Chapter 8: How I became an amateur futurist

The late Alvin Toffler, in the first minute of this clip, explains the role of a futurist.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"A futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what's going to happen next... And we write books, and we go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, making the future...(It's) an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing, our lives, in the years and decades ahead."

-Alvin Toffler

How I became an amateur futurist

 As a dorky kid , I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future, as many kids do.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and our house was always a place of incredible psychological tension.  It was miserable.  To escape the daily drama and misery of life in our house, I would often play and pretend to be somebody successful in the future.  Along with reading and wandering around the woods, "the future" was a form of escape for me, like many other kids.  But I was a really voracious reader of non-fiction, which included my dad's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, which was not really what "normal" kids did.  I began to focus on the future more than most kids, thinking that the pain and fear I dealt with as a kid must be survived, and that maybe someday, many years in the future, I would do something amazing, that would make the pain of childhood worthwhile.  That's not the most sophisticated thinking, but it gave me a reason to cope with the day to day drama.  So I began to just spend more time thinking about the future than most other kids, as my family moved around rural and small town Ohio.

By the time I started my sophomore year of high school, my family had moved west to Boise, Idaho.  As a high school kid in the early 1980's, I got seriously into the weird sport of BMX racing, and then the brand new sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding.  Everyone in my life, family and friends, thought I was completely wasting my time learning tricks on a "little kid's bike."  But BMX gave me a place to vent my teenage frustration at life, blow off my anger, and it kept me out of a lot of trouble, by giving me something to focus on.  In addition, after sucking at every sport my whole childhood (except dodgeball), I finally stuck with a sport long enough to get pretty good at it.  Much to everyone's surprise, not only did I wind up competing in national competitions, BMX freestyle turned into a career for me for several years.  

Meanwhile, in school, Boise High students had to take one year of economics.  I found that class really interesting, and turned out to be naturally good at it.  I don't think that was so much academic, as it was something close to the way I thought about the world already, and fueled by much of the non-fiction I had read as a kid.  Officially, "economics" is "the study of scarce resources."  In reality, economics is about the world of money and finance, and how business and financial trends interact.  It's about predicting the future of the financial world, something I was already interested in.  I found the economics class in high school fascinating.  I'm weird like that.  

In the spring of 1984, when I graduated from Boise High School, I didn't have the money to go to college.  I didn't really have a strong direction I wanted to go in, either, except to focus on BMX freestyle.  My high school friends and I were all outdoorsy oriented types, and collectively talked about becoming wildlife biologists.  But that meant needing the money to head north to the University of Idaho, and the money just wasn't there, so I "took a year off."  I did manage to save up $1,000 that summer, while working in a small amusement park, for $2.10 an hour.  But my family ended up needing that money for a family emergency.  As we headed into the fall of 1984, I rode my bike as much as possible, and worked nights at a large Mexican restaurant.  My freestyle teammate Jay Bickel and I did a shows with our trick team, the first BMX freestyle team in Idaho, and we rode in parades around the area. 

In the spring of 1985,  I still didn't have money for college, and my dad got laid off.  He wound up finding a new job in San Jose, California.  I worked my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, managing the day to day operations of the small amusement park, and 12 employees.  My pay was still low, $3.15 an hour, but it was great experience in management for an 18-19 year old.  In late August, I packed up my ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose.  I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and continued riding my bike all day, and working nights.  I started publishing a BMX freestyle zine, and soon met the NorCal freestylers, as I mentioned in the last chapter.  

A year later, I took the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, and became part of the little BMX/freestyle industry.  At 20 years old, without ever taking a college course, I was suddenly working at national magazines, and responsible for proofreading both magazines.  I quickly began to learn how media works, and the influence advertisers had over the traditional media of the pre-internet world.  The pro riders who had been my heroes a year or two before, became friends and acquaintances.  

