Category: technology

I just finished Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, which was published in 1980, and think it is the most accurate futurist book I’ve read. I don’t have the time right now to write a full summary of his thesis or a list of predictions he got right (but I will in a future blog post), so I’ll just say that Toffler believed the world was transitioning between Industrial-Era “Second Wave” institutions (social, economic, and political) and Postindustrial “Third Wave” institutions, that the transition would be drawn-out, and that a mature Third Wave civilization would be more humane, freer, cleaner, and flatter in its distribution of political power and wealth.

Some of Toffler’s most noteworthy correct predictions include:

• The loss of public consensus over politics and values as entertainment media and news media decentralized and fragmented thanks to new technologies. For example, as the number of TV channels increases, the number of TV news stations will also multiply, and will cater to increasingly specific tastes, and the “Big Three” broadcasters (ABC, CBS and NBC) will lose their near-monopoly over what information and opinions are relayed to average Americans.
• The rise of the internet, and the consequent rise of email, social media, and teleworking.
• The rise of the “internet of things.”
• The possibility that anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe could happen, and trigger a breakup of the USSR along ethnic lines.
• A resurgence in the popularity of authoritarian, populist leaders and political parties in many countries as confused and fearful citizens become frustrated with the growing ineffectiveness of their increasingly obsolete Second Wave governments and afraid that disorder is growing.
• A pervasive, lasting sense among Westerners from nearly all walks of life that the political system is broken, and that “something else” needs to be created to better manage the needs of the postindustrial era.

Some people say the Bible “speaks to them,” in the sense that the book’s passages always seem to offer specific advice for handling whatever life problems they’re having at the moment, and my experience slowly reading The Third Wave over the last two years of global political tumult left me with the same, eerie feeling. I recommend everyone read it to appreciate what a farsighted and thoughtful man Alvin Toffler was, to see how the current political, cultural, and economic dysfunctions bedeviling the West have their origins in changes that started in the late 1970s or earlier, and to learn about potential reforms we could enact to fix those dysfunctions.

My only complaint about the book is that its predictions stop at the current era, so while it makes for an eerily prescient read, it gives little insight into what will happen next. Alvin Toffler died in 2016, and I badly wish he were alive today, in his prime state of health and mind, so he could make more predictions about the next 50 years. He might have been the best futurist of the 20th century.

Until I get around to writing a more in-depth summary and critique of The Third Wave, enjoy my detailed notes on the book. My own comments are also included throughout the notes in square brackets.

The Third Wave [book notes]
By: Alvin Toffler
1980

Chapter 1 – Super-Struggle
First Wave: Agricultural society (lasted thousands of years)
Second Wave: The Industrial Age (lasted 300 years and is now ending)
Third Wave: Post-Industrial Age
Characteristics of Third Wave
-Renewable energy
-New types of goods manufacturing that obsolete factory assembly lines
-Non-nuclear families
-“The electronic cottage”
-Different types of schools and corporations
-Many bureaucracies will become obsolete and collapse
-Weakened nation-states
-Will create a need for more democracy and greater, more complex modes of citizen involvement with decision-making
-Fusion of the producer and consumer into a “prosumer.”
-Will be a more human era than any in human history
Mistakes people make when they think about the future
-Assume rate of change is linear, not exponential.
-Assume existing economic and political structure won’t change.
-Basically, they just imagine that the present world will be bigger or more expansive in the future.
-The stagflation, oil shocks, Iranian revolution, and rise of Islamic terrorism in the 1970s have eroded much of the American optimism about the future, and a growing number of people think the future will be apocalyptic [inflection point from the optimism of the 1960s Space Race era?].
Predictions of “a bigger version of the present day” or of apocalypse are both products of lazy, linear thinking, and lend themselves to passivity: If the future will be fundamentally the same as today, then we need to prepare to change anything. If the world is doomed, nothing we can do will help, so we should do nothing.
The decades ahead could be violent and turbulent as people struggle to adapt to the Third Wave, but a more peaceful, better world will come in the end.
Seemingly unconnected world events are actually all manifestations of the transition from the Second to Third Wave.
The First Wave
-The Agricultural Era
-Started around 8,000 BC when the first humans discovered how to grow crops
-Human lifestyle became sedentary instead of nomadic, the first towns and cities were established, and population sharply grew.
-The “wave” started in the Middle East and spread outwards in every direction.
The Second Wave
-The Industrial Era
-Started in 1650-1750 AD in northern Europe as the first factories were built.
-Enabled unparalleled material abundance for people.
-The wave spread outwards in every direction.
The Third Wave
-The Postindustrial Era.
-Started in the Western world [probably the U.S.] around 1955 and is now spreading outward.
-Problematically, many parts of the world still haven’t completed the transition to Second Wave. The wave fronts are colliding in those places and causing especially bad turbulence.
The uncertainty created by the transition to the Third Wave creates social disorder and scrambled political alliances.
The Second Wave has a interconnected network of institutions (political, economic, and social) designed to serve its needs. Vested interests within those power structures–both on the right and left wings–are fighting the transition to the Third Wave, thereby fueling most of the disorder and conflict in the world.

Chapter 2 – The Architecture of Civilization
Characteristics of the First Wave societies
-“Primitive” people were hunter-gatherers who lived in small, nomadic groups.
-“Civilized” people had agriculture and lived in fixed settlements.
-All “Civilized” First Wave societies, wherever they were in the world, shared some basic qualities:

*Land was the basis of the economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics.
*Life was organized around the village
*There were simple divisions of labor corresponding to different castes and classes (leadership, priest, warrior, slave). People were usually born into a caste for life.
*Power was authoritarian.
*The economy was decentralized, meaning each community made everything it consumed.

Instances where the First Wave and Second Wave societies collided
-American Civil War
-Japanese Meiji Restoration
-Russian Revolution
[But in how many other cases was the transition peaceful?]
During the First Wave, humans got all of their power from local, renewable sources (e.g. – burning firewood, windmills, animals for transportation and farming)
Second Wave countries get their energy from distant, nonrenewable sources (fossil fuels extracted at specific locations and transported elsewhere)
Factories, mass production, and consumerism also rose during the Second Wave.
During the Second Wave, the transit system vastly improved (thanks to paved roads, railroads, canals, and better cargo vehicles), which supported much more trade and more predictable flow of goods.
Institutions and lifestyles that changed during the 1st to 2nd Wave transition
-Family structure: During the 1st wave, extended families (parents, kids, siblings, grandparents, cousins living together) were the norm because people were rooted to the land (a family would live in the same town for hundreds of years). Household burdens were shared. The rise of factories meant that families had to be mobile and to strip themselves of non-productive members. The nuclear family (parents and kids only) became the new standard. The government took over tasks that used to be handled by family members (babysitting, education, elderly care) so the able-bodied people could toil.
-Education: Public schools were structured to fulfill the needs of factory owners, and to instill in students at a young age the qualities of punctuality, obedience, and proficiency doing rote work. The subjects taught in Second Wave public schools (reading, writing, math, history) were also enormous social goods that improved the fabric of society. However, the aforementioned “covert curriculum” has also existed all along for its own purpose.
-Corporations: During the 1st Wave, private businesses existed, but almost all of them were small and were sole proprietorships or partnerships that died with their original creators. Corporations, in which multitudes of unrelated people all own shares of a company, became the 2nd Wave norm because they could raise more capital and absorb losses better. They are also effectively immortal since new stock owners can replace old ones who sell off or die.
-Socio-sphere: Social groups multiplied and copied qualities of the factory. The example used is musical orchestras, which increased in size, internal complexity, and specialization. The socio-sphere evolved in parallel to the techno-sphere.
-Communications: Post offices, mail routes, telegraphs, telephones, and mass media newspapers were invented in the Second Wave. The mass media model of info distribution was the same as the factory model of goods production: Something was centrally made, standardized, and distributed to consumers. No customization.
“The techno-sphere produced and allocated wealth; the socio-sphere, with its thousands of interrelated organizations, allocated roles to invidivuals in the system. And the info-sphere allocated the information to make the entire system work.”

Chapter 3 – The invisible wedge
The Second Wave split apart production and consumption.
During the First Wave, the vast majority of humans lived in small, semi-isolated communities. People locally produced almost everything they needed to consume. Either they made it in their households or traded with other people in the village or small city.
Long-distance trade was almost nonexistent because of poor roads, slow ships, and the inability to preserve foods during long journeys.
For these reasons, there was no incentive for humans to work harder to make food or goods surpluses. Surplus stuff would just rot, pile up in the village, or be confiscated by aristocrats or slave owners. There was little incentive for technological innovation.
The Second Wave turned this arrangement on its head. Trade became global, and most local effort in any given city was devoted to making goods or services for trade to somewhere distant.
The meaning of the market
-Divorcing production from consumption meant that markets had to be created to match producers with consumers and supply with demand. Consumers could no longer self-satisfy by making the goods and services they needed for themselves.
-This change to the basic structure of the economy had monumental benefits and drawbacks. The benefit was that markets were self-reinforcing, meaning their very existence automatically engendered expansion, which raised standards of living for everyone like never before in human history. The drawback was that participating in Second Wave markets was dehumanizing for people. They had to take on careers they had no interest in to satisfy whatever the market was demanding. Participation was mandatory because the people couldn’t produce vital goods and services for themselves anymore–those things had to be bought at the market.
-Participation in markets necessarily meant that all goods and services had to be priced, which changed the way people thought about the fruits of their own labor. A “commodified” way of thinking also crept into human relationships, leading to more transactional relationships, less personal loyalty, and weakened community bonds.
-“Markets” are not synonymous with “capitalism”–markets also exist in socialist countries. However, instead of price signals being used to allocate economic resources, central planners do it. Similarly, in capitalist countries, there are some minorities of producers and consumers who are especially powerful and who have outsized shares of control over how the economy allocates resources.
-In all Second Wave economies–whether capitalist or socialist–the basic economic tension is between consumers and producers: Consumers want low prices for goods and services, and producers want high wages. In many cases, the same people who are Consumers are also Producers.
-Marx was wrong to conclude that class struggle is the basic animating force of history and politics. He rightly observed capitalism’s many defects, but his alternative was just as bad.
The Sexual Split
-Gender roles and personalities also diverged thanks to the Second Wave.
-In First Wave societies, families spent all their time together working the land and taking care of the house. They worked as a unit and could do each others’ tasks. Gender roles were less sharply defined.
-In the Second Wave, men went to work outside the home in factories and offices while women stayed at home doing housework, as they did during the First Wave.
-“This division produced a split in personality and inner life. The public or collective nature of factory and office, the need for coordination and integration, brought with it an emphasis on objective analysis and objective relationships. Men, prepared from boyhood for their role in the shop, where they would move in a world of interdependencies, were encouraged to become ‘objective.’ Women, prepared from birth for the task of reproduction, child-rearing and household drudgery, were taught to be ‘subjective’–and were frequently regarded as incapable of the kind of rational, analytic thought that supposedly went with objectivity.”
-Oppression of females still existed in the First Wave.

