Here's Alvin Toffler being interviewed in 1987, on the Gregory Mantell Show, promoting his last book, Revolutionary Wealth. He talks about The Third Wave idea in this interview, and about Revolutionary Wealth, which went deeper into the themes he first wrote about in 1980.
The Big Transition is my concept, that piggybacks on the thinking of the late futurist, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi. In the 1960's, Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi, got seriously thinking about where society was headed in the future. It was the Space Age, after the Russians launched sputnik, the first satellite. Both the U.S. and Russia were racing to put satellites, and people, into space, and on the moon. It was also the decade of the Civil Rights movement, the rise of drug culture and the Hippies, when rock and roll was blowing up, and when the birth control gave women options for their love life. It was when theVietnam War started. A lot was changing.
In 1970, Alvin published the book Future Shock, with a lot of his and Heidi's initial thinking on how society was changing. After a decade of more research, he published The Third Wave in 1980. They thought it made sense to break down human civilization into three big waves, to help understand where they saw society was headed at the time.
The First Wave was the transition from indigenous, tribal, usually nomadic people, what we call hunter/gatherers, into the Agricultural Age. People began to plant crops, stay in one place, and villages and small towns began to develop. That started about 10,000 years ago, somewhere around Turkey, and it took a couple of thousand years for agriculture to circle the globe.
The Second Wave was the transition from the Agricultural Age into the Industrial Age. People left the farms and moved into cities to work in factories. New, mechanical technology made machines, and a whole new way of life, possible. Towns grew into cities, and some grew into huge cities. The idea of "jobs" was invented. This started about 350 years ago, and took maybe 200 years to travel around the world and become the dominant way of life for most people.
The Third Wave was what the Tofflers saw beginning, a shift from the Industrial-based society into an Information-based society. When Alvin Toffler published that book, most people had two landline phones, sharing the same phone line, and the whole family shared it. TV had 4 networks, and maybe 15 of those new cable channels. People were debating whether VHS or Betamax were the better VCR's. Personal computers were toys for weird, geeky people that other people made fun of, and only a few existed. Video games, like Pong were a new thing. Kids played outside until the street lights came on in the afternoons and evenings. But a bunch of new technologies were heading towards everyday life, and the Tofflers saw big changes in life and work coming. That wave of coming change was The Third Wave.
The key thing to take from each of these waves, from one form of society to another, is that, when these major societal changes happen, everyday life changes dramatically, for everyone. This wave of change the Tofflers saw coming in 1980 would happen faster than these changes ever had before. We're humans, we have a hard time with change.
Right about the time The Third Wave was published, something crazy started happening across the U.S., the factories where most people worked, and had good paying jobs, began to close down. Looking back, most people blame outsourcing for this. A lot of jobs were lost because businesses moved to areas with cheaper labor. At first some moved to other states, like Mississippi and Alabama. Then jobs moved to Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, and eventually to China. But just as many jobs were lost to new technology, like industrial robots, computers, and machines that could do what humans had done on assembly lines a few years before. Things we don't think about, like self serve gas pumps, ATM machines, and later on tax preparation software, took many jobs as well.
The Third Wave had a big impact with intellectuals, big business people, and political people. As new technologies emerged, like the Apple Macintosh personal computer, cell phones, and as factories shut down more and more across the U.S., the Toffler's ideas made sense. People said that Alvin Toffler's Third Wave spoke of the collapse of factories in the U.S. and other industrial countries. "The Industrial Age was over, and the Information Age had begun." Then those intellectuals, business leaders, and politicians moved on to other books, other ideas, other theories, and the Tofflers' Third Wave faded into the rear view mirror of history.
I found the Tofflers' work in the 1990's, being a geek into futurist thinking. Their ideas blended with 200-250 other books I read in the 1990's, on a variety of subjects. I found Revolutionary Wealth in about 2009 or 2010, as well as Previews and Premises, a shorter book on The Third Wave ideas, from 1983. I watched everything I could find, speeches and interviews, with Alvin Toffler, to better understand his and Heidi's thinking.
As I watched our world come out of the The Great Recession in 2009-2010, and limp into a slow, weak, pathetic, Fed-aided recovery, I began to think that The Third Wave was still playing out. The factories shutting down in the 1980's, 1990's, and 2000's, was only the part of it. One industry after another was being Disrupted (with a big capital "D"), as some new technology made a new business model possible. That was still happening, in fact, it was happening to more and more industries, at an even more rapid pace.
