Here's the late Alvin Toffler in 2007, explaining bits and pieces of the huge range of topics from the 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth. Though his name is alone on most of the books he's written, futurists Alvin, and his wife Heidi, definitely worked as a team. From the 1950's on, studying human society, technology, social change, and other aspects of our world, they were always looking at where our society was headed far into the future. As much as the world has changed in the last 12 years, I think this book is still the best overall view of the wide array of changes human society is dealing with in 2019, and for many, many years to come. At 23:26, in the interview above, we hear this quote:
"We're on our way to what I believe are going to be a series of institutional Katrinas. We're going to see one institution after another collapse, or become totally ineffective."
By "Katrinas," Mr. Toffler is referring to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, that devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. That hurricane was still fresh in everyone's mind in 2007. Basically, he's saying in this interview, and he and Heidi say in Revolutionary Wealth, that virtually every aspect of our society is going to collapse, and be completely restructured and rebuilt, hopefully, as part of the transition from the industrial-based society to knowledge-based society. I use the terms the Industrial Age and the Information Age now. This is The Third Wave that the Tofflers wrote a book about in 1980, with that title, and summarized and built upon in Revolutionary Wealth.
The Tofflers saw three major waves in human civilization. The First Wave was the shift from a hunter/gatherer society to an agricultural-based society, roughly 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave was the shift from an agricultural-based society to an industrial-based society, beginning about 350 years ago. The Third Wave is the shift from the industrial-based society to a knowledge-based society, beginning in 1956. Alvin Toffler makes the case for that particular start year in this speech at the University of Toronto in 2007.
In Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers make the case in 2007 for why society has been changing rapidly for a couple of decades before the book, and go into detail on an incredibly wide array of technological, cultural, and economic changes that will happen because of this massive shift from what most of us call the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
In Revolutionary Wealth, the Tofflers make the case in 2007 for why society has been changing rapidly for a couple of decades before the book, and go into detail on an incredibly wide array of technological, cultural, and economic changes that will happen because of this massive shift from what most of us call the Industrial Age to the Information Age.
The Big Transition is my name for the decades-long, scary, chaotic, sticky, crazy transition between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. It's a roughly 80 year period where every single business, industry, institution, political, and cultural structure will either be torn down and rebuilt intentionally, or will collapse and be rebuilt, in a way that fits our new, tech enabled, hyper-connected society.
From 1956 to 2040+/-, in my opinion, we are not in the Industrial Age or the Information Age, we're in the transition between the two. I've found that by thinking that we're in a known, chaotic, transition phase, which is expected to to have continuous rapid change, and be full of disruption, our current trials and issues make much more sense. It's a framework, a context, where all that's happening in our world can potentially fit. The period of major and rapid change also closely corresponds to the life span of Generation X, my peeps, roughly 1965 to 2043. We're the Middle Child generation right now, it's OK, blame us for the chaos, we're used to it.
I come at this as an amateur futurist, of sorts. At 52-years-old, I'm one of the older members of Generation X, I was a kid during the Apollo moon mission years, and grew up in the Industrial Age of thriving factories, spread across the country, in small towns, cities, and huge metros. The small-town Ohio world I grew up in expected the life to go on much as it had for the generations before. My dad was a draftsman who worked his way up to become an engineer, and we always had Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines in our 1970's houses (we moved nearly every year). In those magazines, I read about the great inventions the scientists and engineers predicted we'd have by the far away 21st century.
Yes, we were ALL supposed to have flying cars by now, and be colonizing Mars. You know what I don't remember seeing in those 1970's future tech articles? Cell phones. Only Captain Kirk, Spock, and the original Enterprise crew on Star Trek had cell phone-like communicators. And even they only had flip phones. No cameras, no video, no social media, no Bones looking up "Intergalactic Babes XXX" and showing Spock "illogical" sex videos. The scientists and engineers predicting the 21st century, back in the 1970's, got much of it wrong.
It was in those days, as a grade school kid, that I really became an amateur futurist. I think the main reason I dreamed about the future so much is because my family was quite dysfunctional, and the present usually sucked. The future just had to be better, didn't it? I thought so, and I began to wonder what that future would hold.
Yes, we were ALL supposed to have flying cars by now, and be colonizing Mars. You know what I don't remember seeing in those 1970's future tech articles? Cell phones. Only Captain Kirk, Spock, and the original Enterprise crew on Star Trek had cell phone-like communicators. And even they only had flip phones. No cameras, no video, no social media, no Bones looking up "Intergalactic Babes XXX" and showing Spock "illogical" sex videos. The scientists and engineers predicting the 21st century, back in the 1970's, got much of it wrong.
It was in those days, as a grade school kid, that I really became an amateur futurist. I think the main reason I dreamed about the future so much is because my family was quite dysfunctional, and the present usually sucked. The future just had to be better, didn't it? I thought so, and I began to wonder what that future would hold.