At the time, the BMX freestyle world was focused in a few dozen small scenes, small groups where a couple of guys had seen a trick show, got interested in freestyle, and then started a trick team in their area.  Almost everyone had their own trick team, and promoting our weird, new little sport was important to us.  As BMX freestyle grew exponentially over the next 3 or 4 years, I not only saw, but was in the middle of, a new movement.  BMX freestyle was an idea growing and spreading through society.  I saw how small groups, which I now call Creative Scenes, are born, grow, attract others, and spread a new idea.  At the time, I didn't realize what I was seeing, except that I began to sense that there was something important to these scenes.  I saw how some scenes were better than others, and the differences between them.  The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive, the tightest group, and others were a bit more informal.  But all were innovative, creative, and influenced new people, and attracted new riders into our sport, as BMX freestyle sparked into the national scene in its first wave of popularity.  I also noticed the same was true with skateboarding, the older sport of surfing, the tiny (then) sport of snowboarding, inline skating, and mountain biking.  While us BMX guys were wrapped up in our own sport, we often rode with skateboarders.  As the late 1980's rolled by, I began to realize all of these weird action sports had more in common than we wanted to admit.  I began to wonder why all of these individual, session oriented sports, where competitions weren't the most important thing, were happening at the same time. 

Then, at the bicycle industry trade show in January 1989, talk was in the air.  Industry people were walking around, actually saying, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  Every company pulled its support from BMX racing and freestyle, and put money into the new mountain bike idea.  Our industry collapsed as the world declared BMX was dead.  But us hardcore riders kept riding.  We got "real" jobs, if we didn't have them already, and scrimped and saved to get to contests.  BMX went into recession in early 1989, a year before the national economy did.  BMX freestyle went underground.

At the same time I was working in the BMX and skateboard industries in the late 1980's, the Southern California real estate market was soaring.  Two different people I worked with bought a house one year, and made $100,000 on it in a single year.  Everywhere in SoCal we were hearing stories of people making fortunes off of real estate.  I was a young guy in my early 20's, not making much money, and every Saturday I'd eat breakfast while "Make Money in Real Estate" infomercials playing in front of me on TV.  I thought that if I could learn about real estate, and make a bunch of money, I'd have more time to ride my bike.  I bought one of the courses about real estate, and began to read books on the subject.  

I was really shy, and didn't have the guts to really try and buy a house, but I began to learn about the Southern California real estate market.  Like my interest in economics in high school, a big part of real estate is predicting where the market and the economy would be a year, or two, or five, in the future.  I began to pay attention to the dynamics of the real estate market, and wondering where things were headed.

By Christmas time 1989, after the BMX world had collapsed, things at Vision Skateboards, the parent company of where I worked, were starting to head downhill.  I worked at Unreel Productions, a video production company that was trying to sell TV shows of skateboarding, bodyboarding,  BMX racing and BMX freestyle, six years before the X-Games started.  The TV industry wasn't ready for those sports yet. 

My parents had moved from San Jose, California to Greensboro, North Carolina, and they wanted to fly me back east to spend Christmas with them.  I decided to not take my bike, though I was staying there a week.  My first night in Greensboro, I went with my parents to the grocery store, and I went to the book rack, looking for a book to read.  I knew I was going to be bored as fuck that week, for the most part, and I needed something to pass the time.  I picked up a book called, The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra.  Yeah, I nice little up lifting book of light reading about economics and a complete financial collapse.  Like I said, I'm weird like that.  

The book explained a lot about long term economic cycles in the U.S. economy, mostly 10 year, 30 year, and 60 year cycles.  Being the geek I am, I found it fascinating.  Now, the reality is that we didn't go into in a Great Depression in 1990, as Batra predicted.  But we did go into a recession, with a collapse in the stock markets and the real estate markets.  It turned out to be a good thing that I didn't buy a house in 1989, which I almost did.  The economic downturn dragged on into a stagnant economy that lasted through 1996.  The mainstream economists called it a "double-dip recession."  While we didn't get the full great depression Ravi Batra predicted, almost everything he predicted did come true, just not to the full extent he was expecting.  

That got me interested in the financial markets.  I began watching them every day in the newspaper, watching to see if the market went up or down, and then reading the thoughts of the business people, investors, and economists on why they thought it went up or down.  By doing this, I began to get a feel of why the stock markets ticked up and down day to day, and a sense of why they moved up or down over the longer term.  Like real estate, I wound up as interested in the dynamics of the market, and wanted to understand it, as much as I wanted to just make a bunch of money. 