Chapter 4 – Breaking the code
Most conflicts in Second Wave societies ultimately derive from six basic features of those societies:
1) Standardization
During the Industrial Era, factories, workplaces, aptitude tests, products, prices, and school curricula were all standardized for the sake of efficiency and order.
Mass media and public education also standardized dominant languages in countries, pushing minority dialects and languages like Welsh into near-extinction.
Barter was replaced with set prices.
2) Specialization
While the Second Wave encouraged standardization/harmonization of culture and language, it encouraged the opposite in labor.
The old ways of using skilled craftsmen to make things were abandoned in favor of low-skill laborers specialized to do different tasks on an assembly line because the new way was dramatically more efficient.
Multitudes of new, knowledge and skill specialized professions were created during the Second Wave.
3) Synchronization
Daily schedules were synchronized to keep the factories running at peak efficiency: Time is money since idle machines can’t make anything, and assembly lines require every worker to be present.
Punctuality became very important, and children were conditioned starting at a young age to tell time and to show up to school at certain times.
The “9 to 5” daily work schedule became the standard.
4) Concentration
People and jobs used to be spread out evenly across the countryside. In the Second Wave, the population was concentrated into cities, and jobs were concentrated in factories.
Similarly, for the first time, criminals were concentrated into big prisons, insane people into asylums (they used to be taken care of by their families), and children into large schools.
Energy sources also went from distributed and local (wood) to concentrated (fossil fuel deposits).
5) Maximization
Simply put, an obsession with bigness and growth (of national landmarks, economic statistics, and other superlatives). It derived from the Industrial Era observation that factories got more efficient as they grew in size.
Maximization has led to the assumption that growth is good in itself, and as a result, government have mindlessly adopted any policies that promote GNP growth and many large companies build ever-bigger factories.
6) Centralization
Economic resources were centralized during the Second Wave as the first big companies (railroad companies are used as an example) came to be. They had much larger numbers of workers and money than any previous companies.
Political power was centralized as national governments grew at the expense of local ones. This happened in Free and Communist countries.
Control over the financial system was centralized as each country created a central bank to issue government bonds, print money, and regulate other banks. Even capitalist countries could practice limited central planning thanks to central banks.
These six features of Second Wave societies arose from the cleavage of producers from consumers and are self-reinforcing.
The leaders of Second Wave institutions who only know how to play by these six rules will either adapt to the new ways of doing things in the Third Wave or be sidelined.

Chapter 5 – The technicians of power
In First Wave societies, the power structure is very simple and undisguised: the king, royal family, and church clergy were in charge.
In more complex Second Wave societies where there are larger numbers of powerful entities (government, businesses, religions, banks) with large numbers of members, it’s less clear who the power players are. This has given rise to the use of “They” to refer to the amorphous group of people who are running things.
Governments and companies are so large and have so many specialized parts that no one person can understand everything they do. The people with power are the “Integrators”–the people within the large organizations who manage, organize, and make high-level decisions. They include Presidents, bureaucrats, and managers.
Marx was wrong to think that having the state and ultimately the people themselves take ownership of the means of production would result in a fair society. Just like in capitalist countries, the government and big firms were so big that they needed managers. Political, economic and legal power inevitably concentrated among them. Lenin, Trotsky and Mao all went on record about the ill consequences of this once they saw it happening in their respective Socialist countries.
Whether the means of production are owned by a Board of Directors, by private stockowners, or by all citizens, those owners won’t be able to exercise real control over the means of production since they won’t understand how the big firms operate or what political and economic forces are at play. There will always be a need for “Integrators,” and they will inevitably accrue power to themselves.
Government has steadily grown in size, authority and power in all countries during the Second Wave. Ironically, this has actually helped private industry and sped up economic growth, since the government has the resources, ability to survive without making profits, and long-term time horizon that even the biggest companies don’t.
Government helps private industry by building important public works (highways, railroads, ports, canals, telecommunications networks, other utilities networks like natural gas lines), by setting and enforcing national-level standards, codes and laws to ensure a predictable market environment, and by funding science and technology research (particularly via the military).
Government-run public schools also prepared citizens to work for private companies.
While Western politicians gin up votes by talking about reducing the size of government, they almost never do because they understand it would hurt the economy.
Whether a country is capitalist or communist, the same bureaucratic pyramids will arise–out of necessity–in government, the economy, the entertainment sector, and in other areas of civil society.
Successful revolutionaries who take over countries might temporarily dismantle said bureaucracies, but in time, they always find it necessary to rebuild them. This is part of why their supporters so often become disillusioned.
In the Third Wave, this top-down, bureaucratic order will be replaced by one that is flatter, where decision-making is shared, and where decisions are made more democratically and in a more anticipatory fashion.

Chapter 6 – The hidden blueprint
The political systems of all industrial countries are essentially the same.
When Second Wave revolutionaries overthrew First Wave elites, the former created constitutions and governments that melded ideas from both eras.
-Basing elections on geography (i.e. – each state or district has one elected representative) instead of class, occupation, ethnicity, or sexual identity reflects the centrality of land to the lives of First Wave people. Land was wealth and people seldom moved.
-The assumption that educated, high class people should serve in government owes to the fact that most First Wave people were illiterate and ignorant.
In all Second Wave countries, governance is structured as follows (the “universal represento-kit”):
1) Individuals who vote
2) Parties that collect those votes
3) Candidates who win the most votes and become representatives
4) Legislatures where those representatives make laws.
5) Executives who suggest laws to the legislature and enforce laws passed by it.
These governance structures exist even in communist countries, and within countries they exist at national and local levels.
Thanks to trade and globalization, the actions of any one national government can affect many governments elsewhere.
Second Wave governance systems are fairer and more humane than what came before them, but they are still not nearly as democratic as most people think.
Elections defuse tensions, preempt mass protests, and give voters the sense they’re in control over the government. In fact, bureaucrats, political lobbyists and other elites are always in control.
No matter whom the people elect to office, their behavior in office almost always conforms to preexisting norms, and real change almost never happens.
Labor union leaders have been assimilated into the broader governance structure and orthodoxy. Even unions don’t represent average people any better than politicians do.

Chapter 7 – A frenzy of nations
Third Wave forces will challenge the integrity of nation-states and impel regional independence movements.
During the First Wave, humans lived in a patchwork of innumerable towns, counties, cities, and tribal areas, each with their own sets of laws and customs. Travel was also very slow.
The lack of common laws and standards and fast means of travel were major impediments to the economy and to kings exercising authority in far-flung parts of their lands.
The Industrial Revolution sharply accelerated the emergence of nation-states:
-Expensive factories and infrastructure projects could only be paid for by larger polities of people. City-states, counties, and small kingdoms were pressured to band together to pool their resources.
-Industrialization made it possible for the first time to produce large, local surpluses of goods and to transport them to distant markets before they deteriorated (spoiled). The increase in trade led to a greater awareness of rest of the world and [for reasons unexplained] the emergence of national identities.
-The higher levels of commerce that the industrial revolution made technically possible could only be sustained if laws and product standards were harmonized and if transit infrastructure was built. This meant that the patchwork of small polities had to be replaced by much larger nation-states, which would set uniform laws and standards and coordinate big infrastructure projects over larger areas.
Convincing people to give up their old identities and political loyalties and to accept the nation-state, the myth of unique national self-identity had to be manufactured.
Nation-states expanded in the 1800s until they hit barriers (geographic barriers, other nation-states comprised of unassimilable people [usually thanks to language differences]). Technological limitations on communications and transit also curtailed sprawl beyond a certain point.
Nation-states funded railroad projects because they helped to symbolize the power of the nation and because they had practical value as means to transport troops.