As things turned out, although I was more intelligent than the average kid, I didn't have money for college, and I got into a weird new sport in 1983, called BMX freestyle, while in high school. Trick riding on "little kid's bikes," that's how most people saw it. It definitely wouldn't lead anywhere. I published a zine about it, and that led to a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines at age 20, and a move to Southern California.
I veered off into the emerging BMX and skateboard industries, never took a single college course, and have lived a life I couldn't have imagined, even in my wildest day dreams as a kid. A lot of that life sucked to some degree, I've spent ten years in various forms of homelessness since 1999, but I've also had many successes early on.
I've been reading pretty voraciously my whole life, and have blended book knowledge on many subjects, with real world experience in highly creative scenes, lame-ass odd jobs, and various media outlets. I'm an intellectual mongrel with no papers, but a fairly unique perspective, it seems. The things that fascinate me are where major societal trends, social dynamics, economics, the rapid change caused by technology, and futurist thinking all come together. As fast as things are moving these days, I'm still trying to predict where we're headed in a few years, maybe more.
I veered off into the emerging BMX and skateboard industries, never took a single college course, and have lived a life I couldn't have imagined, even in my wildest day dreams as a kid. A lot of that life sucked to some degree, I've spent ten years in various forms of homelessness since 1999, but I've also had many successes early on.
I've been reading pretty voraciously my whole life, and have blended book knowledge on many subjects, with real world experience in highly creative scenes, lame-ass odd jobs, and various media outlets. I'm an intellectual mongrel with no papers, but a fairly unique perspective, it seems. The things that fascinate me are where major societal trends, social dynamics, economics, the rapid change caused by technology, and futurist thinking all come together. As fast as things are moving these days, I'm still trying to predict where we're headed in a few years, maybe more.
After reading Revolutionary Wealth in about 2010, I spent a lot of time thinking about how we actually make the change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. As Alvin Toffler predicts in the quote highlighted above, disruption is a major part of the way this change happens. But I realized it doesn't happen all at once. We aren't sitting in an office cubicle farm one day, typing away on our big desktop computers and banging our shins on the CPU, and then somebody flips a switch, and we're suddenly in an open office tech start-up, burning angel investor money, sitting on a giant kick ball, and working on a tablet and smart phone the next day. I realized that the entire move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age is very long, it happens in fits and spurts, there's quick adaptation in some places, and heels-in-the-ground lagging by other groups.
This transition is incredibly chaotic and painful to most everyday people, at some point. I'm a recovering Luddite, I understand the resistance to this rapid change. But I also finally realized it was necessary to adapt and try to become relevant again, particularly as a writer and artist. Because this big transition happens over such a long time span, no one really sees it as one big transition. As I thought this all through several years ago, I began to call this period The Big Transition. It's a lame and un-creative name, I know, but I haven't found a better one.
This transition is incredibly chaotic and painful to most everyday people, at some point. I'm a recovering Luddite, I understand the resistance to this rapid change. But I also finally realized it was necessary to adapt and try to become relevant again, particularly as a writer and artist. Because this big transition happens over such a long time span, no one really sees it as one big transition. As I thought this all through several years ago, I began to call this period The Big Transition. It's a lame and un-creative name, I know, but I haven't found a better one.
Here's The Big Transition, as I see it. I'll take Alvin Toffler's beginning point, and start it at 1956. That works. In the interview linked above, he cites 1956 as the first year there were more white collar employees than blue collar employees in the U.S.. Television was new and about to become a household thing, and mass society was born. The birth control pill changed the social scene, the Beat Poets spread new ideas, and a bunch of social justice movements rose up in the 1960's, that's all the Tofflers' thinking on the beginning of this new society.
But the really big technologies that have completely changed, and sped up, all our of our lives; computers, telecommunications, digital photography, video, and the internet (among others), were just tiny experimental things in the 1950's and 1960's. Or they didn't exist at all. The Information Age, like every change in a human world, started with new ideas. A handful of "idea seeds" were planted in obscure R&D labs and other places, and new technologies started to grow. Life for average people, though, continued much as it had before, through the 1970's. Then we hit a critical mass where new technology, and outsourcing of factory jobs to places with cheaper labor, "suddenly" took tens of millions of good paying American jobs away. That's when the changes really hit average Americans (and those in other countries). That's when it got real, and the rapid escalation in the pace of change hit home to most people.
