Background for A Future Perfect

Courses Wayne State University College of Urban, Labor, and Metropolitan Affairs Department of Interdisciplinary Studies Times' Harvest courses, Winter 2001 ( http://www.is.wayne.edu/drbowen/thw05) Times' Harvest Advanced Seminar (online) ISP 3360, Section 010, Call Number 25265, 4 credits Times' Harvest Advanced Directed Study (online) a) ISP 3340, Section 010, Call Number 25785, 2 credits b) ISP 3340, Section 011, Call Number 25786, 4 credits	Instructor
	David R. Bowen 2311 A/AB Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202	Daytime tel: (313) 577-1498 Evening tel: (248) 549-8518 FAX: (313) 577-8585 Home Page: http://www.is.wayne.edu/drbowen Email: d.r.bowen@wayne.edu At Ford: 313-390-2155


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Last updated: 1/4/05
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Alvin Toffler's
The Third Wave
David Bowen

The Third Wave was published by Alvin Toffler in 1980. Many books on the future rocket to popularity, and then plunge into obscurity, all within a few years. In contrast, The Third Wave has been popular continuously since its original publication. It has never been out of print, and has been translated into most of the world's major languages. In important respects, its concepts still seem fresh, up-to-the-minute, even while others seem, at least from today's vantage point, to have been disproved by events. But clearly, Toffler got something right, something fundamental.

In my view, the first part of what he got right is a fundamental shift over the several major forms of human society, from collective society constraining the choices available to individuals, towards an increasing freedom and autonomy for the individual and a consequent fragmentation of society. Secondly, he correctly saw that change has been and will continue to be accelerating. Toffler traces the causes and consequences of these, and demonstrates how they will reshape all aspects of society, ending with the necessity for reshaping representative democracy itself. In Toffler's view, we are undergoing a fundamental shift in society, at least as momentous as the two previous transformations:

from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society
from agricultural society to industrial society

Toffler's basic argument is that the trends towards acceleration of change and towards increasing freedom and autonomy for individuals will lead to society splitting up into smaller groups based on shared values - "affinity groups." These groups will not be geographically based around a neighborhood, but can even be international. Advocates for abortion choice will congregate with those who agree with them, and pro-life advocates will congregate with each other. These groups will not share an assumption of what the core values are - what is really at stake, what reality is. We will all be split in myriads of ways into affinity groups. We will even be split into those who feel this is great, and those who feel it is tearing society apart. On the one hand we will be personally liberated, but our ability to act as a society will decline and shift into gridlock. You may or may not agree with Toffler, but that is what Toffler writes. See the quotes below.

Of course, trends can reverse - Toffler does not claim inevitability for his Third Wave model, at least partially because that would negate the central thesis of increasing freedom and autonomy for the individual, but he does enough to demonstrate the power of the trends he describes, and we can ask what force could be powerful enough to make us now accept limits on on our freedom and autonomy? One can only speculate that our response would be, "Huh? Yeah, right!" and then going on without change.

I do feel that Toffler has made some mistakes, but others have made similar mistakes. The primary example, for me, is the many passages where he writes about businesses universally becoming small, decentralized units. This, applied to energy, becomes a prediction that centralized energy facilities will become obsolete and disappear. In particular, according to this principle of small, decentralized businesses, fossil fuel generating plants based on coal and petroleum, and nuclear energy plants, are transient phenomena that will not last for much longer.

Certainly, many businesses are becoming smaller and decentralized, and even global companies are reorganizing themselves into small independent units. But there are segments where, at least for now, centralization is increasing. One general segment is where goods and products must be distributed over wide regions, such as package delivery and the freight business. The company with a long reach has strong advantages here - a package can be routed through from one end of the country to the other, without having to be unloaded and reloaded multiple times. Certainly this could conceivably be achieved the way containers move from trucks to railroads to ships to airplanes, and across all of these modes. But even here, companies that have all of these modes within the same scheduling and tracking system have important advantages - Federal Express is a prime example here. Indeed, one of the disadvantages of Japanese style in business organization is that its freight transportation segment is fragmented into just the sort of small, decentralized, local units that Toffler writes about. The consequence is disconnects in long-range shipping, a necessity in today's economy. It is true that Toffler offers a clue about how this could be reversed - shipping information could replace shipping goods, but even for shipping information today, the important companies have national systems in place, and are moving towards global systems, and are strongest and most loved by stockholders and investors where this trend is the strongest.