Chapter 8 – The imperial drive
European colonialism actually started when Europe was still a First Wave civilization.
Before the Industrial Revolution, Europe wasn’t able to do much trading with its colonies. Booty that the Spanish and Portuguese took from the New World was enough to enrich their royal families, but the lives of average people living in Spain and Portugal barely benefited.
But once Europe industrialized, colonialism became much more profitable (spurring more expansion) and sharply altered their economies.
Mercantilism arose thanks to factory manufacturing and the ability to move goods around the planet quickly. European countries took over more primitive parts of the world, extracted their natural resources, and paid for it with finished goods made in Europe. The finished goods were sometimes made with the same raw materials the foreign people had shipped to Europe. Colonies were captive markets.
Racism also encouraged whites to take over as much of the nonwhite, First Wave world as they could. They tried to euphemize it as benevolent work to civilize inferior races of people.
David Ricardo’s theories about comparative advantage and the concomitant need for specialization and free trade to optimize the economy were soon accepted as gospel, and led European countries to create empires and hegemonies that conformed to Ricardo’s theories about how economic activity could be optimized.
However, his theories presuppose that all of the participants in the markets are equally informed and that no one is coercing anyone else. In reality, the deck was stacked heavily towards European and American colonialists against their colonial subjects or new First Wave trading partners when agreements were struck. The whites were money savvy, lawyerly, and often used the threat of military force. The non-whites barely had a clue and agreed to unfair deals to sell their labor and resources as below-market rates.
Ricardo’s precondition of free trade was also unmet since colonial powers practiced merchantilism, which sealed off their markets from trading with members of other colonial power blocs.
Much of the time, the raw materials the colonialists wanted–like chromium or oil–had no value to the non-European people because they hadn’t industrialized yet and couldn’t make use of it. As such, they unwittingly accepted sub-market prices for them. This put them at a crucial, long-term disadvantage and also impelled colonialists elsewhere to pressure other exploited people who had the same resource to sell it for the same price or lower so they could be competitive with the first supplier.
This phenomenon could be called “The Law of the First Price.”
[But even though the Europeans were more savvy, how could they have known what the fair price for such commodities was given that they also had limited knowledge of things like local wages in the First Wave countries? And no one can blame them from asking for the lowest prices possible. It’s the rational thing to do.]
European and American colonialists preached free trade, but didn’t truly practice it. The trading arrangements they created were unfair and exploitative, and large amounts of wealth flowed from poorer First Wave countries to their own.
Colonialism disrupted the local economies, social systems, and self-sufficiency of First Wave societies and tied their fates to the trade whims of the West. The interaction with stronger and more advanced First Wave people also instilled a sense of inferiority in Second Wave people, which persists to this day and hampers their growth.
Right after WWII, America filled the global power vacuum left by the ruination of the other industrialized countries. The U.S. created the Bretton Woods system, which solidified its economic and political influence.
-The IMF required members to peg their currencies to the U.S. dollar. This prevented debtor nations from using currency inflation to repay money they owed to the U.S. or World Bank.
-The World Bank loaned money to countries to build infrastructure. At first, the loans were all to European countries to repair the damaged caused by WWII. Later, the loans were to less developed nations to build more advanced infrastructure. Importantly, membership was only granted to countries that were in the IMF and abided by the GATT.
-The GATT required members to lower trade barriers against all other members, and it provided a venue to settle trade disputes.
Lenin hated colonialism and genuinely believed it was a purely capitalist phenomenon that would disappear once the world became communist. Time would show he was mistaken. Even centrally planned economies are still subject to the same economic incentives as capitalist ones. For example, even under communism, economic efficiency is desirable, and central planners can calculate which production method is the least resource-intensive. The USSR used money and was still part of the global money system. Thanks to those things, the Soviets behaved unfairly towards other countries just as the capitalists did, for instance demanding and getting unprofitably low prices for commodities purchased from smaller countries.
After WWII, the Soviets also pillaged Eastern Europe and Germany, and forced their new communist governments to agree to unfair trade and political treaties. This behavior was the same as a capitalist colonialist.
The USSR forced the countries of Eastern Europe into an economic, trade, and monetary arrangement that was more rigid and more controlled than what the U.S. created with Bretton Woods. The Communist analog was “COMECON.” The USSR forced its participants to economically specialize in different things and to submit their development plans to the USSR for approval.
Without colonialism, the West would have industrialized much slower because commodities would have been more expensive.
The “Second Wave mentality” holds the world back from transitioning to the Third Wave.

Chapter 9 – Indust-reality
Second Wave civilization also spawned a unique worldview, set of values and way of thinking that its people internalized. The author calls this “Indust-reality.”
Both capitalists and socialists believe that man should hold dominion over nature, and that nature exists to be exploited. Both have caused massive ecological damage for the sake of industrialization.
All Second Wave nations believe in Darwinian ideas about evolution and survival of the fittest, with humans being the pinnacle of Earthly life.
This way of thinking of course heavily tainted white peoples’ views on race and helped justify their colonial activities. They believed they were superior, and that their place in the world was therefore to conquer, lead, and even exterminate lesser races.
All Second Wave nations believe in the idea of progress. The world is becoming a better place, chiefly thanks to industrialization. [Was true in the 1800s and early 1900s, but today, many people in the Developing World are declinist]
First Wave people had no way to precisely measure time, so they used units relevant to their daily experience. “The time it takes to cook rice” would have been an example of a unit of time.
During the Second Wave, units of time were precisely divided into seconds, minutes and hours, and the world agreed to divide itself into time zones.
First Wave notions that history is cyclical and/or repeating (especially common to Buddhists and Hindus thanks to their belief in reincarnation) were replaced by the Second Wave notion that time is unidirectional and linear.
The idea of time being linear also made the theory of evolution more plausible.
During the Second Wave, notions of distance and physical space were also standardized into units of measure. This was because space was at a premium in cities, and it had to be carefully managed.
Standardized units of distance like meters replaced imprecise First Wave units like “a day’s walk.”
Street grids, which in the First Wave were very irregular since they were based on landscape contours and the vagaries of flowing human foot traffic, were replaced by straight streets and 90 degree angles.
Buildings also assumed square or rectangular shapes.
The appearance of the constructed human environment became more standardized and full of straight, parallel lines and perpendicular lines.
Prevailing beliefs about the nature of physical matter also changed from First to Second Waves. While thinkers like Democritus had theorized the existence of atoms in ancient times, the idea was largely ignored until the Second Wave, when scientists did experiments that proved it was true (and that pure Elements could be isolated in the lab).
The Second Wave also developed new ideas about the nature of matter and causality, which diminished any need to invoke God or supernatural forces to explain why things happened. It became accepted that all physical objects were made of atoms, and that they interacted with each other according to the Laws of Gravity and of other forces. If God existed, he could be comfortably placed at the very margin of our universe as its Prime Mover, and not the active force shaping and determining every event and interaction.
This notion of reality led Second Wave people to think of the universe as tidy, fundamentally predictable, and subject to engineering. Unfortunately, it also led them to ignore things that were non-quantifiable and to punish imagination.

Chapter 10 – Coda: The flash flood
The Industrial Revolution was caused by synergy of many different things (such as the exhaustion of Britain’s timber forcing a switch to coal). However, the fission between consumer and producer was the biggest single cause.
The more that consumer and producer are separated in time and space, the more complex a society becomes.
[The author summarizes the last few chapters.]
Critics of the Industrial Era’s abuses and excesses often make the mistake of romanticizing what came before. However, all evidence suggests that First Wave societies also lived in misery, and that in some ways, life was better for people living in Industrial Era tenements and slums.
However, in some ways, the Second Wave was worse than the First Wave:
-Industrial pollution is more pervasive and long-lasting. We might have permanently damaged the environment during the Second Wave.
-The race-based slavery, forced population transfers, and colonization resulted in suffering and death unparalleled in the past. The psychological scars haven’t healed among nonwhites who suffered from this.
Several factors are conspiring to end Second Wave civilization:
-The environment can’t absorb more industrial damage, so economic growth will be hampered by the need to do so cleanly.
-Cheap energy and cheap commodities are disappearing, which will also constrain the spread of Industrial society. [Low fossil fuels prices in 2017 and the ongoing industrialization of China seem to disprove this claim.]
-Second Wave countries are also facing insitutional and cultural upheaval, as bureaucracies and the services they provide crumble [aging infrastructure in the West] and as homosexuals demand rights and the nuclear family becomes less common.
-Second Wave people are experiencing widespread dissatisfaction with their jobs, with the structure of their lives, and with themselves. There is a pervasive yearning for some kind of personal and cultural change, even if most people can’t articulate what is wrong and what they want to make different.

Chapter 11 – The new synthesis
The author worked in Midwestern factory assembly lines from 1950-55.
Futurists commonly err by extrapolating existing trends into the future as straight lines on a graph. In reality, trends can’t be counted on to reliably continue on like that, and they could stop, reverse, or hit inflection points and exponentially explode at any time.

Chapter 12 – The commanding heights
OPEC was formed in 1960 in reaction to Exxon and other oil big Western companies cutting the amount of money they were willing to pay foreign countries for oil. OPEC was a counterweight to Western power.
During the Third Wave, the world will switch from centralized, non-renewable energy sources like fossil fuels to decentralized, renewable sources like solar panels.
Oil is a finite natural resource, so it will run out. Most likely, this will take the form of several successive supply and price shocks. [Probably wrong, though Toffler was making this prediction in 1980]
However, once the oil is gone, the world will switch to cheap, clean, abundant energy. The end of oil will be painful, but it won’t mean the end of energy.
Coal usage could theoretically be increased to compensate for declining oil and gas reserves, but coal produces a lot of air pollution and contributes to global warming. [Toffler was one of the few people aware of this so early]
Nuclear power is an equivocal option due to its high costs and dangerous waste problem. It is also a totally centralized energy source, which doesn’t fit with the Third Wave model.
Possible alternative energies that will displace fossil fuels:
-Solar photovoltaic panels
-Windmill-carrying high-altitude balloons
-Biomass waste combustion (burning trash to make energy)
-Geothermal
-Solar concentrator
-Hydrogen-powered vehicles and planes
Better batteries will also make electric cars practical.
Toffler predicts a breakthrough in some alternative energy technology in one or two decades (1990 – 2000). [That didn’t happen.]
The fossil fuels industry, utilities companies, mining companies, and unions representing workers in those sectors are all Second Wave entrenched interests who lobby politicians to block the switch to alternative energy.
Enlightened consumers, environmentalists, scientists, and entrepreneurs represent Third Wave forces pushing for change.
The costs of fossil fuel energy are rapidly rising, and soon they will be so high that a switch to alternatives will be unavoidable. [This was a common view in the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s. When Toffler wrote this book, oil prices were still very high. However, the price of oil actually crashed in the mid-1980s and stayed low until 2001. Because of this, and because it took longer than Toffler estimated to bring down the costs of solar PV panels, the switch to alternative energy has taken much longer than he guessed.]
The decline of heavy industries in the American Rust Belt and counterparts in Europe, and the rise of high-tech economy clusters like Silicon Valley is the economic aspect of the transition from the Second to Third Wave. This started in the 1950s.
Electronics and computers together form a new, Third Wave industry that is poised for massive expansion.
Personal computers are about to hit the market and will someday be in every home. Other future technologies will include:
-Climate and soil sensors for farms
-Heartbeat sensors built into clothes
Fiber-optic cables will replace copper phone wires, lowering the energy requirements by a factor of 1,000.
In general, integrated circuits can do the same tasks as older analog technologies with much greater energy efficiency. The coming energy crisis will impel the development of these new technologies. [Toffler ends his future prediction winning streak.]
Launching payloads into orbit will become much cheaper thanks to the Space Shuttles [not true], and space-based manufacturing will begin. [Still hasn’t happened]
Space mining and the construction of space stations for humans are being seriously considered.
Aquaculture and seabed mineral mining could begin in the mid-80s and will mirror man’s exploration of space.
Undersea bases and even colonies could take advantage of free real estate and energy (tidal, thermal currents, wind).
Floating cities are also possible for adventurers and groups of like-minded people (or ethnicity) who want their own countries.
Genetic technology also has major future implications.
-Enzymes in car exhaust systems will monitor pollution levels. [Is he talking about a catalytic converter?]
-Genetically engineered bacteria could filter bits of precious metal from the seas.
-Genetically engineered humans
-Human organ cloning (each person would have “backup” organs stored somewhere)
-New disease cures
-No need for oil to make plastics
-New ways to synthesize natural organic products like wood and wool.
-Genetically modified food crops that will need fewer fertilizers and pesticides and be able to grow on poorer soils. This will benefit farmers in poor countries much more than the Green Revolution’s earlier methods and technologies did.
Accidental releases of genetically modified microorganisms could become a threat.
Third Wave technologies will present new threats and risks
-Electronic smog [?]
-Information pollution [?]
-Space warfare
-Genetic leakage [?]
-Climatic intervention [geoengineering by one country over the protests of others?]
-Manmade earthquakes
Luddites who are afraid of these perils will become more vocal during the Third Wave, and politicians may ride to power by stoking their fears.
“Techno-rebels” are an emerging group of people who don’t want to stop technological improvements, but instead who want new technologies to be more humane. They generally heed the Precautionary Principle, are against nuclear power, are environmentalist but not Luddites, and favor technologies that decentralize power and can be used by average people. They will grow in number over time.
During the Third Wave, energy production will get cleaner and more decentralized, resource usage will get more efficient and less wasteful more generally speaking, and pollution will decrease.