But the really big technologies that have completely changed, and sped up, all our of our lives; computers, telecommunications, digital photography, video, and the internet (among others), were just tiny experimental things in the 1950's and 1960's. Or they didn't exist at all. The Information Age, like every change in a human world, started with new ideas. A handful of "idea seeds" were planted in obscure R&D labs and other places, and new technologies started to grow. Life for average people, though, continued much as it had before, through the 1970's. Then we hit a critical mass where new technology, and outsourcing of factory jobs to places with cheaper labor, "suddenly" took tens of millions of good paying American jobs away. That's when the changes really hit average Americans (and those in other countries). That's when it got real, and the rapid escalation in the pace of change hit home to most people.
The Big Transition began with small changes in obscure areas of technology and social norms, and grew slowly. These seeds of change went largely unnoticed, but were there to find, if anyone went looking. A few people saw where things were headed. But most people, and most established businesses, large and small, dismissed the new tech. Some still do. That's how we find ourselves in a world where Industrial Age retail giant Sears is now bankrupt, J.C. Penney's is struggling, and 15,000 or so major chain retail stores have closed in the last few years. Meanwhile, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, HIMSELF, is worth more than entire Industrial Age corporations like GE, General Motors, or Ford. Bezos saw where things were heading, started an online bookselling website, and got made fun of by the business press for several years. He was ahead of the game, and when average Americans caught up, Amazon became a juggernaut. That's life as a pioneer.
This disruption and rebuilding was happening all along, but most people were struggling to survive, and not looking too far ahead. I am a perfect example. After an injury in 1999, I became a taxi driver, and ignored "that internet thing" through the early 2000's. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, after tech had changed the taxi industry, and I worked long hours, 7 days a week, for four years, I went from working 100 hours a week, to fully homeless, in a single day. Actually, it happened in a few seconds, as I dropped off the taxi keys, when I was no longer able to make money in the cab. I know the disruption that comes from ignoring the reality of new technology emerging, firsthand.
The key thing to understand about The Big Transition is that EVERYTHING will either be intentionally rethought and rebuilt, to function in our tech heavy world, if it hasn't already. More likely, it will stagnate and collapse, and then be rebuilt into a new version of itself, for a 21st century world. This will affect every business, every industry, every group, every institution, every product, every creative endeavor, every village, every town, every city, every major metro region. In some cases, a completely new thing will be dreamed, envisioned as necessary, and created. In most cases, the old will no longer fit the way society now functions, it will collapse, and a new form or version will be created, most likely by a person or group other than the previous leaders in that space.
It's also important to remember that, while our daily lives will continue to change in many ways, core values and beliefs, that actually help a community function better, for everyone, don't have to be thrown away. Honesty, integrity, hard work, industriousness, common sense, peace of mind, persistence, courage, creativity, and many other positive traits, will be as important as ever. But there will be a lot of trouble in places and institutions that are based on systems that only favor a few, no matter who those few may be. Those situations will continue to be some of our biggest struggles as a society moving forward.
I've found that, with the idea of The Big Transition in mind, the knowledge that everything will be disrupted at some point, gives a context to all the crazy stuff happening on all fronts. That doesn't make it any less chaotic, necessarily, but it can help a person deal with it. "Oh yeah, I'm a _______, and there's this new technology someone in __________ invented, that we should keep an eye on, it could disrupt our industry (business, non-profit, sport, school, etc.)." Knowing that all this is going to happen anyway, can make the current chaotic events somewhat less overwhelming. It can also lead to more forward thinking, looking for the oncoming change, and finding the opportunities that come with that change, ahead of time.
We're in The Big Transition. It's really long. It's supposed to be chaotic, that's the nature of a transition. Change is the whole point. With that in mind, go make something cool happen.
Here are just a few examples of revolutionary ideas and disruption during The Big Transition:
A Southern California surfer/skateboarder, named Tom Sims, nailed a piece of tin to a 2" X 8" in 7th grade shop class in 1966. The snowboard. A motocross kid named Scot Breithaupt held an MX type race for some local kids riding bicycles in Long Beach, California in in 1970. BMX racing. In 1973, a businessman-hating, rock climbing, blacksmith started selling shirts, modeled after rugby shirts, made specifically for rock climbing. Patagonia, one of the most forward looking, environmentally conscious businesses, ever, was born. In about 1974, a New York City street urchin/poet/singer named Patty Smith inspired others around her to form underground bands with lots of attitude. Punk rock. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built a weird machine in the Homebrew Club, in San Jose, California, in 1976. Personal computer. Bill Gates wrote an operating system in 1976. Microsoft software. CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee connected his hyperlink idea to the TCP/IP and ARPANET in 1990. The World Wide Web. A college age, highly entrepreneurial kid saw the internet for the time in 1994 and thought, "I can sell shit on this!" Gary Vaynerchuk went on to lead his dad's New Jersey liquor store from $3 million to $60 million in annual sales, and helped pioneer internet and content marketing. Also in the mid-1990's, a young college professor named Richard Florida, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wondered why all the great computer science and tech people graduating from CMU were moving away. They were not starting high tech businesses in struggling Pittsburgh, and rebuilding the economy there. He began research that led the 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which changed the entirenature of economic development, and our understanding of cities. In 1999, 19-year-old Shawn Fanning wrote the code for a peer to peer file sharing service, focusing on MP3 music files. He uploaded Napster to the web, and with the click of a mouse, destroyed the music industry. Now we have more music, by more artists, available to nearly everyone for low or no cost. A new music industry has emerged, and continues to evolve.
This disruption and rebuilding was happening all along, but most people were struggling to survive, and not looking too far ahead. I am a perfect example. After an injury in 1999, I became a taxi driver, and ignored "that internet thing" through the early 2000's. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, after tech had changed the taxi industry, and I worked long hours, 7 days a week, for four years, I went from working 100 hours a week, to fully homeless, in a single day. Actually, it happened in a few seconds, as I dropped off the taxi keys, when I was no longer able to make money in the cab. I know the disruption that comes from ignoring the reality of new technology emerging, firsthand.
"Revolutions... destroy the perfect, disrupt the status quo, and change everything."
-Seth Godin
The key thing to understand about The Big Transition is that EVERYTHING will either be intentionally rethought and rebuilt, to function in our tech heavy world, if it hasn't already. More likely, it will stagnate and collapse, and then be rebuilt into a new version of itself, for a 21st century world. This will affect every business, every industry, every group, every institution, every product, every creative endeavor, every village, every town, every city, every major metro region. In some cases, a completely new thing will be dreamed, envisioned as necessary, and created. In most cases, the old will no longer fit the way society now functions, it will collapse, and a new form or version will be created, most likely by a person or group other than the previous leaders in that space.
It's also important to remember that, while our daily lives will continue to change in many ways, core values and beliefs, that actually help a community function better, for everyone, don't have to be thrown away. Honesty, integrity, hard work, industriousness, common sense, peace of mind, persistence, courage, creativity, and many other positive traits, will be as important as ever. But there will be a lot of trouble in places and institutions that are based on systems that only favor a few, no matter who those few may be. Those situations will continue to be some of our biggest struggles as a society moving forward.
I've found that, with the idea of The Big Transition in mind, the knowledge that everything will be disrupted at some point, gives a context to all the crazy stuff happening on all fronts. That doesn't make it any less chaotic, necessarily, but it can help a person deal with it. "Oh yeah, I'm a _______, and there's this new technology someone in __________ invented, that we should keep an eye on, it could disrupt our industry (business, non-profit, sport, school, etc.)." Knowing that all this is going to happen anyway, can make the current chaotic events somewhat less overwhelming. It can also lead to more forward thinking, looking for the oncoming change, and finding the opportunities that come with that change, ahead of time.
We're in The Big Transition. It's really long. It's supposed to be chaotic, that's the nature of a transition. Change is the whole point. With that in mind, go make something cool happen.
Here are just a few examples of revolutionary ideas and disruption during The Big Transition:
A Southern California surfer/skateboarder, named Tom Sims, nailed a piece of tin to a 2" X 8" in 7th grade shop class in 1966. The snowboard. A motocross kid named Scot Breithaupt held an MX type race for some local kids riding bicycles in Long Beach, California in in 1970. BMX racing. In 1973, a businessman-hating, rock climbing, blacksmith started selling shirts, modeled after rugby shirts, made specifically for rock climbing. Patagonia, one of the most forward looking, environmentally conscious businesses, ever, was born. In about 1974, a New York City street urchin/poet/singer named Patty Smith inspired others around her to form underground bands with lots of attitude. Punk rock. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built a weird machine in the Homebrew Club, in San Jose, California, in 1976. Personal computer. Bill Gates wrote an operating system in 1976. Microsoft software. CERN engineer Tim Berners-Lee connected his hyperlink idea to the TCP/IP and ARPANET in 1990. The World Wide Web. A college age, highly entrepreneurial kid saw the internet for the time in 1994 and thought, "I can sell shit on this!" Gary Vaynerchuk went on to lead his dad's New Jersey liquor store from $3 million to $60 million in annual sales, and helped pioneer internet and content marketing. Also in the mid-1990's, a young college professor named Richard Florida, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, wondered why all the great computer science and tech people graduating from CMU were moving away. They were not starting high tech businesses in struggling Pittsburgh, and rebuilding the economy there. He began research that led the 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which changed the entirenature of economic development, and our understanding of cities. In 1999, 19-year-old Shawn Fanning wrote the code for a peer to peer file sharing service, focusing on MP3 music files. He uploaded Napster to the web, and with the click of a mouse, destroyed the music industry. Now we have more music, by more artists, available to nearly everyone for low or no cost. A new music industry has emerged, and continues to evolve.
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