Alvin Toffler, author of “Future Shock
In the first wave, agrarian societies, Toffler observed that the organized production of goods depended upon control of the land on which crops were grown or livestock grazed. Civilizations that prospered in this era were ones that had strong militaries since defending physical assets was essential to the control of wealth and power.
Widespread development of currencies as a way of storing and exchanging value (though typically still based on precious metals) and the development of banking institutions with the ability to move currencies geographically and between economic and political spheres through investment and loans allowed wealth to be abstracted from underlying physical assets. This process transferred power from property holders to merchants, just as the value in goods moved from raw materials to finished products. But this process only accelerated and became what Toffler calls the second wave with a change in the means of production.
Until the 18th century production of goods was largely dependent upon human or animal labor. But engines, initially powered by steam and later by gasoline and electricity, changed the relationship between labor and production. Suddenly a machine could do the work of first many men and then tens, hundreds or even thousands of men. Ownership of these machines – capital assets – became more important than ownership of land or control of people as the balance of the value that they produced shifted decisively to the machine.
The industrial revolution, as we more commonly refer to this second wave, brought about a radical shift in every aspect of our society. The forces unleashed by the steam engine destroyed the agrarian world order, eliminated entire classes of work, denigrated the role of professional craftspeople, and doomed the aristocracy. It also brought about the greatest period of innovation, increase in longevity and broad spread of prosperity in history. Instead of laboring in a field, the majority of people now labored in factories. But this was accompanied by enormous growth in first the upper class and eventually the middle class. While some may still look back on agrarian times with nostalgia for a simpler time, the vast majority of humanity has lived longer, healthier, and happier lives as the industrial age developed into maturity.
With “Future Shock” Alvin Toffler announced that we had entered what he later called the “third wave” – an information age. Where money and machines had shifted wealth and power away from those that controlled military forces, in the third wave Toffler predicted that a new shift was underway – from control of capital assets to the control of information. Speaking on what he would later call the coming “Power Shift,” Toffler said:
“The central change that the economists have not yet been able to get their arms around, is the change in the role of knowledge in the broadest sense of information and ideas and data, (and) the relationship of that to making wealth in an economy.”
Already in 1990, Toffler saw that the structure of power that had held the world together through the industrial revolution was being radically transformed by information technology. The first uses of the new technology were in our industrial institutions, changing the scale and operational characteristic of these organizations. But for the past thirty years this technology has been expanding to every level of human society, even changing who we are as individuals. We can expect that the coming world will be as different from the industrial world as it was in turn to the agrarian world that it replaced.