Chapter 13 – De-massifying the media
The Second Wave saw the rise of the mass media: a handful of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and TV stations that shaped public opinion. They greatly expanded the knowledge and content that was available during the First Wave, but they still presented a limited picture of the world and engendered conformity.
In the 1970s, newspaper readership in the U.S. and Britain started dropping. [It sounds like the author is referring to the daily newspapers]
Meanwhile, the number of subject-specific and ethnicity-specific magazines and radio stations have increased. Media is becoming “de-massed” and more catered to special interests. [This trend continued once the Internet became commonly available.]
CB radio is getting more popular, and it might cannibalize normal broadcast radio’s share of listener attention among people driving their cars. [This didn’t pan out.]
The Big Three American TV broadcasters–ABC, CBS and NBC–are rapidly losing market share to other, more specialized TV channels.
Cable TV is also rapidly growing in viewership and is another indicator that TV entertainment content is getting more diverse and more tailored to niche groups of people and niche topics.
Fiber-optic cables will replace copper for cable TV.
Cable TV designed for two-way communication will also become popular.
-In Japan, the Hi-Ovis interactive TV system was trialed in the late 1970s. Each participant had a TV camera and microphone mounted to their TVs so they could communicate with the broadcaster and do videoconferencing. Users can also enter codes [not said how] that tell the broadcaster to play certain programs just for them, at any time. [Precursor to Pay-per-view or Video on Demand]
-In the U.S., Warner experimented with the Qube two-way cable system, which also allowed users to send messages to the broadcaster, for instance indicating whether they liked what they were watching. [Like and Dislike videos]
Video games are also de-massifying the media since they are, by nature, customized for each user and interactive, and because they subtract from the time people have to view mass media.
VCRs will allow people to record TV programs and watch them when they want instead of when the network wants them to, and VCRs and camcorders will allow people to produce and distribute their own content.
Satellites will allow smaller TV channels to beam content across the country, bypassing the crowded, limited TV broadcast network.
“Commercial television will no longer be able to dictate either what is watched or when it is watched.”
Third Wave consists of “blip culture,” meaning the new media bombards people with “blips” of content and information that aren’t in the easy-to-follow narrative format of the Second Wave, and the blips aren’t part of a cohesive whole. From smaller and more specialized content producers, people receive conflicting bits of information and values, which many people can’t reconcile.
People will also share more content directly with each other, which is part of what the “information society” title is meant to convey.

Chapter 14 – The intelligent environment
Some animist religions hold that inanimate objects have spirits in them. Computers are, in a way, making this a reality since they are inanimate objects, but alive with energy and information.
Personal computers will soon be in every household.
Telecomputing Corporation of America offers a product package called “The Source,” [a simple version of today’s internet] which has the following:
-Access to a network containing news updates, financial data, educational programs, hotel reservation programs.
-The network also allows users to communicate directly with each other, to play virtual board games with each other, to send emails (including mass emails) to other users, and to participate in topic-specific bulletin boards.
As computers get still smaller, they will become embedded in everyday objects, optimizing the efficiency and performance of all kinds of manmade objects. [Internet of Things]
-Monitor and curtail heat waste in a home. [A programmable thermostat?]
-Attenuate the detergent load and other settings of washing machines to optimize their performance.
-Automatically activate different appliances in the home at certain times to preemptively meet the human occupants’ needs. (For example, turn on the coffee maker right before the human typically wakes up in the morning)
Alan P.Hald described the future potential of this technology in the short story “Fred the House.”
Intelligent machines and AIs distributed throughout the environment (such as in houses and cars) raise the following questions about the future and counterpoints:
-Will pervasive use of electronics and computers give the government more avenues to spy on and control people, [Well, at least from the perspective of 2017, it seems the answer was Yes.] or will the distribution of computing power make it easier for people to thwart government control [cyptocurrencies and VPNs]?
-Will machines “take over,” or will humans find ways to stay ahead with enhanced intelligence and creativity, and find ways to keep the machines down with something like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics?
-“It would be naive to assume that the cards are stacked against the human race. We have intelligence and imagination we have not yet begun to use.” –Pg 161
Computers that can recognize up to 1,000 spoken words already exist, and in 5 – 20 years, their vocabularies might be large enough to make them the default means of human-machine communication.
Illiterate people are excluded from the Second Wave job market, even though many of them have normal intelligence. In a future where computers are everywhere in the environment and they can understand human speech, literacy’s value will decline.
“[Various types of workers] may be able to function quite adequately on the job by listening rather than reading, as a voice from the machine tells them, step by step, what to do next or how to replace a broken part.” [The “Jennifer Unit”; a Borg drone?]
Computers will also be able to crunch vast amounts of data impossible for any one human, and to find causal linkages between things that no one thought of. [“Big Data”]
The richness and interactivity of one’s environment shapes childhood brain development. If the future world is embedded with computers, sensors and devices that intelligently interact with people, then it might raise average intelligence, particularly among children. (Quote by Dr. Donald F. Klein is cited)
Before the invention of writing, the body of human knowledge was in a constant steady-state because things were always being forgotten and relearned. Mass literacy was a second inflection point in the growth of human knowledge. The third inflection point will owe to data being stored in computers and sensors being everywhere in the environment, recording all events. Our civilization will achieve “total recall.”
Computers will be programmed to think in unorthodox ways and to recombine existing knowledge in strange ways that humans would have never thought to do. This will lead to “a flood of new theories, ideas, ideologies, artistic insights, technical advances, economic and political innovations…” It will accelerate the pace of change in many domains.

Chapter 15 – Beyond mass production
The author visited a Hewlett-Packard electronics factory in Colorado and found an environment that represents the future of such work:
-No spatial separation between workers–everyone works in a single huge bay [Open concept office?]
-Relatively quiet
-Relaxed attire standards, so rank is not evident by appearance
-Ability for workers to choose their own hours
It sharply contrasted with the rigid, authoritarian, and uncomfortable environment the author experienced when he worked at a Second Wave factory as a young man.
“The essence of Second Wave manufacture was the long ‘run’ of millions of identical, standardized products. By contrast, the essence of Third Wave manufacture is the short run of partially or completely customized products.”
Manufactured goods are also of greater diversity and are more common to be made in short production runs.
-The U.s. makes jet fighters in runs as small as 10. [This trend certainly didn’t continue, as the massively expensive F-35 shows.]
-There are more car models than ever.
-Custom printed T-shirts
The custom tailoring of clothes could someday be cheap and ubiquitous, and standard sizes might disappear. It will be possible to upload one’s body measurements into a computer and transmit it to a clothes factory. Computers could also deduce the best clothing fit for a person by scanning video footage of him or her.
Manufacture is also “de-massifying.”
Producer and consumer will become tightly integrated once more and consumers find easy ways to transmit their changing style and product preferences to producers.
Computer-aided design has allowed many manufactured goods, such as cameras, to be made with fewer moving parts. Greater use of integrated circuits to replace analog machines will continue this trend. [Digital cameras]
The death of the secretary?
-Increasingly, people work in office environments.
-While this is often said to herald the “postmodern economy,” it is really an extension of the Second Wave era. Most offices are factory-like environments where repeatedly people do small units of deadening work. There is also a hierarchy, with “high-abstraction” workers (scientists, engineers, and managers) at the top, and “low-abstraction” ones (secretaries) at the bottom.
-Word processors, optical scanners, high-speed printers, micrographic equipment [microfilm and microfilm readers], fax machines, and computers are about to enter the office workplace and radically change the workflow process. It could lead to “paperless offices” in the future.
-Those technologies will drastically simplify the process of writing and circulating memos at work. Secretaries won’t be needed anymore.
-The author used a word processor to write the second half of this book, which made him grasp the technology’s potential.
-Computer dictionaries will check written files for spelling errors.
-Electronic mail [the shortened term “e-mail” apparently didn’t exist yet] will be used to transmit written files; they won’t need to be printed out for circulation.
-Electronic mail will threaten the Post Office’s business in the future. Already, some big companies have set up electronic mail systems to send messages between workers and facilities.
-Typing and keyboards will eventually be obsoleted by continuous speech recognition. [This prediction came half-true, as of 2017. The problem with talking to your computer is that is sacrifices your privacy since everyone can hear what you’re doing.]
-High-ranking office people will have to dictate or type their own correspondence since they won’t have secretaries anymore.
When factory automation started in the 1950s and 60s, many economists predicted mass unemployment, but it didn’t happen. [A different picture emerges if one only looks at U.S. factory employment from WWII-Present] New jobs were created, and the same will be true after the computer and office automation revolutions, though it can’t be said what those jobs will be.
Automation is just one factor affecting human unemployment. [It’s true the computer and internet revolutions didn’t increase net human unemployment, but it’s much less clear if this will still be true once machines have become truly intelligent. At that point, humans would lose their cognitive advantages over machines. They lost their physical strength advantage long ago.]