In his book, and a follow-up book, Batra also introduced me to a theory called the Law of Social Cycle by a thinker from India, named P.R. Sakar.  This theory says there are four basic mentalities in every society, and one of those mentalities dominates the society at any given time.  This mentality shapes society, and there are ultra long term cycles involving these cycles, which gives yet another way to get a sense of where the world is heading in the future.  This added to the ideas about predicting future trends percolating around the back of my head. I lived in the BMX and skateboard world  of the early 1990's, where top pro riders ate ramen on a regular basis, because sponsorships were few and far between.  The Law of Social Cycle became more influential on my thinking later on, when I realized it explained other trends I was watching happen in the world.  I'll get deeper into that theory in a future chapter.  

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except for these notes at the bottom.  I even left the original typos in.  My thoughts about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  you can read more of my writing on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 9: "The Blade Runner" future... and the future we actually got

Here's another look at the future acclaimed movie director Ridley Scott predicted for our time, Los Angeles in November 2019, as predicted back in 1982.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

When the idea for this writing project came to me, three months ago, as I type this blog post, I didn't realize that I was living in the time period and location that the 1982 movie, Blade Runner, tried to predict.  I didn't see that movie in its entirety until years after it was released.  I knew it was considered a classic futuristic sci-fi movie for its day.  In 1982, as a high school kid in Idaho, a far off distant future, with flying cars, weird, stream-lined buildings, and lots of human-like androids, was a common vision of what our future might be like.  That Blade Runner world, and similar dystopian scenarios like it, were the future us Generation X kids were shown growing up, in movies and TV.

Now we're in that exact time period, myself, and ten million other people in the L.A. metro area, the initial setting of Blade Runner.  But the real world of late 2019, and now early 2020 as I type this onto the internet, is much different than Ridley Scott envisioned.  It's also much different than the world we lived in, back in 1982.  In a word, today's world is crazy.
 

Our society, by and large, has shifted away from a mass market, mass media world, into world of millions of niches.  But masses of people, everyday, average, working people, in the streets, was a dominant theme around the world in 2019. Populist movements sprang up or grew, around the globe, and not a replicant to be found.  So much for the Blade Runner world.

These days, most everyone is rushed, we all have trouble finding enough time to get everything done.  Most people work long hours at a job, then commute, then drive the kids around, and do the work their home requires.  At the same time, people walk around, ride buses, and drive their cars, staring at a small screen on a device, their smart phones.  These devices have more computing power than the mission control center of the Apollo space program had in the 1970's.  In all the futuristic movies and TV shows of the 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's, no one I remember predicted smart phones, the internet, and wifi taking over, like they have in our actual world today.  Of all those programs, the cartoon The Jetson's, was the closest to reality, in that respect.

Yes, in the original Star Trek TV series, Captain Kirk and the crew had "communicators"  when they went down to the planets.  But we never saw Kirk or Spock watching cat videos, ball games, playing Candy Crush, ordering from Amazon, or watching intergalactic porn.  The Jetson's, the original Star Trek TV show, Blade Runner, and other shows did have tele-conferencing, like Skype or Facetime in our real world.

But all the great writers and directors 40 or 50 years ago didn't foresee the mass adoption of smart phones or the internet, the most influential technologies of real world 2019/2020.  In addition, no one back then expected the widespread political polarization, except Alvin and Heidi Toffler, he mentioned the possibility in an interview in 1980.  No one back then predicted the hyper-connected, phone and internet-based world, the intense political polarization, that a ten year old could make a million dollars a year making videos about giant gummy worms (over 140 million views), the rise of the Kardashians, that one man named Jeff Bezos would be worth more than GE and Ford combined,  that there would be 30,000 homeless people in downtown L.A.,  the rise of quadcopter drones, proximity flying, or that Bruce Jenner was really a chick in an Olympian man's body.

How did things get so crazy and weird?  How did our society get to where it is now?  Where are we headed?  A lot of people ask these questions, particularly older people who remember a pre-tech world that moved at a much slower, and had a much more stable feeling pace.

I've come across three social theories that I believe describe different aspects of today's world, and how we got here, really well.  My own thinking adds to these.  I believe I can give a larger context, where today's chaotic world actually makes some sense.  So let's take a look at these three theories. 

In the 1970's, being sent to our rooms as kids was a punishment.  No one then predicted that 40 years later getting kids out of their rooms would be a much bigger problem.  A drawing I  made for my nephew, on his game room door, last year. 

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 typos I missed.  My ideas about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we are 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  You can check out more of my writing at my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

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Chapter 10: The Toffler's Third Wave

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.