So there may be some segments, those involving movement of information and goods, where the trend towards decentralization is the wrong model, and where global reach intensifies instead of withers. Today, in 2001, it appears that energy may be one such segment. Here, the increasing necessity of the tightest possible control over pollution levels may add another imperative to that of seamless movement across regions and continents. Pollution control may also force energy generation into centralized plants run by trained professionals, tightly regulated, inspected and monitored in a way that home cogeneration plants could not be controlled. But today, those centralized energy plants, whether run by coal, petroleum, natural gas or nuclear energy, are increasingly valuable and high-flying investments, and nuclear energy is currently the most cost-effective method, rather than becoming replaced by solar, biomass and wind as Toffler predicted. Again, this is not an inevitable trend, merely something that seems to make sense today, and which changing circumstances could make obsolete. See also the web page on Global Warming.

It is important to realize that Toffler views these changes as fundamentally transforming all aspects of society. He reinforces this by consistently writing dramatically, by emphasizing conflict, and by inventing all of these phrases, such as 'indust-reality' that, without his claim for fundamental change must seem merely cute. Toffler is not writing about changes which can be accommodated by merely adjusting our views and our institutions - these will all be destroyed and must be remade; that is Toffler's program. It is, of course, possible to see the same changes happening but to feel that accommodation without fundamental change will be the consequence. But that is not Toffler's view.

Here are some quotations from The Third Wave that make explicit the fundamental nature of the trend towards increasing freedom and autonomy for the individual, an increasing independence from the group or society. These quotations are representative of the points that Toffler makes again and again, throughout the book.