The example most of us (Millennials or older) remember is Napster and the music industry. In mid 1999, Shawn Fanning uploaded Napster, a file sharing program for songs and other audio files, onto the internet. With that one click of the mouse, by someone we'd never heard of, the music industry of that time was over. It took many years for new business models to be tried, and the winners to emerge. It took lots of chaos and stupid lawsuits for the music industry to get reinvented. But now we have a totally different series of music distribution models. My thought with the Big Transition is that a "Napster moment," that Big "D" Disruption event, will happen in EVERY single business, in EVERY single industry, and in EVERY single human institution. That has to happen before we can move fully into a functional Information Age.
This is the Toffler's Third Wave idea, continuing to play out over time. Telecommunications got Disrupted in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Personal computers disrupted office work and some media in the 1980's, with the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft software. The internet Disrupted newspapers, magazines, and later TV, in the early 2000's. Movies were Disrupted by digital and streaming in the 2000's and 2010's. What we have called the" Retail Apocalypse" for four years, the closing of tens of thousands of retails stores, is Disruption hitting the retail industry.
Amazon didn't kill chain stores. Jeff Bezos and the Amazon team saw that new technology (in 1994) was going to make a new business model possible, and they began to build that new business model and new infrastructure to distribute goods. So did eBay, Etsy, Shopify, and millions of small online retailers. It was going to happen anyway. The major retailers didn't see the internet and online shopping as a threat, for the most part. Sears, J.C. Penney's, and dozens of brick and mortar retailers blew it. Walmart and Target got off to slow starts, but then saw the writing on the wall. They tried several ideas, and found the "buy online pick up at your local store model" was viable for their companies. They're still going strong. Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney's and many smaller Industrial Age retailers are bankrupt or gone altogether.
What happened to music in the 2000's, and retail in the 2010's will happen to every other industry. Banking, Real Estate. Car sales. Lawnmowers. Health care. All these new technologies coming up, and going into practical operation, will change everything, eventually. I've been warning of the "College Apocalypse" for a couple of years. Around 100 small colleges have gone out of business or merged with larger ones. I think the pandemic has started the crisis period for major schools. Time will tell.
So The Big Transition, my concept piggybacking on the Tofflers' Third Wave idea, is that we are not IN the Information Age, we are in a long, sticky, chaotic transition period in between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Changes are happening more often, in more businesses, industries, and institutions. The Toffler's put the start of this change in 1956, the first year "white collar" office workers first outnumbered "blue collar' factory workers in the U.S.. I won't argue. But I don't see this transition period ending until at least 2040 or so. So The Big Transition is a period of business, personal, and institutional change from about 1956 to about 2040. It started really slow, and the rate of change is increasing as we go along.
Disruption happens, then chaos, then new models are tried out, then business fights between the old and new, and eventually the new model emerges and is widely accepted, in industry after industry. That takes time, not so much to initiate new tech, but for actual humans to get used to it, adopt it, and then for society to readjust to the changes that technology made possible.
I believe the 2020's will be one of the biggest decades of change, and therefore crazy and chaotic on pretty much every level. The rate of change has been increasing since 1956 or so. Now it's massive and rapid change everywhere we look. When you add major "black swan events" like the Covid pandemic, the fast change gets suddenly accelerated to light speed. Let's face it, after 2020, most of us are just hanging on. My thoughts are, 2020 was the intro to the movie, the really crazy parts are still to come.
With that basic Big Picture concept, that we're in The Big Transition, a long period of massive change, I'll use this blog to look at real estate and housing issues of all kinds, and see if I can help make some sense, in places, of what is happening.
I'm not an agent, a broker, a designer, a lawyer, an accountant, a financial planner, or any other kind of real estate professional. I'm a thinker and a blogger, who has learned of some ultra long term trends, including The Third Wave, and has been watching financial markets and real estate, from a distance, for over 30 years now. I'm trying to figure out where we are in the Big Picture of things, and share those insights. Hopefully I can help some of you reading this to make sense of the 2020's chaos, to help you make better decisions in your own life.
So that's The Big Transition concept, and why I put it in the title of the blog.
Blogger's note: Simply writing this idea down and linking this post on Facebook got this entire blog banned on Facebook and Instagram. Someone, somewhere is that threatened by this concept, that they felt the need to censor it on those platforms. Really. The world is weird these days.
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