The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler

Some notes from the book by Alvin Toffler

First Wave (pre-Industrialization) : Two sectors of people. Sector A : produced for their own consumption. Sector B : Produced for trade or exchange. Sector A was huge and Sector B was tiny

Second Wave (Industrialization) : Most people were engaged in producing goods for others consumption and this gave the market the prominence. No longer people were self-sufficient. 

A Market is not inherently capitalist. A marketplace existed long before capitalism. A marketplace is nothing more than an exchange network, a switchboard as it were through which goods and services, like messages, are routed to appropriate destinations. 

The explosive expansion of the market contributed to the fastest rise in living standards the world had ever experienced.

One need scarcely be a Marxist to agree with The Communist Manifesto's famous accusation that the new society "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. Personal relationships, family bonds, love, friendship, neighborly and community ties all became tinctured or corrupted by commercial self-interest".

For the obsessive concern with money, goods, and things is a reflection not of capitalism or socialism, but of industrialism. It is a reflection of the central role of the marketplace in all societies in which production is divorced from consumption, in which everyone is dependent upon the marketplace rather than on his or her own productive skills for the necessities of life. In such a society, irrespective of its political structure, not only products are bought, sold, traded, and exchanged, but labor, ideas, art, and souls as well. 

Principles of Industrialization:

1. Standardization : Frederick Winslow Taylor decided that there was one best (standard) way to perform each job, one best tool to perform it with, and a stipulated time in which to complete it. Standardization help mass production. 
2. Specialization
3. Synchronization : In all second-wave societies regardless of profit or political considerations, social life, too, became clock-driven and adapted to machine requirements
4. Concentration : Concentration of people. Concentration also in capital flows, so that it gave birth to the giant corporation and beyond that the trust and monopoly
5. Maximization : Governments in Germany, Britain, and other countries actively encouraged mergers to create even larger companies, in the belief that larger scale would help them compete against the American giants. Second wave governments around the world entered into a blind race to increase GNP at all costs, maximizing "growth" even at the risk of ecological and social disaster
6. Centralization : Centralization of Governance, of Companies and Also the Capital i.e the Central Bank

Industrialism, as we have seen, broke society into thousands of interlocking parts- factories, churches, schools, trade unions, prisons, hospitals, and the like. In doing so it shattered community life and culture. Somebody had to put things together in a different form.This need gave rise to many new kinds of specialists whose basic task was integration. These were the integrators. They defined roles and allocateed jobs. They set the rules under which organizations interacted. In both capitalist and socialist nations, it was the integrators who rose to the top. 

Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process. The new power of the integrators was, perhaps, most clearly expressed by W. Michael Blumenthal, former U.S. Secrertary of the Treasury. Before entering government Blumenthal headed the Bendix Corporation. Once asked if he would some day like to own Bendix, Blumenthal replied : It's not ownership that counts -- it's the control. And as a Chief Executive that's what I have got ! We have a shareholder's meeting next week, and I have got 97 percent of the vote. I only own 8000 shares. Control is what's important to me.... To have the control over this large animal and to use it in a constructive way, that's what I want, rather than doing silly things that others want me to do.

Free marketers have argued that governments interfere with business. But left to private enterprise alone, industrialization would have come much slowly. Governments quickened the development of railroad. They built harbors, roads, canals and highways. The operated postal services and built or regulated telegraph, telephone, and broadcast systems. They applied foreign policy pressures and tariffs to aid industry. They subsidized energy and advanced technology, often through military channels. By setting up mass education systems, governments not only helped to machine youngsters for theri future roles in the industrial workforce (hence, in effect subsidizing industry) but also simultaneously encouraged the spread of the nucelar family form. By relieving the family of educational and other traditional functions, governments accelerated the adaptation of family structure to the needs of the factory system. 

Time and again during the past 300 years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple the regime.

Yet each time the ultimate outcome was the same. Each time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites and super-elites. For this integrational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave Civilization as factories, fossil fules, or nuclear families. Industrialism and the full democarcy it promised were, in fact, incompatible.

"The Law of first Price" : Where no previous history of trade existed for a given commodity, the price set in the first transaction was crucial. Typically set in the absence of competition, almost any price was acceptable to a lord or tribal chief who regarded his local resources as valueless and found himself facing a regiment of trooops with with Gatling Guns.

