The world today is facing revolutionary change, yet simply acknowledging change is not acceptable. We must learn to identify and analyze change to better manage and guide it. If not, our civilization could squander our best chance of improving the human condition.
In the seventies, Alvin Toffler used wavefront analysis to examine the technological changes occurring in the world. Toffler viewed history as waves of changes with prominent points of each wave changing society. The main idea was not to focus on history but the innovations and breakthroughs. He hoped we could then examine the patterns for the identifiers so that we could as a society influence change.
These wavefront analysts believed the advent of agriculture was the first significant transforming point in human progress, and that the Industrial Revolution was the second great transformation.
This view held that such transformation was not a detached, singular occurrence but as a wave of rippling transformation moving at a certain speed globally.
Before the First Wave transformation, humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies. Some time, around ten to twelve thousand years ago, our agricultural transformation started, and it slowly spread across the planet. This First Wave of change set in motion the change we now deal with daily.
This First Wave change continued until the sixteenth century when the financial and protoindustrial revolution exploded in Europe and unleashed the second wave of global change. This new development— industrialization— spread more quickly across the world. These two separate and different transformational methods were still progressing across the earth concurrently but at different speeds.
In America, First Wave ideas lingered. Our very own Thomas Jefferson third U.S. President and notorious technology lover was also a First Wave holdout. Jefferson was an agrarian. He supported slavery, an important part of earlier First Wave ancient societies of Greece and Rome. Yet his conception of the yeoman farmer as the key element of American democracy was especially First Wave. The American Civil War can also be viewed through the lens of wavefront analysis for the First Wave agrarian southern planter class squared off against Second Wave northern industrialism in near-total war. Ironically, Jefferson the First Waver still holds a crucial element to our Third Wave transformation. Eventually, this blog may revisit the Jeffersonian seed within Third Wave ideas.
We do not give much thought today to the First Wave still spreading since most areas of the earth have been reached. Except for some tribes in the Amazon or the Congo basin, all the world is now reached by agriculture. The First Wave influence has largely culminated.
At first, the Second Wave spread across the northern hemisphere. It transformed life there and spread to the developing world. One only needs to look at China which struggled to transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. The drive of industrialization is still felt yet it is dying an agonizing death.
But even as the industrial process continued in the 1950s and 1960s, a new and more revolutionary transformation was getting underway. Few people fully understood the approaching Third Wave. The infiltration of the Information Age across the earth transformed the world and moved faster too.
Some countries, like China, are experiencing the influence of two, separate waves of change, all moving at different rates and with varying levels of intensity.
For this blog I consider the First Wave period starting sometime around 10,000 BCE and to 1500 CE. From this moment on, the First Wave lagged as the Second Wave started in Europe. The sixteenth-century Europeans financed the ships of discovery, which really just plundered much of the world and set the financial conditions for capitalism and protoindustrialization. Europe went on to pick up steam in the 1700s and the Industrial Revolution took off. Our Industrial civilization is the product of this Second Wave transformation.
Some may argue about the arrival of the Third Wave. Alvan Toffler looked at the data points and put the beginning in 1955 for the United States because this was the point when white-collar workers surpassed blue-collar workers. However, I prefer to put the Third Wave at a specific date, precisely on October 29, 1969. That is the day an ARPANET computer delivered its first message from one computer to another. “The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was originally developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network”.
The Third Wave followed in the footsteps of the previous Second Wave industrial revolution. In the late 20th century, it again swept first across the northern hemisphere in places like the United States, Northern Europe, Japan, and to a limited degree the Soviet Union. Now in the 21st century, all these same high-tech nations are struggling with the forces they unleashed on the world. Few counted on a confrontation between the Third Wave and the obsolete Second Wave economies and institutions.
Today some people like to negate the Third Wave by adding new slivers to the Industrial Second Wave. These people are still in denial of Third Wave forces and impede those who want to get to the Fourth Wave. What is the Fourth Wave? It is when humans have regular transit of our Solar System and everything that implies for humanity. An interesting example of a Fourth Wave civilization is what is portrayed in the television series The Expanse. The series is set hundreds of years in the future where humanity has colonized much of our Solar System. Yet much of the darker aspects of this sci-fi drama result from a poor Third Wave transition negatively impacting this future Fourth Wave civilization.
Yet let me be clear. If we botch the transition to a Third Wave civilization, there will not be a Fourth Wave civilization. Any continuation of Second Wave industrialism as the dominant form of our civilization will lead to human extinction. Therefore, we must use our ability to understand these waves and the tension they generate to solve our political and social conflicts. If we concentrate on reading the patterns, acting, and mitigating these conflicts then just maybe we can build a future less dark.
About the author: John Foley is a writer and political commentator. He is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and U.S. Marine Corps, veteran. He currently lives in Colorado.
History of agriculture - Wikipedia
History of Europe - Aspects of early modern society | Britannica