it out.
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