 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:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

 

Chapter 11: P.R. Surf's up Brah... the long term waves of the U.S. economy

A classic scene that sums up a lot of the 1980's mainstream  business mentality, Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, telling the crowd, "Greed is good."  This Oliver Stone movie looked at the excesses of Wall Street, coming out in 1987, shortly after Black Monday, a day where the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22% in one day.  This movie also came out a year after the 1986 Reagan Tax cuts, that set the stage for today's incredible wealth inequality.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

As I mentioned earlier, while visiting my parents for Christmas, in December of 1989, I picked up a book called The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra.  Being the geek I am, I found it fascinating.  Now, the U.S. didn't go into the great depression in 1990 that Batra predicted.  But we did go into what was termed a "double dip recession," in 1990.

The definition of "recession" then was an economic contraction for two consecutive quarters.  In real people speak, that means the economy shrinks for six months, or more, instead of growing.  There's a new, convoluted definition of recession, which basically allows economists to avoid calling a recessions a recession now.  Orwellian newspeak aside, a "depression", by definition, is an economic downturn for three years, and a "great depression" is an economic downturn for five years.  In this long term chart of California real estate prices, you can see the prices rose slightly after the recession started in 1990, but didn't start coming back until 1997, as the Dot Com craze, fueled by that new thing called the internet, took over the stock markets and business world.  We were actually a lot closer to a great depression in the early 1990's than anyone wanted to admit.  It was not to the extent that Ravi Batra predicted, but it was a lot worse, and a lot longer, than anyone else seemed to see coming.

 As wealth continues to concentrate at the top of the economic scale, an ultra long limo makes its way through Hollywood, California in late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.

Part of Batra's economic prediction was based on 30 year, and 60 year, economic cycles he saw in the entire economic history of the United States.  The only exception was for about 30 years after the Civil War, which dramatically disrupted normal business cycles.  The rest of the time in U.S. history, we had a depression every 30 years.  If it skipped the 30 year mark, then we had a great depression at the 60 year mark.  So 1990 was 60 years after the start of the Great Depression of the 1930's.  But we didn't have a full blown great depression in 1990, so now, as we enter 2020, we're at a thirty year mark from 1990's double dip recession.  We're also at the 90 year mark from the 1930's Great Depression.

The U.S. stock markets have been propped up with easy, cheap money, by the Federal Reserve, since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  In September 2019, The Fed had to go into crisis mode, pumping more than a trillion dollars into the economy so far, to keep the markets from crashing, after the Repo Markets seized up.  What was started as a couple weeks of "liquidity," has now become life support, and this rolling bailout of the banking system can't be stopped without collapsing the U.s.stock markets, and other markets around the world.  You know, today's Wall Street, the Gordon Gekko types of today's world.  As The Fed tried to figure out how to get out of this mess they created, the global economy is slowing, with dismal growth projections, even China's stellar growth is slowing down, though it's still far beyond other large countries.  The world's economy is grinding to a halt, oddly right on track with the 30 year cycles Batra used to make his predictions back in the late 1980's.

But it's not these 30 year economic cycles that I found most interesting in Batra's 1989 book.  He also wrote a chapter about an obscure theory called the Law of Social Cycle, written by a spiritual guru and thinker in India, by the name of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.  P. R. Sarkar is a weird character, pretty much unknown to American intellectuals.  Yet, using that one chapter Batra wrote about The Law of Social Cycle, and watching most of what Batra predicted in 1989 play out, I began to see great merit in The Law of Social Cycle.  By looking forward to what it predicted, I realized in the late 1990's that there should be a massive populist uprising, at some point, in the future of the United States.  During the Dot Com stock bubble fury, where damn near everybody jumped in the stock market, this sounded ridiculous.  It was a "new economy," and "things were going to just keep going up forever."  We heard those quotes, or very similar ones, day after day in the business news media then.  Why would there ever be a time when average people would feel the need to rise up against the world of Big Business and the super rich?  Damn near everybody was feeling the wealth in the late 1990's.

