The Commanding Heights of Our Time
The impact of the information techno-sphere.
As much as I like to discuss Third Wave ideas, the hallmark of our 21st-century high-tech world, we must still deal with our Second Wave industrial past. Too many people still cling to the failed baggage from our Second Wave society.
My Third Wave concept builds upon the First Wave agricultural societies and feudalism. The Second Wave was our Industrial Age society. Third Wave society is based on information and is data-driven. Love it or hate it, today’s data-driven supply chains have their origin in First and Second Wave production systems too.
Any type of mass production is meaningless without comparable changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally handcrafted. Products were produced one at a time on a routine basis. The product distribution was based on various trade networks.
Even First Wave civilization has a sophisticated trading system built by various Arab, Indian, African, Chinese, and Scandinavian merchants. These merchants used companies to open trade routes around the world, organized convoys of ships and caravans. They traded in a rich world of glass, paper, silk, spices, tea, wine, and wool.
These First Wave era goods, however, got to customers only through small-scale shopkeepers or traveling peddlers roaming the countryside. Poor communications and rudimentary transport severely limited the market. These local shopkeepers and itinerant vendors could offer only the barest of inventories and resupply often took months or years.
The Second Wave industrialism smashed this obsolete distribution system. It made radical advances that upended old ways of distribution and production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened remote regions, and with industrialism came modern consumerism— and the first department stores. Complex networks of middlemen, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first department store in New York, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the assembly line. He improved distribution to a completely new phase by establishing the world’s first chain-store system— The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, later shortened to A&P.
Market distribution led to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself.
What we see, is a transformation of what Alvin Toffler called the techno-sphere. “All societies— primitive, agricultural, or industrial— use energy; they make things; they distribute things”. In all civilizations, the energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interconnected parts of a system of systems. This system of systems is the techno-sphere, and it has a distinctive form at each stage of societal advancement.
As the industrial Second Wave swept across our planet, the earlier agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable fossil fuels underpinned the mass production system which, in turn, spew out commodities into a highly mass-market distribution system.
Now as the information Third Wave sweeps across our planet, the earlier industrial techno-sphere is getting replaced by an information techno-sphere. Replacing the mass-market distribution system is innovative global supply-chains with just-in-time logistics. AI technology is implemented in the supply chain process, using data to improve the process quality, monitoring customer behavior, even analyzing in real-time for in-depth insight into the system. Information now produces more information, so control of this information and how it is used is vital to us in our Third Wave society.
It took people like Teddy Roosevelt to reign in the Second Wave robber barons’ and hold them accountable to society. Today the same holds true, as Third Wave society depends on information being a catalyst for human freedom. The monopoly of data by big government or big corporations is the next level in the robber barons’ attempt to deny people their rightful freedom too.
The information techno-sphere is not about the gadgets and electronic toys, but data and the social impact of that data. Ownership of data is the commanding height of our time.
John Foley is a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer. He currently lives in Colorado.
Notes:
Will a Third Wave of Social and Economic Organization Save Us? — Buzzflash
Trade Routes That Shaped World History | Mental Floss
George Huntington Hartford - Wikipedia
AI is Transforming the Manufacturing Industry: Pros and Cons - Global Trade Magazine