Page(s)	Quotation
349 - 350	"Every civilization operates in and on the biosphere, and reflects or alters the mix of populations and resources. Every civilization has a characteristic techno-sphere - an energy base linked to a production system which in turn is linked to a distribution system. Every civilization has a socio-sphere consisting of interrelated social institutions. Every civilization has an info-sphere - channels of communication through which necessary information flows. Every civilization has its own power-sphere. " Every civilization in addition has set of characteristic relationships with the outside world. -exploitative, symbiotic, militant or pacific. And every civilization has its own super-ideology - a kit of powerful cultural assumptions that structure its view of reality and justify its operations. "The Third Wave, it should now be apparent, is bringing revolutionary and self-reinforcing changes at all these different levels at once. The consequence is not merely the disintegration of the old society but the creation of foundations for the new."
350	"In no way is this to suggest inevitability. The period of transition will be marked by extreme social disruption, as well as wild swings, sectional clashes, secession attempts, technological upsets or disasters, political turbulence, violence, wars, and threats of war. In a climate of disintegrating institutions and values, authoritarian demagogues and movements will arise to seek, and possibly attain, power. No intelligent person can be smug about the outcome. The clash of two civilizations presents titanic dangers."
351	"For Third Wave civilization, the most basic raw material of all - and one that can never be exhausted - is information, including imagination. Through imagination and information, substitutes will be found for many of today's exhaustible resources - although this substitution, once more, will all too frequently be accompanied by drastic economic swings and lurches." "Instead of being dominated by a few mass media, Third Wave civilization will rest on inter-active, de-massified media, feeding extremely diverse and often highly personalized imagery into and out of the mind-stream of the society."
356	"The emerging multiculture will be torn by turmoil until new forms of group conflict resolution are developed..." "The increasing differentiation of society will also mean a reduced role for the nation-state"
357	"Instead of the mass society's extreme standardization of behavior, ideas, language, and life-styles, Third Wave society will be built on segmentation and diversity."
360	"Meanwhile, two things cut through everything as the Third Wave thunders in our ears. One is the shift toward a higher level of diversity in society - the de-massification of mass society. The second is acceleration - the faster pace at which historical change occurs."
367	Section heading: The attack on loneliness. "To create a fulfilling emotional life and a sane psychosphere for the emerging civilization of tomorrow, we must recognize three basic requirements of any individual: the needs for community, structure, and meaning. Understanding how the collapse of Second Wave society undermines all three suggests how we might begin designing a healthier psychological environment for ourselves and our children in the future."
369	"One clue to the plague of loneliness lies in our rising level of social diversity. By de-massifying society, by accentuating differences rather than similarities, we help people individualize themselves. We make it possible for each of us more nearly to fulfill his or her potential. But we also make human contact more difficult.."
372	Section heading: Telecommunity. "At the level of longer-term social policy we should also move rapidly toward 'telecommunity.' Those who wish community restored should concentrate attention on the socially fragmenting impact of commuting and high mobility [not to mention electronic communications / DB]. Having written about this in Future Shock, I will not retrace the argument. But one of the key steps that can be taken toward building a sense of community into the Third Wave is the selective substitution of communication for transportation. "The popular fear that computers and telecommunications will deprive us of face-to-face contact and make human relations more vicarious is na�ve and simplistic. In fact, the reverse might very well be the case. While some office or factory relationships might be attenuated, bonds in the home and the community could well be strengthened by these new technologies. Computers and communications can help us create community."
389	"During the Second Wave period, people were bathed in a sea of mass-produced imagery. A relatively few centrally produced newspapers, magazines, radio and television broadcasters, and movies fed what critics termed a 'monolithic consciousness.' Individuals were constantly encouraged to compare themselves to a relatively small number of role models, and to evaluate their life-styles against a few preferred possibilities. In consequence, the range of socially approved personality styles was relatively narrow. "The de-massification of the media today presents a dazzling array of role models and life-styles for one to measure oneself against. Moreover, the new media do not feed us fully formed chunks, but broken chips and blips of imagery."
408	"As the Second Wave produced a mass society, the Third Wave de-massifies us, moving the entire social system to a much higher level of diversity and complexity. This revolutionary process, much like the biological differentiation that occurs in evolution, helps explain one of today's most noted political phenomena - the collapse of consensus."
409	"These same developments also sweep into oblivion our notions about political coalitions, alliances, or united fronts. In a Second Wave society a political leader could glue together half a dozen major blocs, as Roosevelt did in 1932, and expect the resulting coalition to remain locked in position for many years. Today it is necessary to plug together hundreds, even thousands, of tiny, short-lived special interest groups, and the coalition itself will prove short-lived as well. It may cleave together just long enough to elect a president, then break apart again the day after the election, leaving him without a base of support for his programs. "This de-massification of political life, reflecting all the deep trends we have discussed in technology, productions, communications, and culture, further devastates the politicians' ability to make vital decisions..."
410	"Circumstances differ from country to country, but what does not differ is the revolutionary challenge posed by the Third Wave to obsolete Second Wave institutions -- too slow to keep up with the pace of change and too undifferentiated to cope with the new levels if social and political diversity. "The missing majority makes a mockery of standard democratic rhetoric. It forces us to question whether, under the convergence of speed and diversity, any constituency can be "represented." In a mass industrial society, when people and their needs were fairly uniform and basic, consensus was an attainable goal. In a de-massified society, we not only lack national purpose, we also lack regional, statewide, or city-wide purpose. ... [The elected representative] cannot represent the general will for the simple reason that there is none. What, then, happens to the very notion of 'representative democracy?' "To ask this question is not to attack democracy. ... But it makes one fact inescapably plain: not only our Second Wave institutions but the very assumptions on which they rest are obsolete.
415	"As we race into the Third Wave era, those of us who want to expand human freedom will not be able to do so by simply defending our existing institutions. We shall -- like America's founding parents two centuries ago -- have to invent new ones."
442	"... we should not expect today's nominal leaders - presidents and politicians, senators and central committee members [written well before the downfall of communism] -- to challenge the very institutions that, no matter how obsolete, give them prestige, money, and the illusion, if not the reality, of power."
443	"The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestions on grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever exists now as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive or unworkable it may be. ... "If we begin now, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstitution not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself. "Like the generation of the revolutionary dead, we have a destiny to create."