The Third Wave

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Book review

Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave in 1980. He told us that: “A powerful tide is surging across much of the world today, creating a new environment in which businessmen swim against highly erratic economic currents; politicians see their ratings bob wildly up and down; universities, hospitals, and other institutions battle desperately against inflation. Value systems splinter and crash, while the lifeboats of family, church, and state are hurled madly about.” “So profoundly revolutionary is this new civilization that it challenges all our old assumptions. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful in the past, no longer fit the facts.” “Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before.” “It is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades, bringing with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most of factory assembly lines obsolete; on new, non-nuclear families; on a novel institution that might be called the ‘electronic cottage’; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future.” “As the tide of industrialism peaked in the decades after the Second World War, a little-understood Third Wave began to surge across the earth, transforming everything it touched.” “This latest historical turning point arrived in the United States during the decade beginning about 1955 – the decade that saw white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time.”

THE THIRD WAVE

ALVIN TOFFLER

PAN BOOKS            1981

Introduction

  • A powerful tide is surging across much of the world today, creating a new environment in which businessmen swim against highly erratic economic currents; politicians see their ratings bob wildly up and down; universities, hospitals, and other institutions battle desperately against inflation. Value systems splinter and crash, while the lifeboats of family, church, and state are hurled madly about.
    • These violent changes are not independent of one another. Nor are they random. They are part of a much larger phenomenon: the death of industrialism and the rise of a new civilization.
    • The Third Wave describes the old civilization in which many of us grew up, and presents a careful, comprehensive picture of the new civilization bursting into being in our midst.
    • So profoundly revolutionary is this new civilization that it challenges all our old assumptions. Old ways of thinking, old formulas, dogmas, and ideologies, no matter how cherished or how useful in the past, no longer fit the facts.
    • The Third Wave argues that, in the very midst of destruction and decay, we can now find striking evidences of birth and life. It shows that the emergent civilization can be made more sane, sensible, and sustainable, more decent and more democratic than any we have ever known.
    • There are powerful reasons for long-range optimism, even if the transitional years immediately ahead are likely to be stormy and crisis-ridden. Whether we know it or not, most of us are already engaged in either resisting – or creating – the new civilization. The Third Wave will, I hope, help each of us to choose.

 

PART I: A COLLISION OF WAVES

Chapter 1: Super-struggle

  • A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.
  • Pieces of this new civilization exist today. Millions are already attuning their lives to the rhythms of tomorrow. Others, terrified of the future, are engaged in a desperate, futile flight into the past and are trying to restore the dying world order that gave them birth.
  • The dawn of this new civilization is the single most explosive fact of our lifetimes. Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. We are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.
  • Until now the human race has undergone two great waves of change, each one largely obliterating earlier cultures or civilizations and replacing them with ways of life inconceivable to those who came before.
  • The First Wave of change – the agricultural revolution – took thousands of years to play itself out. The Second wave – the rise of industrial civilization – took a mere three hundred years.
  • It is likely that the Third Wave will sweep across history and complete itself in a few decades, bringing with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources; on methods of production that make most of factory assembly lines obsolete; on new, non-nuclear families; on a novel institution that might be called the ‘electronic cottage’; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future.
  • It is a civilization with its own distinctive world outlook, its own way of dealing with time, space, logic, and causality. It could turn out to be the first truly humane civilization in recorded history.

 

The revolutionary premise

  • This book is based on what I call the ‘revolutionary premise’. It assumes that, even though the decades immediately ahead are likely to be filled with upheavals, turbulences, perhaps even wide-spread violence, we will not totally destroy ourselves.
  • This book flows from the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one, and that much of our personal confusion, anguish, and disorientation can be traced directly to the conflict within us, and within our political institutions, between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take its place.
  • The First Wave had not yet exhausted itself by the end of the 17th century, when the industrial revolution broke over Europe and unleashed the second great wave of planetary change.
  • This new process – industrialization – began moving much more rapidly across nations and continents. Thus two separate and distinct change processes were rolling across the earth simultaneously, at different speeds.
  • The Second Wave, having revolutionized life in Europe, North America, and some other parts of the globe in a few short centuries, continues to spread. The momentum of industrialization is still felt. The Second Wave has not entirely spent its force.
  • As the tide of industrialism peaked in the decades after the Second World War, a little-understood Third Wave began to surge across the earth, transforming everything it touched.
  • This latest historical turning point arrived in the United States during the decade beginning about 1955 – the decade that saw white-collar and service workers outnumber blue-collar workers for the first time.
  • Since then it has arrived – at slightly different dates – in most of the industrial nations. Today all the high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second.
  • When a society is struck by two or more giant waves of change, and none is yet clearly dominant, the image of the future is fractured, creating a raging ocean, full of clashing currents, eddies, and maelstroms which conceal the deeper, more important historic tides.
  • It creates social tensions, dangerous conflicts, and strange new political wave fronts that cut across the usual divisions of class, race, sex, or party.
  • Whether we know it or not, most of us in the rich countries are essentially either Second Wave people committed to maintaining the dying order, Third Wave people constructing a radically different tomorrow, or a confused, self-cancelling mixture of the two.

The leading edge

Waves of the future

Goldbugs and assassins.

  • A profound battle is taking place beneath the surface. On the one side are the partisans of the industrial past; on the other, growing millions who recognize that the most urgent problems of the world – food, energy, arms control, population, poverty, resources, ecology, climate, the problems of the aged, the breakdown of urban community, the need for productive, rewarding work – can no longer be resolved within the framework of the industrial order.