Yet, during that era of stock market euphoria, I realized that a massive workers' revolt was in store, somewhere down the line, if The Law of Social Cycle held true.  I even wrote about it a bit, just in my little zines, and told some people in conversation.  I also came to think of the action sports world as "the warrior sports," though they were then tagged with the lame, X-Games hyped tag, "Extreme Sports."  The rise of a new category of individual-oriented sports was also something to be expected, in a world where The Law of Social Cycle made sense.  These sports, most of which were born in the 1960's to the 1990's, have gone worldwide in a few decades.  They've become so popular, that the Olympics, the freakin' OLYMPICS, needed to add some of them to insure the American TV ratings, which is the main source of funding for the entire Olympic system.  Without snowboarding in winter Olympics, they couldn't afford to put on the games.  BMX racing was added to the summer games in 2008, and skateboarding and BMX park riding will be demo sports in 2020.  These sports have become so popular in 40 years, that the Olympics organizers feel the need to tap into them to keep TV ratings high in future games.  This is the rise of the Warrior mentality sports, which I'll explain more in the next chapter.

A rider backflips over a jump at the 2018 D.I.Y. World Championships, a low-budget, hardcore BMX event,  loved by top riders, in Richmond, Virginia, in October of 2018.  Riders like him will be a demo sport in the 2020 Summer Olympics.  Photo by Steve Emig

We're now deep into the rise of the populist movements, not just in the U.S., but in many parts of the world.  Average working people are in the streets, motivated, in large part, by the long term decline in their standard of living.  This populist uprising caught fire here in the U.S. first as Occupy Wall Street, then died down and went underground.  But the dissension continued to bubble, and rose again, evidenced by the surprising mass popularity of 2016 presidential candidates Donald Trump, on the political Right, and Bernie Sanders on the political Left.  While they had much different views on how the government should be run, both candidates tapped into large numbers of everyday working people, or often, formerly working people, who felt left behind by the mainstream candidates.  This caused a splintering and fracturing of both major political parties in the U.S., which is also something inferred by The Law of Social Cycle.

So what is P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle?  It's the second big theory that I think really helps put today's crazy world in context. I'll explain it in the next chapter.

Written by Steve Emig.

Blogger's note- 9/12/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I wrote them, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the typos i originally missed.  As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack.  Check it out.

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter12: P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

On June 15th, 2015, Jeb Bush, the 43rd Governor of Florida, announced he would run for president of the United States.  His father, George H.W. Bush, was the 41st president of the United States.  His brother, George W. Bush, was the 43rd president of the U.S..  He quickly raised well over $100 billion for his campaign from the Republican donor class.  Jeb had the full support of the Republican establishment, the wealthy, white elite that run most of America.  Barrack Obama, the first black president, was ending his second term.  The economy had been growing, but growing very slowly, since early 2009, a weak recovery from "The Great Recession" of 2008.  Jeb's only competition would be former First Lady, senator from New York, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  Most of America sighed, it was going to be another boring election between two political dynasties, neither of which most Americans liked very much.  Same ol', same ol'.  Nothing ever changes...  It's hard to remember now, but that was the mainstream America feeling in June of 2015.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

P. R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

In an earlier chapter, I shared the most basic idea of the Toffler's concept of the Third Wave, a long transition from an Industrial-based society to an information-based society.  That was the first of the three big theories, that I think explain where we are now, and where we're all going.  This second theory is one virtually unknown in the United States.  As I mentioned in the last chapter, I know P. R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle from one chapter in Ravi Batra's 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990.  It's written about in much more detail in Sarkar's second volume of Human Society, a book I've never been able to get my hands on to read.  Yet, it was that one chapter in Batra's book that really stuck in my head.  It's the chapter that gave me a sense of where America was heading, not only back in the 1990's, but much farther in the future, including now, 30 years later.  It was that one book chapter that explained to me why Jeb Bush, who seemed to have every aspect of political force behind him in June 2015, didn't have a shot in the 2016 presidential election.  Most people now, don't even remember Jeb ran for president.  The Law of Social Cycle helps explain why.  So what is the Law of Social Cycle?  Let me explain how I understand it.

Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle states that there are four basic mentalities in any society.  These are the Intellectual, the Acquisitor,  the Laborer, and the Warrior.  Sarkar comes from India, which had a very defined caste, or class system, that greatly defined people, by and large.  But he saw that some people were able to move to another level of society, despite the caste they were born into.  The four basic mentalities are not traditional classes, they are based on the way an individual makes their way, and earns a living, in the world.