Cultures that had subsisted for thousands of years in a self-sufficient manner, producing their own food supplies, were sucked willy-nilly into the world trade system and compelled to trade or perish.

Nevertheless, once torn out of self-sufficiency and complelled to produce for money and exchange, once encouraged or forced to reorganize their social structure around mining, for example, or plantation frarming., First Wave populations were plunged into economic dependence on a marketplace they could scarcely influence. Often their leaders were bribed, their cultures reidculed, their languages suppressed. Moreover, the colonial powers hammered a deep sense of pshychological ingeriority into the conquered people that stands even today as an obstacle to economic and social development.

In 1492, when Columbus first set foot in the New World, Europeans controlled only 9 percent of the globe. By 1801 they ruled the third. And by 1935 Europeans politically controlled 85 percent of the land surface of the earth and 70 percent of the population. Like Second Wave society itself, the world was divided into integratotrs and integratees.

As early as 1941 U.S financial strategists had begun to plan for a postwar reintegration of the world economy along lines more favorable to the United States. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held under US leadership, 44 nations agreed to setup two key integrative structures - the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF compelled its member nations to peg their currency to the American Dollar or to gold - most of which was held by the United States. (By 1948, United States possessed 72 perecent of the whole world's gold reserves). Soon a third component was added to the system - GATT. This agreement promoted originally by the United States, set out to liberalize trade, which had the effect of making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect their tiny fledgling industries. The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loands to any country that refused to join th eIMF or to abide by the GATT.

Second-Wave civilization cut up and organized the world into discrete nation-states. Need the resourced of the rest of the world, it derw First Wave socieiteis and the remaining primiteve peoples of the world into the money system. It created a globally integrated marketplace. But rampanant industrialism was more than an economic, political, or social system. It was also a way of life and a way of thiniking. It produced a Second Wave mentality.

Three ideas that bound all second-wave nations together and differentiated them from the rest of the world:

1. Nature is an object to be exploited by humans aka The War with Nature
2. Humans were not merely in charge of the the nature, they were the pinnacle of a long process of evolution AKA The importance of Evolution
3. The progress priniciple : The idea that history flows irreversibly toward a better life for humanity

This remarkable coordination of specialized spaces - necessary to get the right people to the right places at the right moments -- was the exact spatial analogue of temporal synchronization. It was, in effect synchronization in space. For both time and space had to be more carefully structured if industrial soceities were to function. 

Like any culture, Second Wave civilization produced distrorting filters through which its people came to see themselves and the universe. This package of ideas, images, assumptions -- and the analogies that flowed from them - formed the most powerful cultural system in history.

Any search of the cause of the industrial revolution is doomed. For there was no single or dominant cause. Technology, by itself, is not the driving force of history. Nor, by themselves, our ideas or values. Nor is the class struggle. Nor as a history, merely a record of ecological shift, demographic, trends, or communications inventions. Economics alone cannot explain this or any other historical event. It is no "independent variable", upon which all other variables depend, there are only interrelated variables boneless in complexity.

Of all the mini forces that float together to form the second wave civilization, if you had more disable consequences, then widening split between producer and consumer, and growth of that fantastic exchange networked me now called the market, but our cabin list or socialist inform.

Industrial man was different from all his forerunner. He was a master of court energy slaves court that amplified is puny power anonymously. He spent much of his life in a factory style environment, in touch with machines and organizations that wife, the individual. He learned, almost from infancy, that survival dependent, as never before on money. He typically grew up in a nuclear family, and went to a factory state school. He got his basic image of the world from the mass media. He works for a large corporation or public agency, belong to unions churches, and other organizations to each of which Sheba parcel doubt piece of his divided self he identified less and less with his village or city done with his nation. He saw himself standing in abortion opposition to nature, exploiting it daily in his work. Yet he paradoxically rushed to visit it on weekends. Indeed, the more he savage nature, the more he romanticized and revert it with the words. He learned to see himself as part of vast, interdependent, economic, social, and political systems was I just faded into complexities beyond his understanding.

