Review:The Third Wave

Probably a name familar to most of you, Alvin Toffler, authored the well-known book The Third Wave. This is a book that explores the emerging change in the world, called, (duh) The Third Wave. Thanks to joshy for sending this review our way. The Third Wave author Alvin Toffler pages publisher Bantam Books rating 8 reviewer joshy ISBN 0553246984 summary he Third Wave is an in-depth study of the forthcoming information economy and the rest of the civilization surrounding it. I can only recommend reading it if you plan to have a job or purchase anything in the next hundred years. Overview

Alvin Toffler is an historian and futurist. In The Third Wave he presents an historical view of our two previous civilizations types, a look at the new Third Wave economy, and an analysis of the conflicts that arise between the warring forces of these three civilization types as change sweeps across the globe. Now sure, we've all read the endless Wired articles about the New Economy with it's virtuous circles, network effects, and general cyberiffic rosy view of the future, but this book is where it all came from. The truly amazing thing is that Toffler wrote the third wave almost 20 years ago, in an era before the World Wide Web, before the IBM PC, and before anyone knew that Vader was Luke's father. While some of the ideas never came to fruition, it remains an amazingly accurate picture of the future.

Structure

The book starts off with a lengthy description of First and Second Wave civilizations. A First Wave economy is agrarian society where everyone makes their own products for their own consumption and there is little or no trading between households. A Second Wave civilization is an industrial society. Rampant specialization and economies of scale have taken over as people form into larger and larger groups like corporations and nation-states. The key indicators of a Second Wave economy are standardization, specialization, and centralization. Almost no one creates products for themselves, but instead people spend most of their time working in a factory creating products to be sold to others. This split of producer and consumer is the primary sign of a Second Wave economy and, according to Toffler, one of the major reasons for strife and chaos in the modern world.

After covering the first two economies (with most of his time spent on the second) Alvin Toffler begins his description of a Third Wave economy, which America has already started to become. (This was true at the time of the writing. I'd say it's well underway now). The key tenets of a Third Wave economy are de-massification and de-centralization. Products will no longer be standardized in huge factories, but, using new manufacturing technology, will be customized in extremely small production runs; sometimes a single unit. Consumers will have a bigger part in the creation of the products they buy, turning the producers and consumers into 'prosumers'. All bureaucratic structures will be de-centralized. National governments will divest more power to regional governments and global organizations that deal with the problems of our new world wide economy. Corporate structures will also be de-massified, giving more power (and economic payoff) to people lower on the ladder.

The key to a Third Wave civilization is flexibility: people work when they want, where they want, and for whom they want. These are all traits found in technology startups and are becoming more common in traditional industries. Flextime, tele-commuting, and stock options all fit very nicely into this future. And they are all features we should look for in prospective companies.

What's Bad?

The Third Wave is an amazing book, but it's not without it's flaws. First of all, it's too long. Minus the ninety odd pages of index, notes, and bibliography, the book weighs in at a hefty 445 pages. That's not huge, but it's pretty big for a non-fiction, non-narrative book. The Third Wave is very in-depth and covers a lot of ground in detail, but a smaller book of one to two hundred pages would give the reader the basics without being so heavy on history and examples.

Secondly, as surprisingly current as the book is, it still is dated in some areas. He had big hopes for the space and undersea industries that haven't panned out. And even with as much time as he spent talking about the possibilities of computing, he was unable (understandably) to anticipate the true growth of the industry.

So What's In It For Me?

This is a good book that should be read by anyone planning on being a part of business in the Information Economy. We can see de-centralization and de-massification all around us, and it's growing in power. Slashdot, MP3s, tele-commuting, block grants, indie-films, non-nuclear families are all signs of the coming 21st century civilization. The Third Wave may be a little out of date and a little too optimistic, but it's still the closest thing we have to a history of the last fifty years and a roadmap of the next hundred.

To purchase this book, head over Amazon.

Table of Contents

1. A Collision of Waves
   1. Super-Struggle
2. The Second Wave
   1. The Architecture of Civilization
   2. The Invisible Wedge
   3. Breaking the Code
   4. The Technicians of Power
   5. The Hidden Blueprint
   6. A Frenzy of Nations
   7. The Imperial Drive
   8. Indust-Reality
   9. CODA: The Flash Flood
3. The Third Wave
   1. The New Synthesis
   2. The Commanding Heights
   3. De-Massifying the Media
   4. The Intelligent Environment
   5. Beyond Mass Production
   6. The Electronic Cottage
   7. Families of The Future
   8. The Corporate Identity Crisis
   9. Decoding the New Rules
   10. The Rise of the Prosumer
   11. The Mental Maelstrom
   12. The Crack-Up of the Nation
   13. Gandhi with Satellites
   14. CODA: The Great Confluence
4. Conclusion
   1. The New Psycho-Sphere
   2. The Personality of the Future
   3. The Political Mausoleum
   4. Twenty-First Century Democracy

• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Comments

Re:A comment in the present

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think Wales and Scotland's national identities are imaginary? Surely the fact that millions of people consider themselves to have a Welsh or Scottish nationality means that they have one. By definition, a national identity is what people consider themselves to be.