The Intellectuals use their brains, their high intelligence, to earn a living.  They are exactly who you'd expect; professors, teachers, scientists, engineers, doctors, clergy, writers, artists, and similar professions.  The Acquisitors are also quite intelligent, but they focus their smarts on making money.  They are the landlords, investors, financiers, stock traders, and large business owners.  In most earlier cultures, they would also be the entrepreneurs.  I think some of today's entrepreneurs also share characteristics of two other categories, I'll get more into that in a bit.  The management in various businesses could be either Intellectuals or Acquisitors, and at the lower levels (like the assistant manager of your local 7-11), part of the Laborer mentality.  I think it depends on the particular business.  In most traditional businesses, I think upper management is primarily Intellectuals, but when you get into Wall Street's investment banks, real estate, and the world of stock, commodity, and bond traders, those management people are most likely Acquisitors.

 With a high concentration of successful business people and real estate investors, this is an Acquisitor heavy area.  Newport Harbor, Newport Beach, California.  Photo by Steve Emig

The next group is The Laborers.  These are the everyday working people, like the great American middle class (what's left of it), the low wage service workers, the farmers, and in ages past, the proletariat or the serfs.  This is, by far, the largest of the four groups.  The Laborers are the vast majority, by numbers, of any nation or society, and most of the time they work for whatever group is leading society at that time.

The last mentality is the Warriors.  The Warriors make their living using physical strength and ability, and raw courage.  They do the physically demanding work that's also scary and highly dangerous.  In most earlier societies this group was made up mostly of actual warriors, the soldiers, professional hunters, and perhaps a few professional athletes (fighters or boxers), and those in some other daring and dangerous professions, like sailors in the days of sailing ships.  The explorers who trekked to new lands would also be a part of the Warrior mentality.  In our modern society, the Warrior mentality includes soldiers, police, firefighters, professional athletes in traditional sports, and some of the more dangerous construction professions, like riggers and iron workers, for example.  I think those crab fishermen in Alaska, and others who do similar, highly dangerous jobs, also qualify.

I also believe there are a lot of people in today's society who have the warrior mentality, but may do something else for their living.  In these cases, their lifestyle is centered around physical feats and courage, but they may have to pay for that lifestyle with Laborer or other types of jobs.  I believe the hardcore action sports athletes, like surfers, motocross riders, skateboarders, snowboarders, BMXers, rock climbers, parachuting enthusiasts (sky divers, BASE jumpers, proximity fliers), and and the other action sports  qualify as having the Warrior mentality.  As a long time BMX freestyler myself, I've seen that most of these people don't make a living at these sports, but their lifestyle is based on one or more of these sports, making them part of the warrior mentality.

I also think all the people seriously involved in adventure racing, like participants in the Raid Gualoises, mud runs, Spartan races, and even hardcore crossfit people, all have the Warrior mentality.  Even closer to the actual notion of "warriorship," martial artists and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters, are part of today's Warrior mentality.  In today's world, there are many people whose lifestyle is centered around physical fitness, physical abilities, and courage-based activities, though they might not actually make a living at these things.  I consider all of these people part of the modern Warrior mentality.  If you go to a Crossfit gym three times a week for fitness, that doesn't make someone with the warrior mentality.  But it your entire lifestyle is based around crossfit, or Spartan races, or rock climbing, or any of these other activities, that does make you part of the Warrior mentality.  Also, being part of the Warrior mentality doesn't make you a warrior, in the traditional definition of the word.  If you're a pro snowboarder and go up to a Navy SEAL in a bar and say, "I'm a warrior," you're going to get your ass kicked. But at some level, these two, and the rest named, share many traits and outlooks on life.

World War II soldier, riding a motorcycle at speed, one handed, while aiming a Thomson submachine gun.  It doesn't get much more Warrior mentality than this.  Public domain photo.

Another aspect of the Warrior mentality is activists.  It takes great courage to stand up, usually against some large and powerful establishment institution or organization, and call out corruption, or other things that pose threats to some group of people.  While it make not take physical skill to hold a protest sign, to stand up against a major force in society, often with threats of their well being or even of bodily harm, or to stand up for the rights of others who can't stand for themselves, does take great courage.  Again, marching with 10,000 people holding a sign doesn't qualify you for the warrior mentality.  But the initial activists, and activist leaders, do need a great deal of courage, and I think some of them qualify as another aspect of the warrior mentality in modern society. 

