Creating a New Civilization by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler - Excerpts

Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. 1995. ISBN 1-57036-223-8

EXCERPTS

Even more jarring and significant, however, is the growing transfer of political power away from our formal political structures – the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties – to electronically-linked grassroots groups and to the media.

What is needed, we believe, is a clear distinction between rear-guard politicians who wish to preserve or restore an unworkable past, and those who are ready to make the transition to what we call a “Third Wave” information-age society.

The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power.

Today all high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second.

The Second Wave created mass societies that reflected and required mass production. In Third Wave, brain-based economies, mass production (which could almost be considered the defining mark of industrial society) is already an outmoded form. De-massified production – short runs of highly customized products – is the new cutting edge of manufacture. Mass marketing gives way to market segmentation and “particle marketing”, paralleling the change in production.

Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid or ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Not only illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they couldn’t do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributed to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they had “made a covenant with the Devil.”

The only reason we ship huge amounts of raw materials like bauxite or nickel or copper across the planet is that we lack the knowledge to convert local materials into usable substitutes.

While land, labor, raw materials and capital were the main factors of production in the Second Wave economy of the past, knowledge – broadly defined here to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is now the central resource of the Third Wave economy.

Work itself is transformed. Low-skilled, essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labor. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labor as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially fungible. Thus a low-skilled worker who quits or is fired can be replaced quickly and with little cost. By contrast, the rising levels of specialized skills required in the Third Wave economy make finding the right person with the right skills harder and more costly.

Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.”

In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true – which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian nor monetarist remedies work well.

In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia or elsewhere. The purchase doesn’t add jobs at home.

The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. But any effective strategy for reducing joblessness is a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge.

We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as “hamburger flipping.” McDonald’s cannot stand as the sole symbol for a range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a dating service or in a hospital radiology center. What’s more, if, as is often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing.

In lowbrow industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods – autos, radios, tractors, TV sets – was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.”

Marxist economists, if any thing, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “socialist realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, their Schwarzenegger-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a lowbrow economy.

In brief, production is reconceptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologists of lowbrow economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not cheap labor, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of the sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashes the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is sweated from the back of the worker alone and that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-ismo, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically.

A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands flowing downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, after all, about knowledge.

A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way.

America’s schools, for example, still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education. A similar question could be asked of health legislation, welfare legislation and of every proposal to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. America needs new institutions built on post-bureaucratic, post-factory models.