Chapter 16 – The electronic cottage
Technology will soon allow people to work from their homes, which will have major impacts on company structures and population distribution.
Skeptics of this should remember that pre-Industrial people would have found it equally nonsensical if a futurist had told them they would someday be working OUT OF their homes in factories. For almost all of human history, people worked locally alongside their families. Going to distant, centralized locations to work alongside strangers has only been going on a short time and is odd.
The author interviewed the heads of several advanced tech factories, and they said anywhere from 1/3 – 3/4 of their workforce could telework. Some could even telework without benefit of home computers.
“The electronic cottage” describes a technology-enabled home workstation that would allow people to telecommute. It would include a ‘smart typewriter,’ fax machine, computer, and teleconferencing equipment.
High-ranking, high-abstraction workers would be less able to telecommute since they need to frequently meet with other people. Not all jobs are amenable to being done remotely.
Across the developed world, there is a transportation crisis largely thanks to people commuting to work using inadequate road and rail capacity. Long commutes strain peoples’ health and cost individuals and their companies money. Putting telecom equipment in peoples’ houses so they can work from home is a cheaper and better alternative.
Gas shortages and high gas prices will intensify the need for telecommuting. [A rare, wrong prediction, and clearly influenced by the events of the 1970s.]
Telecommuting uses less energy than mass transit at 100% capacity, and will also allow workplaces to physically shrink, lowering real estate costs, climate control bills, and security costs.
Telecommuting could make families closer since members of the family will be around each other more, could strengthen communities since people wouldn’t move whenever they switched jobs (just use home PC to work for the new company) and they’d be able to put down roots in one place, and could geographically decentralize energy demand and also supply.
If telecommuting became popular, some industries (computers, electronics) would flourish, while others (cars, oil, paper makers, USPS) would shrink.
“Rather than a world of purely vicarious human relationships, with an electric screen interposed between the individual and the rest of humanity…one can postulate a world divided into two sets of human relationships–one real, the other vicarious–with different rules and roles in each.” [The anonymity of the internet indeed encourages very different personal behavior than the real world does. However, the smartphone revolution has led to the frequent, literal interposition of electric screens between individuals and the rest of humanity. The author didn’t predict that, but to be fair, neither did anyone else right up until the day the iPhone was introduced.]
If even 10% of the American workforce teleworked, the country’s economy, cities, ecology, family structure, values, and politics would be altered beyond recognition. It could happen in as little as 20 year. [As of 2017, only 2.8% of U.S. workers telecommute at least half of the time. The practice is still growing in popularity among workers and employers, but it simply hasn’t grown as fast as the author predicted it would.]

Chapter 17 – Families of the future
The nuclear family became the standard because it suited the employment needs of the Second Wave. It is being eroded away by high divorce rates thanks to the transition to the Third Wave. [Divorce rates stabilized in the 1990s.]
Keeping the nuclear family the default family arrangement would require forsaking over 20 years of technological, social, and economic progress to return Americans to a 1950s standard of living and values. It’s impossible.
At the time of the book’s publishing, only 7% of the U.S. population lived in an ideal nuclear family (working husband, stay-at-home wife, and two young children).
The numbers of single people living alone, unmarried couples who cohabit, and couples who have decided not to have kids are rapidly increasing.
At the turn of the century, families were child-centric, as lifespans were so short that parents typically died shortly after their children left the house.
Single-parent households and mixed households where two divorcees with kids marry are rapidly becoming more common.
In the Third Wave, no single type of family (extended, nuclear, single-parent, mixed, other) will predominate, and almost all will be socially accepted.
[The author suggests 15% of the workforce might spend all or some of its working hours at home within 25 years (the year 2005). It proved too optimistic an estimate.]
Telecommuting could benefit most marriages since spouses would have more time together, even if they were both occupied with work. However, it would damage a minority of marriages since it would just provide more time for personality clashes. First Wave families spent almost all their time together, and many were dysfunctional and abusive.
Expectations people had of marriage have changed over time thanks to different demands put on the family unit.
-First Wave: Since families were work units, adults wanted to marry spouses who were physically robust and disciplined. Physical attractiveness was not a primary criterion, and emotional love was not as important.
-Second Wave: With work life separated from home life, older priorities shifted. People now wanted spouses who were physically attractive and who seemed able to provide emotional support. Love became essential for a marriage.
-Third Wave: With NON-PHYSICAL work again returning to the home, people might start seeking out partners who are smart enough and technically skilled enough to succeed in the future economy, while still possessing all the good qualities people expected during the Second Wave. [As of 2017, this is either true or close to coming true. Note the phenomenon of women not wanting to marry men with inferior levels of education and/or income, and the general recognition that the romantic arena is more competitive and demanding than ever.]
Once parents work from home, children will have direct exposure to their parents’ work, instead of it being a mysterious, unseen activity that happens at a distant workplace.
Child labor laws (which the author says were put in place to protect adult wages) might be rolled back once children are able to do non-physical work from home. [Unsure about this. The more time a child spends working, the less he spends studying, which translates into worse grades and test scores and poorer college prospects. The more knowledge-based the economy gets, the more important higher education is to personal success.]
Allowing children to participate in the information economy and in services would also reduce juvenile delinquency since it would give them things to do. [Contradicted by the fact that the labor force participation rate among 16-18 year olds is extremely low.]
Some families that telework will also evolve into “electronic expanded families” through the incorporation of unrealted people into their corporations. This could be thought of as a commune founded for common financial benefit. [Teleworking has become more common, but there has been little if any movement towards spouses purposefully adopting the same jobs so they can literally “work together” while at home.]
Family law and social mores should be changed to ease the transition to non-nuclear family arrangements.
It might become common for couples to be hired onto jobs together. They would work outside their homes.

Chapter 18 – The corporate identity crisis
For 300 years, Second Wave nations and corporations steadily integrated the world economy. Wars and economic depressions proved temporary setbacks.
From WWII until the 1970s, affluence sharply and steadily increased in both Communist and Capitalist countries, and it appeared both sides had nailed the formulas to economic growth.
However, at the time of this book’s writing, the world is undergoing economic upheaval, and the old order (exemplified by Bretton Woods, the U.S. precious metals standards, commodities prices, and Stagflation) is breaking down. This crisis is different.
Even heads of the world’s biggest corporations feel powerless.
Currency speculators are destabilizing major national economies.
Stock trades also now happen in fractions of a second thanks to computers.
The pace of economic activity and of business evolution is accelerating: Product life cycles are shorter, fads are more common, price changes are more frequent, and job turnover is faster. Company heads have to endure near-constant change.
The de-massified society
-Mass production of standardized products is no longer satisfactory to consumers since they are becoming more diverse (in terms of needs, values and lifestyles) and demand different things.
-Jobs are likewise becoming more specialized and workers less interchangeable, again because society and its consumer demands are becoming more diverse and complex.
-Across the Western world, populations are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse due to immigration, and minorities are demanding more rights and recognition.
Average people are increasingly mistrustful of big businesses and corporations and hold them responsible for a variety of social and environmental problems. Popular pressure is mounting for corporations to show more civic responsibility.
The number of government regulations that corporations must comply with (employment rights, worker safety, environmental) is also mushrooming and sapping their time and money.
Standards of behavior and ethics for businesses and their leaders are also rising.
In sum, its harder and more complicated for businesses to exist in the Third Wave than it was in the Second Wave.
It’s now common for big companies to evaluate the social and environmental impacts of their decisions. In some cases, this is just pure P.R., and the analyses are made up or change nothing, but it other cases, it is a bona fide part of their business process.

Chapter 19 – Decoding the new rules
There is a generational disconnect between those raised during the Second Wave and those raised during the Third.
The younger generation is less punctual, less conformist, and less interested in standard, 9-5 corporate jobs. The younger generation also achieves life milestones (marriage, childbirth) later.
Flextime, an arrangement where workers have staggered start and finish times each workday and can structure their schedules within generous limits, is becoming popular and is challenging the Second Wave’s fixation with Industrial Era punctuality.
Night shifts are also becoming more popular, and more business are staying open late or 24/7. In sum, more people are shedding the standard 9-5 daily rhythm.
Asynchonized daily schedules will make it harder for people to socialize, so a computer-based social networking system that informs users of their friends’ whereabouts and availability will be created. [Sounds like shared Google Calendars]
The switch to customized work schedules will ease burdens on the roads and utility services, as demand peaks will be smoothed out over the length of each day.
VCRs and cassette tapes will allow people to watch their favorite TV shows on their own schedules. [On-demand video]
660 tech people participate in a simple internet-like system called the Electronic Information Exchange System. They use personal computers to link to it, and can interact with each other in real-time if they want.
Computers have gotten so fast that it is impossible to synchronize people to them as it was to synchronize Second Wave machines to the pace of human factory laborers. As the Third Wave progresses, human workers will create their own rhythms, and punctuality will become less important.
This will really just be a return to how things were in the First Wave, before factories and cities and before anyone was punctual.
Life could actually be more enjoyable with more relaxed work schedules and less attention to punctuality more generally speaking.
As jobs, lifestyles, tastes, and politics, become less standardized, people will think less alike. Social isolation and loneliness will also worsen.
Companies are becoming more decentralized, meaning different units and more independent (and in charge of making their own profits), and the staff hierarchy is transforming from a waterfall into a matrix, where the typical employee is a member of multiple work groups at once, and reports to multiple supervisors.