So those are the four mentalities in P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle.  The theory states that at any given time, one of these mentalities dominates society.  That mentality favors a certain type of government, influences the business structure, and many of the social organizations.  That mentality is what most people want their children to grow up and be.  In an Intellectual society, people want their kids to be a professor or scientist or engineer.  In a Warrior society, people want their kids to be a soldier, a cop, a firefighter, or maybe a pro athlete.  In an Acquisitor society, people want their kids to grow up and make a lot of money, maybe be a businessman, an entrepreneur, a real estate mogul, or maybe Kanye, Diddy, or a Kardashian.

Another aspect of the Law of Social Cycle is that people can change from one mentality to another.  That means that even in a highly structured society with a set class or caste system, like India, some people can learn a different role, and move up in society to a position outside their traditional class. A intellectual can get int mountaineering, and go try to climb the world 7,000 meter peaks, shifting to the warrior mentality.

A good example from today's world is Joe Rogan.  He was a long time, very hardcore, martial artist, with black belts in tae kwon do and jujitsu.  He first became  well known as a commentator for the UFC fights, early on in that franchise's history.  So he was definitely a part of the Warrior mentality, no doubt about it.  But then he went on to become a stand-up comedian, which is an Intellectual, through and through.  Then he built a podcast, and has become a Larry King level interviewer, to a generation, most of whom don't know who Larry King was.  Joes podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, had over 190 million downloads a month, as of April 2019.  Again, his podcast is a serious Intellectual pursuit, but also a very successful and lucrative business.  At this point, he's probably more a part of the Intellectual group, as far as the mainstream influence of his work, but he's really a Warrior/Acquisitor/Intellectual.  In today's weird, internet powered society, I think we're seeing a lot of people who are mixtures of the mentalities, though at any given time, one will be the dominant. 

The eras when one of these mentalities dominates a society, can last for decades, or even hundreds of years, there's no set time period.  During these times, the dominant mentality will filter down through and shape, all of society.  It affects the type of government, the sports and games people play, the social organizations, the business world, and every aspect of society.  When a nation or society changes from one dominant mentality to another, it's a long, sticky transition, it doesn't happen overnight.  It can be a very chaotic time during that transition.

Here's the kicker for P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles.  The four mentalities always rise to prominence, in a certain order.  That order is Intellectual, Acquisitor, Laborer, Warrior, then back to the Intellectuals.

So where is the United States in this cycle?  For that we go back to economist Ravi Batra's 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990.  After looking at many societies in history, to check this theory out and validate it, Batra concluded that the United States has been in the Acquisitor age since the colonial days.  We were a country built by enterprising entrepreneurs.  Over the 400 years since the Pilgrims landed, this has been a country where business was highly influential.  We've run the arc of the Acquisitor age, and in the late 1980's, Ravi Batra saw us in the late stage of the Acquisitor era, a time when corruption rise dramatically, and the living standard for workers stagnates.  That was Batra's assessment in his book, in 1989.

So what happens after that?  The next mentality to rise up is the Laborers, the everyday working people.  Things are a bit different with the Laborer era, than with the other three mentalities.  This era, in Sarkar's theory, is called the Acquisitor cum Laborer era.  In effect, the society gets so incredibly corrupt, and the conditions for average people get so bad, that the Laborers rise up in a major populist uprising.  So that's what Batra saw coming in the future of the U.S., way back in 1989.  Now his focus in The Great Depression of 1990, was on the economic situation happening then, not on a populist movement sometime far off in the future.  So he combined Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles with the 30 year and 60 year economic cycles, and predicted a Great Depression happening in 1990.  Instead, as I mentioned in the last chapter, we got a long, drawn out, "double dip" recession during that period.

I watched most of what Batra predicted actually happen in the early 90's, though not to the depth he expected.  I also started paying close attention to the financial markets.  But I was a BMX freestyle guy, living cheap with other BMX guys.  I worked on TV show crews in the summer, and worked all sorts of odd jobs the rest of the year, and just scraped by financially.  Riding my bike as much as possible was the priority.  Batra's ideas and Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles were something interesting, but not really a major aspect of my life.  I checked up on the financial markets day to day, and the other ideas were in the back of my mind.