If you are saying that the idea of an ethnic identity is imaginary, that is wrong too. Welsh and Scottish are more ethnically different as, say, the Serbs and the Albanians.

Re:A comment in the present

[Anonymous Coward]

Yow. I'm gonna go home, put on Neil Young and Pink Floyd, and contemplate suicide. Yikes.

Unfortunately, I agree with the tone of your post.

I don't agree with all of your presumptions, let alone all of your conclusions, though. For instance, there hasn't been a breakdown of "national identity," because there's been little national identity at all. Almost all of these ethnic confilicts have been festering in the populace for many years. This whole Kosovo thing is a direct result of re-drawn political lines in post-WWII Europe, driven by the US and its insane egoism. Scotland (and Ireland) have always maintained their own distinct ethnic identity.

The collapse of industrialism is not a direct condemnation of capitalism (as intrinsically evil as capitalism is), but rather a direct result of the collapse of industrialism itself. In the '70s, the US underwent some traumatic changes in the automotive industry. Even now, there are many under-employed ex-auto workers, but it isn't nearly the crisis it was 20 years ago. A lot of this is temporary, if scary, just as the collapse of the cotten plantations due to the industrial revolution led to the US Civil War. The crisis is over, even if we still bear the scars.

The quality of life is going up in general, all over the world. (I'm disregarding warring nations, because in war, there is no quality of life. However, the wars fought today are smaller and less bloody, if more frequent.) This biggest slowdown in the increase in quality-of-life is the wealth-hoarding of the major corporations. (Wealth-hoarding and empire-building (which contributes to wealth-hoarding) are the two biggest flaws of unfettered capitalism, IMHO.) A corrallary: anyone who contributes to a corporation that practices wealth-hoarding or empire-building is stealing from the quality-of-life of someone. In a generic sense.

Personal accountability is more important than political accountability. Politicians should be personally accountable for every decision made, and every life lost due to those decisions. And everyone should be personally accountable for every decision they make. At least, if you ask me. (Which you didn't.)

Decadence? Perhaps. Are we in for a crash in a few years? Perhaps. But our world is expanding, and our only hope is to work for our beliefs-- no matter what those beliefs are. If you dislike what you see in the world, work to change it, to the best of your abilities. Help out a single person in a nightmare position. Do what you can to make the world the world you want, and not the world you were given.

Anyway, just a long ramble. I'm working on a counteragent to your depression and cynicism, no matter how well-founded your cynicism is.

At least, that's my opinion. I could be wrong.

Too Long, out of Date? Get Small, New Version

[pudge]

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, "Creating A New Civilization: Politics of the Third Wave". It summarizes the main points of the larger tome, and is 112 pages long and published first in 1994.

Plus, it has a forward by Newt Gingrich hisself ... who can pass THAT up?

A comment in the present

[RedGuard]

As with all books of prediction, this is really a comment on the present. The dominant trend of the past decades has been a declining industrial base in the advanced countries (second wave, or capitalist as they are usually called), now rather than seeing this as a failure of capitalism (which it certainly is), the theorists of the new economy redefine unemployment as flexibility, low paged, irregular work as service jobs, the breakdown in national identity and cohesion in favour of largely imaginary "ethnic" identities (for example Scotland and Wales) as decentralisation. When the author predicts that goods will be designed almost for each person this is clearly a fantasy, out of reach of all but the richest, the modern trend being noted here is twofold, first towards definitions of identity based mainly on consumption and secondly towards a shift of responsibility onto the individual. If we are 'prosummers' then we have no need or desire to put complain about our circumstances, join political parties or trade unions, in short social life is completely privatised. This is not a utopia, except for those who are benefiting from a lack of political accountability, but a nightmare. Decadence is the only way to describe it.
It should also be noted that the computer industries growth has chiefly come from consolidation, it is only the fantasy world of the US stockmarket that makes it appear otherwise.

--
Yours, depressingly