Chapter 20 – Rise of the prosumer
Starting in the 1970s, new medical devices such as at-home pregnancy tests and automated blood pressure cuff machines became commercially available. Their existence marks a shift in how health care is thought of: average people are now empowered to take some of their care into their own hands.
During the First Wave, people produced everything they needed, and there was very little outside trade. People were “prosumers” (producer-consumers).
During the Second Wave, work done to satisfy one’s own needs was overshadowed by work done to satisfy other people, to the point that prosumer work was excluded from official economic statistics. This was a mistake, as unpaid prosumer work–mainly household labor done by stay-at-home wives to ensure the next generation of people is fully functional–is vital to the entire economy.
The proliferation of free or low-cost self-help groups and support groups represents a restructuring of the socio-sphere.
The do-it-yourselfers
-AT&T was forced to automate the process of long-distance phone calling in the 1950s because they couldn’t hire enough human operators to meet demand.
-The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo forced gas stations in the U.S. to convert to self-service to save money.
-ATMs are replacing human bank tellers.
-Human store clerks are disappearing, and customers are now doing the work of finding their own merchandise, moving it through stores, and bagging it.
-Ordinary people are doing repair and maintenance work on their home appliances, thanks to appliance companies providing repair guides and 1-800 numbers for technical advice.
‘Made possible by advances that have driven down the cost of long-distance telephoning, it suggests future systems that might actually display step-by-step fix-it-yourself instructions on the home television screen as the adviser speaks…such systems would reserve the repair mechanic only for major tasks…’
-Home assembly of furniture is becoming more popular, partly thanks to the rising relative cost of handyman labor. [IKEA was highly successful]
Computer-aided design (CAD) is a new method of designing and making manufactured goods.
In the future, people will be able to use their home PCs to design custom clothing for themselves and to transmit orders via telephone lines [“the internet”, even though he never uses that term] to automated garmet factories.
It will become less common in the future for people to have full-time jobs. More time will be spent at leisure or getting educated. This trend will be accelerated by the rise of dual-paycheck households. [The opposite of this happened. As incomes rose, so did materialism, meaning people just spent more and never got off the “treadmill”.]
A new do-it-yourself ethos and better home technologies will allow people to cheaply assemble cars, clothing and other goods. [If anything, average peoples’ knowledge of cars has DECLINED since this book was written.]
The author describes something very similar to a 3D printer that could use digital files as instructions for making custom clothes.
Economic models need to include prosumer labor. Productive, profitable labor that people do for themselves outside the workplace should be counted towards GDP.
The global market has almost reached peak size and complexity. The world will save large amounts of time and money in the future since it won’t have to expand it any farther.

Chapter 21 – The mental maelstrom
‘Never before have so many people in so many countries–even educated and supposedly sophisticated people–been so intellectually helpless, drowning, as it were, in a maelstrom of conflicting, confusing, and cacophonous ideas…Every day brings some new fad, scientific finding, religion, movement, or manifesto…We see a mounting attack on establishment science. We see a wildfire revival of fundamentalist religion and a desperate search for something…to believe in.’
The culture war is part of the broader war between the Second and Third Waves.
The environmentalist movement is probably the sharpest example of this Wave-driven cultural conflict. A few decades ago, almost no one cared at all about protecting nature. Today, its protection is enshrined in law, popular culture, and even business community practices.
There is a growing consensus that Earth is more fragile and closer to destruction than was previously believed.
Our understanding of biology, the history of evolution, and of our uniqueness in the cosmos has also been shaken by recent scientific discoveries.
Human genetic engineering might become possible.
The people who shape Third Wave culture and thinking are pessimists, whereas their Second Wave counterparts are optimists. The difference first appeared in the 1950s with the “beats,” and continued with the hippies of the 1960s.
Pessimism became chic in Hollywood quickly, as evidenced by the replacement of the brave, masculine heroes of 1930s and 1940s films with the alienated anti-heroes of the 1950s and 1960s, who sometimes met with ill fates.
Technology began to be portrayed as a force for evil rather than good, mainly because of its impact on nature. The Second Wave’s faith in progress and the perfectibility of man was replaced by the Third Wave’s cynicism and gloomy view of the future.
Third Wave people began seeing humanity as a blight on the planet, crowding out other species with our growing population, and consuming non-renewable resources.
The Third Wave notion of “progress” is more complex and multifaceted.
This century’s discoveries in theoretical physics and astronomy (such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity) have upended our notions of what “space” and “time” really are.
The population’s distribution and mental orientation changes with each Wave:
-First Wave: People lived in small farming settlements and ancient cities that were small by our standards. Few ever left the communities they were born into.
-Second Wave: People moved into cities to work in factories. They were highly mobile, as they had to move between cities to chase jobs.
-Third Wave: Big cities will stop growing, while small- and medium-sized cities will grow. Peoples’ orientations will be simultaneously local and global. [Note that big cities will still grow in developing countries because they are still Second Wave]
‘As advanced communications proliferate and we begin to shift work back into the electronic cottage, we will encourage this dual focus, breeding large numbers of people who remain reasonably close to home, we migrate less often, who travel more perhaps for pleasure but far less often for business–while their minds and messages range across the entire planet and into outer space as well. The Third Wave mentality combines concern for near and far.’
Satellite maps of the Earth’s surface that clearly show details like roads, buildings and even subterranean features will become publicly available. We’ll be able to use maps compiled at different times to see how things have changed.
An outgrowth of WWII was the “systems approach” way of thinking, which has spawned many new technologies. The systems approach looks at a problem as an integrated whole, where all the different components interact with each other. It is at odds with more simplistic, specialized Second Wave thinking.

Chapter 22 – The crack-up of the nation
Nation-states are losing authority (and in some cases, territory) thanks to ethnonationalism of minorities and to transnational organizations.
Throughout the world, wherever there are ethnic minority enclaves where the residents feel “cheated” or “disrespected” by the majority ethnicity, there is also usually a separatist movement. Such movements exist in the following places:
-Corsica
-Brittany
-Scotland
-Wales
-Belgium
-Southern Germany
-Quebec
The Soviet Union also has secessionist movements in Armenia and Georgia.
‘It is impossible to gauge the full intensity of separatist sentiment in various parts of the U.S.S.R. But the nightmare of multiple secession movements must haunt the authorities. If war were to break out with China, or a series of uprisings suddenly exploded in Eastern Europe, Moscow might well face open secessionist or autonomist revolts in many of its republics.’
The U.S. also has weak secessionist movements in California, Texas, and a few other states.
The nation-state is under internal stress because the Third Wave is de-massifying society, populations are becoming more diverse and demand different things, minorities are asserting their rights at last, and governments aren’t adapting their governance models to adapt to the change in demand.
Businesses are much more nimble, and constantly monitor changes in customer preferences and alter their products or create new ones to suit changing tastes.
The nation-state is also under external stress since many problems are now continental or global in scope, making it impossible for any one country to fix them. One example is currency trading, which can wreck a country’s economy if enough money is moved overseas. Another is pollution, which can easily drift over borders.
‘The new global communications system further opens each nation to penetration from the outside. Canadians have long resented the fact that some 70 U.S. television stations along the border telecast programs to Canadian audiences. But this Second Wave form of cultural penetration is minor compared with that made possible by Third Wave communications based on satellites, computers, teleprinters, interactive cable systems, and dirt cheap ground stations.’
Billion-dollar transnational corporations are rich than many countries and challenge their authority. Their supply chains and operations span more than one country.
Transnational cultural and religious movements are also growing. [They’ve always been around, though.]
‘We can expect the next decades to be torn by struggle over the creation of new global institutions capable of fairly representing the prenational [colonized groups and minority ethnic groups] as well as the postnational [people in rich countries who are members of or want to expand the power of transnational organizations] peoples of the world.’
The world will never be run by transnational corporations that have supplanted all governments. The world is too messy and diverse a place for one organization to rule over, and Third Wave corporations will be less heavyhanded, anyhow.
‘This simplistic image is based on straight-line extrapolations from Second Wave trends: specialization, maximization, and centralization.’
For the same reason, a single world government will not arise.
Instead, world governance will be performed by a complex matrix of national governments, supernational governments, international treaties, transnational corporations, and international nonprofit groups.
This complexity will impel the U.N. to consider whether it should admit representatives of ethnic groups, regions, religions, and corporations alongside nation-states. [Hasn’t happened yet.]

