The Third Wave (1980), by Alvin Toffler, Bantam Books
Excerpt One:
Second Wave civilization placed an extremely heavy emphasis on our ability to dismantle
problems into their components; it rewarded us less often for the ability to put all pieces back together
again. Most people are culturally more skilled as analysts than synthesists. This is one reason why our
images of the future (and of ourselves in that future) are so fragmentary, haphazard—and wrong. Our
job here will be to think like generalists, not specialists.
Today I believe we stand on the edge of a new age of synthesis. In all intellectual fields, from the
hard sciences to sociology, psychology, and economics—especially economics—we are likely to see a
return to large-scale thinking, to general theory, to the putting of the pieces back together again. For it
is beginning to dawn on us that our obsessive emphasis on quantified detail without context, on
progressively finer and finer measurement of smaller and smaller problems, leaves us knowing more
and more about less and less.
Our approach in what follows, therefore, will be to look for those streams of change that are
shaking our Iives to reveal the underground connections among things not simply because each of
these is important in itself, but because of the way these streams of change run together to form even
larger, deeper, swifter rivers of change that, in turn, flow into something still larger: the Third Wave.
Like that young man who set out in mid-century to find the heart of the present, we now begin our
search for the future. This search may be the most important of our lives.
Excerpt 2:
Coal, rail, textile, steel, auto, rubber, machine tool manufacture—these were the classical
industries of the Second Wave. Based on essentially simple electromechanical principles, they used
high-energy inputs, spat out enormous waste and pollution, and were characterized by long production
runs, low skill requirements, repetitive work, standardized goods, and heavily centralized controls.
From the mid-1950's it became increasingly apparent that these industries were backward and
waning in the industrial nations. In the United States, for example, while the labor force grew by 21
percent between 1965 and 1974, textile employment rose by only 6 percent and employment in iron
and steel actually dropped 10 percent A similar pattern was evident in Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Japan,
and other Second Wave nations.
As these old-fashioned industries began to be transferred to so-called "developing" countries,
where labor was cheaper and technology less advanced, their social influence also began to die out
and a set of dynamic new industries shot up to take their place.
These new industries differed markedly from their predecessors in several respects: they were no
longer primarily electromechanical and no longer based on the classic science of the Second Wave era.
Instead, they rose from accelerating breakthroughs in a mix of scientific disciplines that were
rudimentary or even nonexistent as recently as twenty-five years ago quantum electronics, information
theory, molecular biology, oceanics, nucleonics, ecology, and the space sciences. And they made it
possible for us to reach beyond the grosser features of time and space with which Second Wave
industry concerned itself, to manipulate, as Soviet physicist B. G. Kuznetsov has noted, "very small
spatial regions (say, of the radius of an atomic nucleus, i.e., 1(H3 centimeters) and temporal intervals
of the order of Kh23 seconds."
It is, from these new sciences and our radically enhanced manipulative abilities, that the new
industries arose—computers and data processing, aerospace, sophisticated petrochemicals,
semiconductors, advanced communications, and scores of others. In the United States, where this shift
from Second Wave to Third Wave technologies began earliest—sometime in the mid-1950's—old
regions like the Merrimack Valley in New England sank into the status of depressed areas while
places like Route 128 outside Boston or "Silicon Valley" in California zoomed into prominence, their
suburban homes filled with specialists in solid-state physics, systems engineering, artificial
intelligence, or polymer chemistry.