 

PART II: THE SECOND WAVE

PART III: THE THIRD WAVE

Chapter 11: The New Synthesis

  • Our task from here on will be to join the young men and women in their quest for tomorrow.

Chapter 12: The Commanding Heights

  • On 8 August 1960 Monroe Rathbone made a decision that may symbolize the end of the Second Wave era, by cutting back on taxes Exxon paid to the oil-producing countries.
  • His decision struck like a thunderbolt at the governments of these countries, since virtually all their revenues derived from oil company payments. Within a few days the other major oil companies had followed Exxon’s lead.
  • On 9 September delegates of the hardest-hit countries met in emergency council and formed themselves into a committee of oil-exporting governments.
  • In 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries – OPEC – choked off the world’s supply of crude oil and sent the entire Second Wave economy into a shuddering down-spin.
  • What OPEC did, apart from quadrupling its oil revenues, was to accelerate a revolution that was already brewing in the Second Wave techno-sphere.

The sun and beyond

  • The Second Wave energy base was premised on non-renewability. The Second Wave energy base is unsustainable.
  • Once we learn to combine new technologies, the number of options will rise exponentially, accelerating the construction of a Third Wave energy base.
  • Those who favour the advance to a Third Wave energy base seem scattered, underfinanced, and often politically inept. The Second Wave lobbyists, public relations experts, and politicians deepen public confusion and keep the Third Wave forces on the defensive.
  • The struggle over energy is inextricably intertwined with another change of equal profundity: the overthrow of Second Wave technology.

Tools of tomorrow

  • Coal, rail, textile, steel, car, rubber, machine tool manufacture – these were the classical industries of the Second Wave.
  • As these old-fashioned industries were transferred to ‘developing’ countries a set of dynamic new industries – computers and data processing, aerospace, sophisticated petrochemicals, semi-conductors, advanced communications – shot up to take their place.
  • The advance towards Third Wave industries will be radically accelerated by the energy crisis, inasmuch as many of them carry us towards processes and products that are miserly in their energy requirements.

Chapter 16: The Electronic Cottage

  • Hidden inside our advance to a new production system is a potential for social change so breathtaking in scope that few among us have been willing to face its meaning. For we are about to revolutionize our homes as well.
  • Apart from encouraging smaller work units, decentralization and de-urbanization of production, and altering the character of work, the new production system could shift millions of jobs out of the factories and offices into which the Second Wave swept them and right back where they came from originally: the home.
  • If this were to happen, every institution we know, from the family to the school and the corporation, would be transformed.

Chapter 23: Gandhi With Satellites

  • The rapid emergence of the Third Wave not only foreshadows the end of the Second wave imperium, it also explodes all our conventional ideas about ending poverty on the planet.

The Second Wave strategy

  • Ever since the late 1940s a single dominant strategy has governed most efforts to reduce the gap between the world’s rich and poor.
  • Progress consists of moving millions of people out of agriculture into mass production. It requires urbanization, standardization, and all the rest of the Second Wave package.

The First Wave strategy

  • Faced by the failure of the Second Wave strategy, rocked by angry demands by the poor countries for a total overhaul of the global economy, and deeply worried about their own future – the rich nations in the 1970s began to hammer out a new strategy for the poor.
  • It called for a new emphasis on rural development, food for self-sufficiency, and called for resources to be channelled directly into ‘basic human needs.’
  • The new approach stressed labour-intensive production with low capital, energy, and skill requirements, favouring decentralized, small-scale facilities designed for the village.
  • The Intermediate Technology Group founded in 1965 in Britain served as an early model. The developing countries, too, created such centres and began pouring out low-scale technological innovations.
  • Such a strategy may be a new form of imperialism. Only those who have never spent years at gruelling manual labour can lightly brush aside machinery that, as early as 1855, could thresh grain 123 times faster than a man.
  • In a world of exploding diversity we shall have to invent scores of innovative strategies and stop looking for models either in the industrial present – or in the preindustrial past. It is time we began to look at the emergent future.

The Third Wave question

  • Third Wave civilization turns out to have many features – decentralized production, appropriate scale, renewable energy, de-urbanization, work in the home, high levels of prosumption, to name just a few – that resemble those found in First Wave societies.
  • Tomorrow’s development strategies will come not from Washington or Moscow or Paris or Geneva but from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They will be indigenous, matched to actual local needs. They will not overemphasize economics at the expense of ecology, culture, religion, or family structure and the psychological dimensions of existence.
  • They will not imitate any outside model, First Wave, Second Wave or, for that matter, Third.
  • But the ascent of the Third Wave places all our efforts in a new perspective. For it provides the world’s poorest nations, as well as the richest, with wholly new opportunities.

Sun, shrimp, and chips

  • The surprising congruence between many of the structural features of First Wave and Third Wave civilizations suggests that it may be possible in the decades ahead to combine elements of past and future into a new and better present.
  • A new balance has now to be struck between the most advanced science and technology available to the human race and ‘the Gandhian vision of the idyllic green pastures, the village republics’, requiring a total transformation of society, its symbols and values, its system of education, its incentives, the flow of its energy resources, its scientific and industrial research and a whole lot of other institutions. Gandhi, in short, with satellites.

PART IV: CONCLUSION

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