Chapter 23 – Gandhi with satellites
The political and economic turmoils of the late 1970s were growing pains of the transition to the Third Wave.
Second wave international organizations that preserved the wealth and power the rich countries at the expense of poor ones–such as the IMF, GATT, World Bank, and COMECON–will weaken thanks to the Third Wave.
The Second Wave solution to global poverty is to encourage poor countries to copy what rich countries did in the past and to industrialize. Aside from the Asian Tigers and a few other countries, this model has failed.
Iran is one example of failure. Opening their market to investment and focusing on building infrastructure enriched Western companies who took advantage of cheap labor and lived like kings in Iran. The country also had a corrupt, hierarchical culture, meaning the new wealth was mostly captured by families that were already rich and powerful. Little was done to improve the lives of average Iranians. Extreme, visible wealth inequality enraged the masses of people and fueled the 1979 Revolution.
Oil and Islam were minor but real contributors to the revolution. [The author might be underestimating this.]
In the 1960s and 70s, the rich countries of the West fell into near-chaos, deep self-doubt, and pessimism, as they were rocked by strikes, blackouts, crime waves, civil disobedience, energy shocks, and a new awareness of environmental degradation.
-The sudden riches of the Arab states cast into doubt the Western notion that national wealth always had to be preceded by a period of hard work and slow build-up. [This was a very special case that doesn’t really challenge the old model.]
-Established industrial countries like the U.S. and France also began to worry about upstarts like Japan, Taiwan and China competing with them through trade.
Instead of copying the Second Wave model, some Western foreign aid agencies started encouraging people in poor countries to focus on small farm agriculture. This means the spread of technologies meant to facilitate First Wave labor, like pedal-powered rice thresher.
The Indian government used economic planning to encourage small farmers to stay on their land and use First Wave techniques to slow down migration into the cities.
Even if the aims of these projects are noble and are sometimes defensible as responses to past mistakes, they are still inappropriate.
Samir Amin: ‘[Labor-intensive techniques are now in vogue] thanks to a medley of hippie ideology, return to the myth of the golden age and the noble savage, and criticism of the reality of the capitalist world.’
At the Paris Exposition of 1855, a competition was held between human threshers and four threshing machines. The best machine was 123 times faster than a human. Even that long ago, primitive machines were vastly better than humans. It’s unfair and obtuse for rich countries to impel poor countries to totally eschew better technology and to focus on the First Wave paradigm.
Maoist China made the biggest attempt to push the First Wave paradigm to its limits, and the result was mass famine and eventual stagnation.
Most First Wave countries can’t be rushed into the Second Wave paradigm since it would mean, among other things, dispensing with conservative values, ethnic/tribal self-identities, and old customs. [This is definitely why Communism inspired a widespread rebellion in Afghanistan.]
However, since First Wave economies and lifestyles are more similar to those of the Third Wave, it may be possible and better for poor countries to skip the Second Wave altogether. Similarities include:
-Population decentralization
-“Appropriate scale”
-Renewable energy
-Working from home
-Prosumption
More appropriate technologies for First Wave development could include:
-Bio-gas power plants that burn human and animal waste to make energy. They would be scaled to serve one village or small town apiece.
-Solar-powered desalination plants.
-Sugar cane grown for use in a biorefinery to make ethanol fuel for local people. [By far, the greatest development success story since this book was written was in China, which actually did copy the Western development model by transitioning to the Second Wave and then the Third.]
Other predicted developments:
-Controlled-release fertilizers [fertilizer particles have impermeable coatings that slowly dissolve over many days or weeks] will cut nitrogen use in farm fertilizer and will be affordable by 1996. [Unsure what the state of things was in 1996, but the prediction seems to be true as of 2018.]
-Nitrogen-fixing grains will also be available by 1996. [This prediction failed. As of 2018, geneticists are still trying to make cheap GM crops that can fix nitrogen.]
-Newer strains of seeds will give 25-50% higher yields, and drip irrigation systems will be in widespread use. [Both true as of 2018.]
-First Wave countries would do better to building microelectronics factories instead of large metal foundries, since demand for the former will be stronger in the future than for the latter. [This turned out half-true. Starting in the late 1990s, there was a sharp increase in demand for metals like steel and aluminum as China industrialized, and it didn’t ease up for 15 years. Of course, production of microchips also soared over the same period.]
-Microelectronics enable the decentralization of production and human population. City population growth will slow and less strain will be put on transit networks. [As of 2018, this hasn’t happened yet. Across the world, cities are growing and getting more expensive, and commute times are lengthening. Teleworking has grown slower than Toffler predicted.]
-“It now appears [that China] can integrate new manufacturing techniques into their [agrarian, First Wave] society without moving entire populations.” –Ward Morehouse [This was completely wrong. The population transfer from China’s countryside to its cities from 1980-present has been one of the greatest migrations in human history, and China’s undemocratic government did a good job managing it.]
-It might be a better use of money in the future for countries to invest more into telecommunications networks and less in transportation networks.
Toffler imagines a scenario where these technologies allow First Wave villages to stay intact and self-sufficient. None of their people would migrate into the cities, and they could prosper by teleworking and building advanced, small-scale or medium-scale facilities nearby to support higher-yield farming, clean energy production, and manufacturing.
A shorthand descriptor for this scenario is “Gandhi with satellites” since it fuses traditional, village-based lifestyles with suitable high technologies.
Unemployment rates in poor countries are very high, and it might be impossible to ever get them as low as they are in rich countries. Letting poor countries adopt economies where people work part-time and spend most of their time at prosumption might be the strategy best-suited for them. [This might be the weakest chapter of the book.]
The Second Wave classroom-based mass education model is probably obsolete.
Third Wave civilization isn’t yet fully formed, so we don’t know exactly what it will look like.

Chapter 24 – Coda: The great confluence
Third Wave civilization will be radically different from its predecessor.
The transition to the Third Wave will be scary, turbulent and at times violent. However, Third Wave life could be more decent and peaceful than today.
Nuclear power will prove to be a costly mistake.
Summary of Third Wave life:
-Greater diversity of energy sources that are more efficient than today’s sources and mostly clean
-There will be greater resource abundance thanks to the discovery of substitutes for exhaustible resources.
-The handful of dominant media outlets will fall and be replaced by multitudes of smaller outlets that cater to more narrow interests.
-“Looking far ahead, television will give way to ‘indi-video’–narrow-casting carried to the ultimate: images addressed to a single individual at a time. We may also eventually use drugs, direct brain-to-brain communication, and other forms of electrochemical communication only vaguely hinted at now.”
-“The giant centralized computer…will be supplemented by myriad chips of intelligence, embedded in one form or another in every home, hospital, and hotel, every vehicle and appliance, virtually every building-brick. The electronic environment will literally converse with us.”
-Factory jobs will become easier and more humane.
-Factories will relocate outside of cities. [This happened, resulting in the “Rust Belt”]
-In office workplaces, the use of paper will decrease, but not disappear, [True] and rote tasks like data entry and secretarial work will diminish.
-Schools will need to change their curricula and teaching styles to give students the skills and knowledge to function in the brainier, more nimble Third Wave workplace. Higher education will grow more important.
-Teleworking will become common.
[Skipped over a few pages of summary of the book.]
Third Wave civilization won’t be perfect, but it will be better than its First- or Second Wave predecessors. It could be called a “practopia”–a practical world that is better than the present, but falls short of utopia or dystopia.
There is no single cause for the rise of the Third Wave.
Third Wave societies will look different in different countries.
Conflict between classes, races, genders, religions, and regions won’t disappear during or after the transition to the Third Wave.
Society will become more diverse (de-massification), and the pace of historical change will accelerate.
Overwhelmed people will suffer “future shock.”

Chapter 25 – The new psycho-sphere
Symptoms of the Second Wave’s nearing end:
-Social problems such as mental illness, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse are growing across the modern world.
-Violence and perceptions of how bad it is are worsening in the Western world. People are more afraid and paranoid.
-Cults and self-help gurus are becoming more popular.
There is a growing problem of loneliness and social isolation thanks to the decline of traditional communities.
A strong, but temporary sense of community arises during disasters and social uprisings.
Rising social diversity makes it harder for people to get along and worsens social isolation. The more that people are empowered to cultivate themselves as individuals, the fewer people there are with whom they share much in common. Disagreement gets more common, leading to fewer real friends, lower-quality relationships, and fewer marriages. [Humans probably aren’t meant to live like this. Consider how we lived in tribes for the first 95% of our species’ existence. There was no diversity, and the tribes were made up of large, extended families.]
Ways to decrease social isolation:
-Offer financial incentives for adult children to take care of their elderly parents directly instead of putting them in nursing homes. [Not as good of a solution as it sounds. What if the parent and child have a poor relationship, or the parent constantly judges and second-guesses everyone else in the household?]
-Culturally normalize homeschooling and give parents a greater say in what is taught at their local schools. [At least the first reform has been accomplished.]
-Schools and companies should encourage more teamwork. For example, part of a student’s grade should be based on the class’ overall performance or on the performance of a long-term, intra-class team the student is assigned to.
-There should be programs that make it easy for retired people to be part-time mentors to the young. They would teach whichever life skill they had.
-Create better matchmaking services for single people, such as video dating.
Telecommuting and the internet [even though the author doesn’t use that term, but is clearly envisioning it] could benefit the social fabric:
-If people telecommute, they’ll have more time to spend with their families, especially if both parents telecommute.
-Telecommuting will allow people to spend more time in their communities, allowing them to bond with their neighbors and to patronize local businesses.
-The internet will allow people who are shy in face-to-face situations to voice their opinions and ideas. It will also allow people with rarefied interests to find one another and form communities.
Humans need structure in their lives to be happy. Having predictable responsibilities to other people and time commitments gives people a sense of purpose and satisfaction. People become distressed when they have nothing at all to do.
One appeal of heroin addiction is that it provides aimless people a structure to their lives. Each day is spent trying to secure money, evade the police, and do drugs. They also join a unique clique of people (other heroin users).
Cults are popular because they satisfy these needs among lonely or troubled people.
-Community: Cult members lure new recruits by being (initially) very friendly and engaging to them. This is very effective on lonely people.
-Structure: Cults have rules and often mandatory duties that members must abide by.
-Meaning: Cults always have some religious or social element at their cores, which give members a sense of higher purpose.
Cults are bad, but people shouldn’t be ashamed or afraid to reach out for help if their lives seem chaotic and meaningless.
-There should be professional life coaches and life organizers who help clients get their personal, financial, and professional lives in order and to tackle long-overdue tasks.
-Schools should teach more practical life skills to young people.
-The government could license and monitor “semi-cults” that provide the structure and orthodoxy of many existing cults, but where abuse and brainwashing are prohibited, and recruits are allowed to quit without consequence.
-A revived version of the Civilian Conservation Corps could be created for young people. They would live in Army-like barracks environments and would receive sub-minimum wage salaries, but would also be paid money only for college or technical training. The Corps would have a wide variety of duties, including cleaning up trash, providing paramedic services, or helping the elderly.

Chapter 26 – The personality of the future
What form will the “new man” of the Third Wave take?
In many past eras where the world seemed on the brink of change, people famously predicted the rise of some type of “new man” to fit the new era:
-The “American Adam”
-Hitler’s “Aryan superman”
-Trotsky’s future socialist man
There won’t be a “Third Wave man” per se, but certain personality traits and ways of thinking will be encouraged and hence will become more prevalent.
Children and childhood in the Third Wave
-Society will value children less in the future because of the shifted focus to the swelled ranks of the elderly, and because there will be more single mothers and they’ll have less time for parenting. [This proved mostly wrong. In the Western world, parents have actually grown more obsessive of their children since this book was written. Even as average work weeks lengthened are more mothers got jobs, the amount of time middle-class parents spent with their kids actually grew. Parents sacrificed personal time and sleep. Poor single mothers might be the exception. And while the money devoted to caring for the elderly has grown, the amount of time their children spend caring for them has not, and most old people are just sent to nursing homes.]
-Adolescence will shorten and many children will be put to work sooner, helping their telecommuting parents around the house. [This prediction is also wrong. Adolescence has gotten longer in “Third Wave” countries and it’s common for people to not have adult lifestyles until their late 20s. Telecommuting also hasn’t grown as rapidly as the author predicted.]
-However, for others, adolescence will not shorter and might grow longer thanks to unions of various stripes locking minors out of the workforce and keeping the duration of mandatory education the same so teachers won’t lose jobs.
The ideal Third Wave worker will be someone who is self-motivated, able to learn new things, but still obedient.
Workers will increasingly demand jobs that allow them more work-life balance (in particular, reasonable commutes) instead of just more money. [Doubtful that this came true. The average U.S. commute time is probably higher now than in 1980.]
A problem with jobs in the postmodern area is that they typically involve dealing with abstractions (numbers, symbols, etc.), leaving workers with a sense of disconnection from the fruits of their labors. This could explain the rising popularity of hands-on hobbies that fill that need, such as gardening and making crafts.
The personalities of the sexes will become more alike as more women enter the workforce and have to adopt male “objective” thinking, and as more men telework and have to adopt female “subjective” thinking. [The prediction is kind of vague, but the sexes did get more similar for various reasons.]
The de-massification of the media and the rise of two-way multimedia communication will make people more aware of their individuality, and they will demand recognition for it. [Social media definitely made people more narcissistic.]
Media might get so interactive in the future that people will be able to talk to characters in their favorite TV shows and influence their actions in some way. [Yes, probably.]