Faced with his this reality, he rebelled without success. He thought to make a living. He learn to play. The game is required by Society, fitted into his assigned roles, often hitting them, and feeling himself a victim of the very system at improved his standard of living. He sent straight line time beating him. He must Lesley toward the future with hits waiting grave. And as his wrist watch, ticked off the moment, you approach death, knowing that the Earth and every individual on it, including himself, Vermilion, part of a larger, cosmic machine is motions for regular in relentless.

Within its borders, despite massive economic, depression, and horrifying waste of human life, second wave which civilization clearly improved the material standard of living of the ordinary percent. Critics of industrialism, and describing the mass misery of the working class during the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain often romanticize the first way past. The picture of the total past as warm, communal, stable, organic, and it in which city spiritual rather than purely medalist values. Yet historical research reveal said, he's supposedly lovely rural communities work, in fact, cesspools of malnutrition, disease, power, tea, homelessness, and tyranny, with people help us against hanger, cold, and the lips of the landlords and masters.

Life expectancy was low about 40 years in the 16 century reduced to the mid 30s in the epidemic ridden 17th century and the rising to the early 40s in the 18th. It was rare for married couples to have long ears together. All children were at Hazard. how are just leaving my criticize today's crisis ridden, misdirected health systems, it is what, recalling that before the industrial revolution, official, medic medicine was deadly, emphasizing bloodletting, and surgery without anesthesia.

Just as there is no single cause it could you second wave civilization, so there can be no single evaluation. I've tried to present a picture of second wave civilization with false included, if I appear on the one hand to condemn net, and all the other to approve it is because simple judgments on misleading, and it is the way industrialism trust first way, when primitive papers I cannot forget the way it massive fight war and invented AuschwitAnd unleash the atom to incinerate Hiroshima. I'm ashamed of his cultural arrogance, and it's depredations against the rest of the world, I'm sick and by the waste of human energy, imagination and spirit in our ghettos in various yet unreasoning hatred for once on time, and people is hardly the best places for creation of the future was industrialism, an air conditions, nightmare, waste, land, and unmitigated harder? Was it a world of single vision ask lame, but enemies of science and technology? No doubt, but it was far more than that as well. It was like life itself a bittersweet instant in eternity.

Finally, the convergence of precious the loss of key subsidies, the malfunctioning of the main life, support systems of society, the break up of the rules structure – all produce crisis, in the most elemental and fragile of structures; the personality. The collapse of second wave civilization has created an epidemic of personality crisis. Today we see, millions, desperately searching for their own shadows, during movies, please, novels and self-help books, no matter how obscure the promise to help them locate the missing identities.In the United States, as we shall see the manifestations of the personality, crisis are bizarre. Six times her themselves into group, therapy, mysticism, sexual games, the age for change, but I'm terrified by at the urgently, wish to leave the present existence in leap, somehow when you live to become what they are not, they want to change jobs, spouses, roles, and responsibilities.

Here, too, we see second Play forces on one side, first favorite version of Senada, and the third wave forces struggling against both. He had the second Way forces are those your favor the old mindless approach to technology if it works, produce it if it sells produce it if it makes a strong buil. Imbued with obsolete industrial notions of progress, many of these evidence of the 2nd Way positive vested interest in the responsible applications of technology. Shrug of the dangers.

What is title all but the most primitive first wave technologies, will seem to favor return to medieval, craftsman hand labor. Mostly middle class, speaking from the vantage point of a full belly, the resistance to technological advance is as blindly in discriminate as a support of technology, by second way, people. They fantasize about the return the world that most of us – and most of them – would find abhorrent.

Extremes is an increasing number of people, in every country who formed the core of the techno-rebellioin. They are, without knowing it, agents of the third wave. The "with technology, but with hard questions about what kind of future society we want. Did he could nice that we now have so many technological opportunities. We can no longer fun, develop, and apply them all. The argue, therefore, they need to select more carefully among them, and choose those technologies that so long, green, social, ecological goals. Other than letting technology shape our goals, they wish to assert social control over the larger directions to the technological trust.

. Is that the Earth by spare is Regina, enter the more powerful our new technologies become, the higher, the risk of doing irreversible damage to the planet. Does the demand that all new technologies please screen for possible adverse effects, the dangerous want to be redesigned or actually blocked – and shot, tomorrow's technologies, be subject to tighter, ecological constraints than those of the second way better.