After the Bell: Easing into the new year with Alvin Toffler

Okay, let’s take this slowly. It’s a new year and the temptation is to get out there, throw off the cobwebs, fling open the doors, and welcome the freshness of the new year. But, you know, we can do all of that slowly.

Although we celebrate the new year, the change is just conceptual. There is no essential difference between 31 December 2023 and 1 January 2024, especially since we no longer write cheques, which require us to remember the new year’s number. It’s nice to think in terms of a new start and there is nothing bad about that, but we can take it all in our stride.

There are great lyrics by singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, whom I’m very partial to (in defiance of almost everyone I’ve ever met), in a song called Slow: “I like to take my time/ I like to linger as it flies/ A weekend on your lips/ A lifetime in your eyes”. I mean, really, who else writes lyrics like that?  

If we are being deliberately slow about it, it’s easier to notice how similar the old year was to the new one, rather than the new year is not much different from the old year. We are suddenly rooted in reality rather than in hopefulness. As I say, nothing against a fresh start, but is that really how things happen? Do innovations jolt their way into our lives, or were they there all the time and just seemed to bounce into the public eye? 

During the break, I was at a village market in Greyton where there was a second-hand bookstall. I was paging through old editions of Wilbur Smith and endless bodice-rippers when I came across a book by futurologist Alvin Toffler called The Third Wave, published in 1980. I was familiar with his first big international success, Future Shock.

It’s interesting to look back on the predictions we make for the future and see how inevitably wrong and — less often, if we are honest — how sometimes weirdly right we were. But The Third Wave was an eye-opener and amazingly accurate. The book is a quick summation of history, with the first wave, the Agricultural Age, replacing the hunter-gatherer culture. The second wave, the Industrial Revolution, was characterised by the nuclear family, the dominance of corporations, and widespread education. The result is all kinds of mass: mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass media, mass recreation, and, ominously, weapons of mass destruction. 

Good call

But clearly, it was the third wave which interested Toffler most: the post-industrial society, called by others the Information Age. Although he doesn’t refer to it specifically, artificial intelligence is all over the place. Toffler called it, more generically, “intelligent machines”, which he claimed would revolutionise industry, change labour dynamics and affect human interaction with technology. Well, spank my ass and call me Sally, that was a good call. 

Many of Toffler’s best predictions had to do with the likely effect of technology on society. He coined the phrase “information overload” and was right about how the pace of change would increase. Innately optimistic and enthusiastic, he also predicted the trend toward customisation and personalisation. The whole idea of tailored experiences, to the extent they exist, was a Toffleresque take on technological change.

His worst predictions had to do with political and geopolitical changes. He was positive about the decline of the nation-state and the idea of an emerging global ethos, something akin to a new world order. He scorned the idea of “rule-by-periodic polling at the election booth” and welcomed a more direct interaction between governments and their populaces, which he called “anticipatory democracy”. Maybe all that will still happen. 

But standing here on the brink of a new year, I think it is incumbent on us to think forward, not backwards. There is a great story about The Third Wave in Wikipedia. While imprisoned under military rule in South Korea, the country’s future president, Kim Dae-jung, was given a copy of the book by his wife. In his autobiography, Kim said The Third Wave inspired him to make Korea an ICT powerhouse. Today, South Korea’s cyber-infrastructure is considered to be Kim’s greatest legacy, Wikipedia says. 

Goes to show, you can’t change the present without imagining the future first. DM