Chapter 27 – The political mausoleum
Second Wave government structures can’t govern Third Wave people.
Today, the U.S. government seems badly paralyzed by indecision and partisan logjams. Laws are passed and then repealed in a fickle manner, which mainly hurts corporations.
Companies pay fortunes in compliance and reporting costs to the government (mainly the IRS).
Governments across the Western world seem impotent and gridlocked. Even insiders speak of a sense of powerlessness. [Sounds like 2018.]
Average people are also losing faith in their own governments’ ability to get useful things done, and done on time. [Sounds like 2018.]
Third parties have sharply risen in popularity as citizens lose faith in their older, stale parties. [Sounds like 2018.]
Across the world, people have lost respect for their governments and feel there is a power vacuum. [Sounds like 2018.]
In Britain and Italy, far-right political groups with thuggish tendencies have been recently created. [Sounds like 2018.]
The political instability will continue in the 1980s and 90s. [The Eastern Bloc certainly destabilized in the 1980s, and Russia remained unstable in the 1990s, but the West prospered during those two decades.]
If a major petrostate like Saudi Arabia were to collapse, or a new Middle East war were to erupt, there’s little reason to assume from recent experience that the world’s key leaders would respond appropriately.
In the U.S., an authoritarian cult figure could gain political power.
“This craving for a masterful, macho leader is voiced today by even the most well-meaning of people as their familiar world crumbles, as their environment grows more unpredictable and their hunger for order, structure, and predictability increases.”
Racist political groups and terrorist groups have arisen in America and Western Europe, along with their equally odious counterparts on the far left. [Sounds like 2018.]
Much of authoritarianism’s appeal derives from the mistaken notion that it is an efficient form of government. In fact, it is less efficient than democracy. Nazi Germany didn’t allocate its wartime resources as well as Britain, and the USSR is laden with waste, inefficiency and torpor.
The current crisis of governance isn’t thanks to poor-quality leaders, it is thanks to the outdated government structures they labor within.
Most governments remain structured around the needs of the early nation-state era, when countries had large amounts of control over their own territories, and they didn’t have to deal with so many problems that spanned borders, such as pollution or currency trading.
Within governments, expertise is also stovepiped into different, specialized agencies that don’t share information with each other and even unwittingly negate each others’ efforts.
The pace of world events, trend shifts, and of change more generally speaking have quickened so much that governments designed during the Second Wave can’t keep up. They are obsolete.
Political parties and advocacy groups have also “de-massified,” meaning they are smaller but greater in number and more specific in purpose. They also tend to exist for shorter periods than their Second Wave predecessors did.
‘[In many countries there is a] 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 of social and political diversity.’
‘In a mass industrial society, when people and their needs were fairly uniform, consensus was an attainable goal.’
Government officials at all levels routinely endure ‘information overload’ because they are faced with so many different issues requiring fast decisions. Mistakes and suboptimal choices are the inevitable, routine results.
In the future, malevolent leaders will tempt people to surrender their freedoms in exchange for stronger government.

Chapter 28 – Twenty-first century democracy
Though the author greatly admires the U.S. Constitution, he believes it has become obsolete, and the U.S. should adopt a new constitution and form of government suited to the needs of the Third Wave.
Transitions to Third Wave political systems could involve bloodshed, but the costs of not changing will be even higher.
Consensus is to hard to get and interest groups are so ephemeral that the core principle of Western governance, that the majority should rule, should be abandoned. The will of the minorities is more important.
‘We need new approaches designed for a democracy of minorities–methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or faked majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues, or rigged electoral procedures. We need…to strengthen the role of diverse minorities yet permit them to form majorities.’
Voting in favor of something doesn’t convey the strength of a person’s support for whatever it is, or what they would be willing to accept in exchange for a “no” vote. [The 2016 U.S. election was a perfect example of this: the two presidential candidates were deeply unpopular, and large fractions of the votes both received were cast by reluctant people, many of whom simply wanted the other candidate to lose.]
Ideas for an effective Third Wave political system:
-Opinion polls should be more complex, and should solicit answers that indicate the respondent’s strength of support or opposition to something, as well as what tradeoffs he is willing to make to switch sides.
-Adopt cumulative voting to protect the will of minorities.
-Switch to ephemeral, issue-specific political parties.
-Appoint “diplomats” or “ambassadors” to negotiate (and break) alliances between different minority groups. There might be a central venue for them to meet.
-Empower minorities to govern themselves more by giving them legal authority to run their own youth courts.
Sortition should be used instead of elections to assign people to some positions of power. The process would ensure that minorities were represented in proportion to their shares of the population.
Sortition is used to select jurors and to pick citizens for military service during drafts. It is not an alien process.
Another option is to keep the existing elected legislatures, but to add a body of randomly selected citizens that would have equal voting power (50/50) to the legislature on each issue. The randomly selected people wouldn’t have to gather in one place like the legislature and instead could vote electronically from their homes. This would undermine the power of professional lobbyists.
Whatever option is chosen, the goal should be to “de-massify” the political system by distributing political power more evenly.
Another needed Third Wave political reform is the institution of “semi-direct democracy”
-Since elected representatives have become ineffective at brokering deals on the behalf of their constituents (largely due to information overload), the constituents should start doing it for themselves.
-The biggest downside to popular referendums is that average people can vote based on temporary emotions and passions, and later regret their choices. For instance, Americans might have voted to drop a nuclear bomb on Hanoi during the most frustrating times of the Vietnam War.
-Possible antidotes to that risk include “cooling off periods” before referendums can be held, mandatory second referendums on important issues, and only allowing citizens who have sat through educational training on an issue to vote in a referendum about it.
-Any technological barriers to voting in a direct democracy will fall in the future.
-Voter petitions could be used to force Congress to create committees on issues average people think are important.
Decision making power must also be shifted from the national level to the local and international levels. International issues can’t be handled properly without international organizations and treaties.
More economic decisions, in particular, should be made at the sub-national level.
“Decision load”
-Understanding the concept of “decision load” is crucial to understanding the history and future of democracy.
-Decision load refers to the frequency and complexity of decisions that a government must make to effectively serve its people.
-During the First Wave, the decision load was low since progress was slow and little about the world changed. A tiny clique of elites could effectively run a tribe or ancient nation.
-Democracy arose during the Second Wave because societies got so complex that the decision load outstripped the abilities of the old governing cliques. Decision-making power had to be spread out among a larger number of people by necessity.
-Democratization was a gradual process in which political rights (including the right to vote) and political jobs were slowly expanded to bigger and bigger shares of the population as the decision load slowly grew. [This suggests that a powerful AGI with a near-perfect understanding of real-time and future human needs could effectively govern a country.]
-Thus, democracy is not a matter of choice, but a matter of necessity. A society will stagnate if its government’s ability to make decisions is outstripped by the quantity and complexity of decisions it has to make.
-We may be on the edge of another wave of democratic expansion.
The “super-struggle” underpinning so many problems in the world is principally between people who want to preserve the political systems created during the Second Wave, and people who want to replace them with Third Wave political systems that will decentralize power more and hence result in expanded democracy.
Traditional political parties dating to the 20th century or earlier, such as the U.S. Republicans and Democrats, are not actually that different from each other, and they are united in their overarching mission to preserve obsolete Second Wave government institutions.
Forces of the Second Wave
-Against increased minority rights, direct democracy, decentralization of power, regionalism, and diversity.
-Oppose the de-massification of schools.
-Support obsolete energy policies [Is it considered backwards to oppose nuclear energy thanks to overblown, unscientific fears about safety?] and downplay ecological problems.
-Deify the nuclear family.
-Preach nationalism while denouncing any moves to make the international order fairer.
Forces of the Third Wave
-Want more direct democracy, stronger minority rights, and are willing to experiment with new forms of government.
-Favor weakening existing bureaucracies and less standardization of public schools.
-Support decentralized, clean energy production.
-Are tolerant of non-nuclear family arrangements.
-Want the world economy to be more fair and just.
There are still more Second Wave supporters, and they are likelier to be in positions of power.
Third Wave supporters are more diverse and come from the left and right wings of the Second Wave spectrum. They are unconscious of the shared strains in their thinking, other than being aware that the current system is hopelessly broken and needs replacement.
Political systems are the most desperately in need of change, but the prospect of doing so is deeply frightening to most people. The longer the world lumbers on with Second Wave governments, the greater the risk of violence will get.
However, there are reasons for optimism that leaders and activists will enact the necessary reforms before it is too late:
-The number of educated people is greater now than ever in human history.
-People travel more and have access to more information than ever before.
-More people than ever have the personal spare time to participate in politics.
Again, a Third Wave government should be based on three basic principles:
-Minority power
-Semi-direct democracy
-Decision division (decentralization of power and empowerment of average people)
A long-term campaign of public debates and discourses should be started to alert the general public to the need for political change, to solicit and analyze their reform ideas, and to build some kind of coalition.
Career politicians won’t enact Third Wave reforms unless a critical mass of their constituents forces them to. The involvement of average people is critical.