The Third Wave

The Third Wave, by Alvin Toffler ISBN 0553246984

The first wave was the agricultural revolution, when we went from being nomads to being settled farmers. People worked for themselves, ate food they had grown themselves, didn't specialize so much. The second wave was the industrial revolution. People started working for other people. They specialized; some produced food which they sold to other people to eat. The market arrived to connect buyers to sellers. Everything became mass-produced, centralized, synchronized. You can't run a production line if one worker is late to work.

The third wave started a few decades ago and is continuing. It promotes economies of speed rather than economies of scale. Customization is king: where production lines manufactured streams of identical items, they now make items that are slightly different, the machines driven by computers that reconfigure themselves on the fly. Intelligence is valued ever more highly; smart solutions are more efficient. Everything becomes desynchronized. Instead of phone calls, we have email and the WikiWikiWeb. Decisions are decentralized, localized, and networked. Supermarkets became self-service and promote late-night shopping. Publishing reached the desktop. Broadcast television gives way to time-shift video, then video rental, then video on demand, then the many-to-many anarchy of the Internet.

And so forth - read the book. It's very good; a profoundly different take on history to anything I ever got at school. It unifies and synthesizes a wide range of different phenomena.

Alexander sees his patterns as a return to the old ways, TheTimelessWayOfBuilding. I see it as very modern, very Third Wave. This is because of the emphasis on customization, adaptation and specialization. Do other people who have read both books make the same link? -- DaveHarris

Decentralization is both old and new, ancient and modern. Anthropologists have consistently found that pre-agricultural peoples lived without chiefs or kings or big bosses, in which each person had personal political autonomy and freedom. The patterns of our modern decentralized digital world have many similarities to those of our deep ancestry (the first 50,000 years of anatomically modern humans).

The similarity is entirely superficial. What pre-agricultural people had, living without an organized society, can't be called by the terms political autonomy or freedom. It isn't freedom to be "free" to be murdered by your neighbour in reprisal for the evil spirit he's convinced you sent him. It isn't political autonomy when there is no politics in the first place. Putting a modern label to a situation so alien you can't hope to comprehend it, is pointless.

Autonomy and freedom are complex and subtle concepts. Too subtle to be apprehended by reductionists who think in binaries such as good / evil, slavery / freedom. Too subtle to be apprehended by Americans; because I can't see a European harking back to the good old days of barbarism and rampant bloodshed for the sake of some specious and non-existent "freedom".

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