As time rolled on, and mountain biking and snowboarding popularity exploded in the early 1990's, I began to think about the future that the Law of Social Cycles predicted.  I got Batra's book out, and read through it again.  If the Law of Social Cycle held true, American business (and the government, influenced by big business) would get more and more corrupt, and at some point, there would be a major populist uprising.  At that point, either the society collapses (bad option), or the Warrior mentality rises up to positions of leadership, and they take over society (hopefully a good option).

At some point around 1994 or 1995, I suddenly realized that the exponential growth of the action sports world, my world at the time, was an aspect of the Warrior mentality.  Sarkar's theory predicted that the Warriors were drawn more to individual oriented sports, that also involved physical skill and courage.  So action sports, from surfing to motocross to BMXers like me and my friends, were Warrior mentality sports.  We were one aspect, of many, of the Warrior mentality growing in American society.  Some sports, like skydiving, were often done by former soldiers, who were paratroopers in the military.  I realized the warrior mentality was already rising in popularity, even before any sign of a populist uprising.

I also realized that the Law of Social Cycle was an ultra long term cycle.  From the time I tied action sports to the warrior mentality, around 1995, it could be another 5-10-20-40 years, before the populist uprising began.  So I went on with my weird life, but I kept an eye out for something that looked like the beginning of a populist uprising.  In September 2011, I saw the Occupy Wall Street protests on TV.

Occupy Wall Street Protestors in New York City, getting arrested by NYPD, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests seemed to come out of nowhere, and they spread like gasoline doused wildfires.  It started as one protest, with activists camping out, in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in New York City.  But within a couple of weeks, Occupy protests were taking place in dozens of cities in the U.S. and even other countries.  It was haphazard and disorganized, but the theme, "We are the 99%," struck a chord with millions of workers.  The protests lasted a few months total, and were stamped out by authorities as quick as they possible.

As this was happening, and I was watching these protests on TV, while living in North Carolina, and then I saw protests in Winston-Salem, a highly conservative area, where I was living.  I knew it was something big beginning.  I thought, "OK, here we go, this is the beginning of the populist uprising The Law of Social Cycles predicted."  While the protests were met with major establishment force to quell them, and they seemed to completely disappear, something had begun.  Those activists went back to their homes, some after a bit of time in jail.  Many of them became local activists, working under the mainstream radar, on local issues, in their different cities.  But the dissension of "the 99%," against the wealth inequality of "the 1%," grew.  I sensed it was bubbling under the surface, and it would pop up again, much bigger, and much more powerful.  In September of 2011, with the Occupy Wall Street protest, the Acquisitor cum Laborer age began.

As I wrote at the top of this chapter, the 2016 election cycle began in the summer of 2015, and looked like another boring, and largely hopeless, race between one status quo and the other, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.  We all know what happened, Senator Bernie Sanders on the political Left, and Donald Trump on the political Right, sprung to popularity out of nowhere.  They both tapped into huge numbers of average working people (or unemployed, formerly working people) upset with the same basic issue, the declining standard of living for average Americans.  But, they tapped into different aspects of this populist movement.  Finally, the beaten down working people, on both sides of the political spectrum, had presidential candidates that seemed exciting to them.  Once Donald Trump got going, he quickly blew establishment Republican Jeb Bush out of the water.  Hillary Clinton had a much tougher time dealing with Bernie Sanders, and things got dirty behind the scenes as she fought him off.  Hillary won the popular vote by more than 3 million votes.  But the Trump-infused Republican machine squeaked out some narrow state victories, clinching a solid electoral victory, and taking the Presidency, much to most people's surprise.

As I type up this chapter, on January 24th, 2020, we are just over three years into Donald Trump's presidency, and in Day 4 of the Trump impeachment trial.  We are just now hitting peak corruption in the United States, as Senate leader Mitch Mcconnell tries to slip a sham trial past the American public.  Time will tell how that works out, but the Laborer class are still rising, and will force massive change at some point.  This is not even close to over.  In the mid term, over the next 3 to 5 years, things will shift favor the political Left, the truly populist part of the populist uprising.  It's going to get a lot crazier before (and if) we see something close to "normalcy" in American society.

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 initially missed.  As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my writing on Substack.  Check it out.

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack .

Chapter13: The Big Transition: The Unplanned Revolution of Everything

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

"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.  

"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.  

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.   

 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.  

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack