Looking Back at Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave

The name Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) does not seem to be spoken much these days, but in the latter decades of the twentieth century that associate editor of Fortune magazine was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the day. The Accenture study of the top business intellectuals at the turn of the century, when he had been associated with figures like George Gilder in missionary work for the digital age, and Newt Gingrich when he became Speaker of the House at the head of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," actually ranked Toffler at #8 on their list--well ahead of figures like Lester Thurow, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Alfred Chandler and John Naisbitt. Indeed, looking back one is struck by how references to him came up even in pop culture, figures from cyberpunk "godfather" Bruce Sterling to comics giant Alan Moore making casual mention of Toffler's work and even quite specific reference to his ideas in their essays and interviews.

Toffler's very considerable reputation rested heavily on the strength of the ideas he set forth in such bestselling books as Future Shock and The Third Wave (1980)--the latter apparently the single work that did most to popularize and shape conceptions of the "information age." The book's wide influence makes it well worth looking back at what Toffler had to say in that particular book about the matter, starting with just what he meant by the term "Third Wave" in the first place.

As Toffler explained it, human civilization had emerged and overspread the Earth in three waves. The first wave was the agrarian civilization that started well before the dawn of recorded history. The second was the Industrial civilization that emerged in the Western world in the seventeenth century. The third was the "information civilization" that he saw as similarly emerging by the middle of the twentieth century.

Each civilization has its "hidden code" of operating principles. Toffler did not have much to say about First Wave agrarian civilization, but much of his book does address the differences in code between the Second and Third Waves--the industrial and information civilizations--that reflect the organization of their basic economic activities, and in the process color their broader societal organization and cultures in the substructure-structure-superstructure mode familiar to the student of sociology. Toffler identifies the Second Wave, industrial, civilization with the working up of raw materials by using "simple electromechanical principles" using large amounts of materials, energy, and low-skill, repetitive, labor. Making the most of this saw the organization of the work process on the basis of the principles of centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization"--the exploitation of "economies of scale" that made for a drive toward bigness of facility, of enterprise, of output and run and market. Thus was the old merchant subcontracting manufacturing work to artisans working in their own homes replaced by the factory where the workers were all expected to come to one facility at the same time for the same shift (concentration, centralization), where instead of each making a complete good by themselves the production task was broken up into different steps carefully distributed among the workers, one of whom did their same piece of the task over and over and over again (specialization) so that the next worker could do their own bit of it in turn (synchronization). The result was an elaborate arrangement of people and equipment that could only be changed with difficulty and expense, creating an incentive to avoid such change as much as possible, while for the sake of plain and simple profit amortizing the investment over as much production as possible with the existing arrangement--in the form of as long a run of the same product as possible (standardization, maximization). The case in the cotton cloth-producing textile mill of the eighteenth century, it was as much the case in a twentieth century "integrated" steel mill where armies of workers use vast amounts of coal-derived coke and iron ore to produce in blast furnaces the metal undergirding virtually all the products that distinguished modern life. And its logic culminated in the way electrification and the internal combustion engine remade energy, transport, the daily terms of living and work, and everything having to do with them, from the assembly line to the auto-suburban-consumerist version of middle class existence to the massification of culture and politics as seen in ways from the ascent of the business corporation and nation-state to the status of the era's master institutions, to ideologies such as capitalism and nationalism.

By contrast with that resource processing-oriented Second Wave industrial civilization the Third Wave information civilization was centered on the substitution of "information" (or to use Toffler's preferred term, the "refined information" that is "knowledge") for those inputs of materials, energy, labor the Second Wave civilization used so lavishly.* Of course, substituting information for other inputs is what technological progress had always been about, arguably even before one could speak of agricultural civilization, while innovation of that kind had become systematized and deliberate in the Second Wave--with the codification of the scientific method, the "invention of invention," and the increasingly institutionalized and intensive pursuit of invention in an age of mass scientific education, and formal private and public research efforts. What made the Third Wave different was this form of civilization being centered on this as a result of two factors--the increasing awareness of the practice and its possibilities, and the ecological crisis as the Second Wave civilization hit the limits of expanding in its resource-profligate old way. (Consider, for instance, how oil consumption was doubling every decade or so in the post-war boom years. Had the growth of that consumption continued at the same rate we would be burning through over two billion barrels of oil a day now--twenty times the actual rate of production, a practical impossibility even before we get to the environmental effects.) Of course, that new form of civilization was supposed to be just emergent, but the expectation was that as it developed, the activity of work, creation of value, possession of wealth would increasingly consist of the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of information relative to the gathering, processing, storage, movement, usage, ownership of things.

One may expect from all of the foregoing that third Wave civilization would have a very different code from its Second Wave predecessor, and indeed Toffler anticipated that it would be virtually the opposite of that of the Second Wave industrial civilization he wrote about. Rather than centralization, concentration, synchronization, standardization, specialization and "maximization" he anticipated that its principles would be decentralization, dispersal, flexibility, adaptiveness, and variety and even smallness of scale. Thus instead of everyone showing up to a centralized workplace at the same time one might have people telecommuting from home, and not necessarily all working at the same time, in a more idiosyncratically arranged work process during which the workers, supplying more than repetitive physical labor under the direction of an overseer had to coordinate with each other and solve problems as the group worked on highly customizable and customized products. Seemingly most plausible in areas such as the creation of software or the provision of financial services where the essential products are intangible, the same principles carry over to material production, with steel an example worth considering again--the mini-mill with its electric arc furnaces as against the giant integrated operations that characterized past steelmaking, the work being done to produce "green steel" today, suggestive of a Third Wave approach even to heavy industry. So too does it go with the renewable energy sector, which had a particularly important place in Toffler's predictions--Toffler anticipating that where the Second Wave civilization had been powered by a voracious consumption of finite fossil fuels, the Third Wave civilization would ultimately be renewables-powered, with this feat the simpler to bring about in a world where the substitution of information for things brought about a significant "dematerialization" of life. For example, the idea of replacing individual ownership of gas-burning cars with "Transportation as a Service" accessed through conveniently on-call self-driving electric cars can seem exemplary of Toffler's thinking (even if he did not make that particular prediction).

All that said, when we compare the world we actually live in with the world of his anticipations, how does it measure up? Consider such matters as the spread of telecommuting, and the "energy transition" to renewable energy. One might hail Toffler as a prophet for discussing such contemporary-seeming things in 1980--but the reality is that the world went very little way toward these developments compared with what he predicted. The frenzied, awkward, improvisation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how, in spite of the advances in telecommunications, there had been very, very little shift toward telecommuting in the decades since he wrote, while the ferocious resistance of employers to continuing in the practice any longer than they thought they absolutely had to made clear that they had every intention of keeping the workplace "Second Wave" to the extent that they had anything to say about the matter. Meanwhile the energy transition has been a far slower thing than Toffler anticipated. Where he characterized Big Oil, Gas and Coal as dinosaurs likely to fall in the 1980s, and predicted that we would have a renewables-powered civilization by 2025 (just next year!), the fact remains that any such transition remains far closer to its beginning than its end as the fossil fuel industry, as colossal, profitable and powerful as ever, fights back with the help of innumerable partners, allies and hirelings across the world of business, the media and politics.

In all this it seems that we would seem, at best, a long way from the "dematerialization" Toffler described--and indeed thinking about the state of the world it has seemed much more Second Wave than Third in the material foundations of life. One may take from this different conclusions--perhaps that there was really no civilizational shift ongoing the way Toffler thought there was, what he thought a Third Wave civilization a mere tweaking of the Second, which some have simply sought to play up because they thought it would serve their particular political agendas. Or perhaps such a shift is ongoing, but much more slowly than he anticipated--perhaps because he underestimated the force of the opposition to some of the associated changes.

In either case the lack of change is reflected at those structural and superstructural levels. Where Toffler saw the dominance of the large corporation and the nation-state giving way to more diverse, idiosyncratic and commonly smaller entities in economic and political life that arrange and rearrange themselves as immediate requirements dictate, the reality is that we still live in a world of the same sorts of organizations as before, with the same ideologies leading to the same politics and conflicts as before. Thus is one of the key divisions of our time the resurgence of that old division between capitalists of more cosmopolitan mind and the globalization they pursued so ardently, and the resurgence of nationalism now threatening to tear the global economy apart. It also seems to be all too telling that amid the multiplying and intensifying trade wars one of the most conspicuous recent acts has been a massive tariff on imports of those electric cars that were supposed to help take us into that new age of renewable energy, an action all too likely to further slow that already far too much delayed energy transition.

* This definition of information comes from Toffler's later, less well-remembered, but still bestselling 1990 book Powershift, which can be described as rounding out a "trilogy" he began with Future Shock and continued with Third Wave.