My idea of "The Big Transition" - in a nutshell

The late futurist, thinker, and writer, Alvin Toffler, explaining the "Third Wave" idea that he and his wife Heidi discovered, and then explained in their 1980 book, The Third Wave.  This interview is for their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth.

"The Big Transition" is a concept of mine, which is based on, and piggybacks on, the Third Wave idea put forth by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their 1980 book by that name.  Yes, that's a long time ago, but the Tofflers were looking far into our collective future.  We are now in the middle of "the future" that the Tofflers were thinking about, trying to figure out, and writing about.  To get to my concept, let's first get into the Toffler's "Third Wave" concept.

Originally, for somewhere around 200,000 years ago, human beings lived primarily as nomadic tribes of people, hunting wild animals, and picking fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.  We generally refer to these people as "hunter/gatherers" these days.  After thousands of years, there came some huge changes in human society and life, these are the three waves.

The First Wave
About 10,000 years ago, most likely in or near the country of Turkey, people started planting crops.  Agriculture, as we know it, was born.  It spread very slowly.  As it spread, people settled down, stayed in one location, started villages and small towns, grew crops, and fed their families.  Wealth came from owning the land the crops were grown on.  This was the Agricultural Age.

The Second Wave
About 350 years ago, new technology emerged, and machines began to get more important.  This transition happened faster, and villages and small towns grew into cities, as people left their farms, and moved into the towns and cities, because factories were being built.  It was a new economy, wealth came from owning the factories, and jobs were invented.  Before that, people worked on family farms, often on land owned by kings or barons.  The change to living in larger cities and working in factories was a complete change in the way human beings lived in society.  This was the Industrial Age.

The Third Wave
The third wave the Tofflers saw coming was another transition, from the industrial-based society to an information-based society.  They put the start of this era as 1956, the year there were more "white collar workers" (office people) than there were "blue collar workers" (factory people).  This change was fueled by an incredible series of new technologies, which began to fundamentally change society.  Radio, TV, video, computers, biological tech, medicines, all the way up to today's smartphones, A.I., and the like.  There were more and more new technologies that began to change how we communicated, how we built things, and eventually technology took many of the factory jobs humans performed during the Industrial Age.  This change to an "information-based society," the Tofflers realized, was as big and powerful as the changes between the other waves, like society moving from agriculture to factories.  But this change is happening much, much faster. This massive transition in how we live and work and communicate is basically happening in a single human lifetime.  This "information-based society" has been referred to as the "post-industrial society," or "the digital age." I use the term "The Information Age."

In their 2006 book, Revolutionary Wealth, Alvin and Heidi Toffler shared one idea, in particular, that got me thinking.  That idea was that different aspects of our current society are adapting to this new technology at different rates of speed.  For example, "Silicon Valley" our high tech businesses, are surging quickly ahead in using, and bringing, this new high technology into their daily lives.  The military has adapted and uses a lot of new technology, obviously.  But other areas of society, like our school system, our legal system, and our government agencies, among other institutions, have barely begun to really adapt to new technology and the many types of changes it has caused.

That idea, that we have different parts of society working with new technology at very different speeds, intrigued me, and I started thinking about this concept in a deeper way.  One main thought was the idea that we had many different parts of society, which were all in transition from the industrial-based society to the information-based society, which led me to a simple understanding.  We're actually not in the Industrial Age anymore, and we're not fully into the Information Age, we're actually still in the transition in between the two.  This long process of changing from one age into another, is "The Big Transition."  The Tofflers set the start of it in 1956, and my rough guestimate is that it will continue until at least 2040.  So instead of being in either age, industrial or information, we are all living in the in between time.  If you think of our current society that way, it's much easier to understand why things seem so chaotic in so many ways.

My next line of thought after that understanding was, "Is there any part of society that will not have to make the transition from an Industrial Age institution to an Information Age institution?"  I could not think of any part of society that would skip this change.  There may be some aspect I don't see, but I can't think of one.  So that means every single aspect of society has to change, at some point, from an Industrial Age model, to an Information Age model. So that puts us in an era, roughly 85-90 years long (maybe longer), where every single part of society has to be re-invented.  That's big.  That's scary.

"How does an industry or business or institution actually change from the Industrial Age to the Information Age?" became the next, obvious question.  I saw two ways.  1) A visionary person or group intentionally re-invents a business or institution, bringing it into alignment with not only the new technology available, but the new business and social environment created by these technologies, and new social standards, adapted to the world of new technologies.  2) A visionary person or group invents a new model for the business or industry or institution that completely disrupts the older, established Industrial Age model, and build the new, Information Age model, for that business or industry or institution.

In practice, this DISRUPTION, the second form of change, is the way most of these changes are happening.  And that's freaking all kinds of people out all across our society.  For example, in June of 1999, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker uploaded the Napster file sharing program onto the internet.  Using that program, suddenly people all over could share digital music files for free, in large numbers.  That act completely destroyed the business model for the entire music industry, immediately.  It took years ot fully shake out, but the initial change happened overnight.

That's Disruption, with a capital "D."  That really pissed off a lot of people, it put companies out of business eventually, fotunes were lost, and new fortunes were eventually built based on the larger change.  One more thing, it was INEVITABLE that a change like this would happen in the music industry, at some point, because of the new technology that had been developed.  It sucks for the Industrial Age music industry power structure, but it was going to happen at some point.  The same goes for Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and other online stores, which have disrupted Sears, J.C. Penney's, dozens of major chain retailers, shopping malls, and have lead to what's now often called the "Retail Apocalypse."  This caused major disruption to many businesses, many power structures, and thousands and thousands of people's lives.  But in a world where technology is going to keep evolving, like it or not, these huge Disruptions will keep happening.

The Big Transition began slow, and largely unnoticed, marked at 1956 by the Tofflers.  It's going to keep happening, like it or not.  It's accelerating, and more and more industries and institutions are being disrupted, and changing from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, at the same time, now.  These changes are happening faster, and these major changes are interacting with each other, and also creating major social backlashes.  It's a chaotic world these days.  It will get more chaotic.  But it's not going to stop until all of our human institutions are working with Information Age models, or until society collapses.  Hopefully, it will be the first one.  But it's not going to stop, and it's not going to slow down, until nearly all aspects of society are part of the Information Age.

That's my concept, "The Big Transition." In my mind, this is the overall contest, the macro explanation, for Western Society, and huge parts of other societies around the world.  As I write this, in August of 2019, the retail system is being disrupted.  The economic system is being disrupted.  both main political parties are being disrupted, many other industries are being disrupted.  The music industry, the publishing industry, and the video/TV industry, and the taxi/limo industry, to name a few, have already endured their main phase of disruption, and are moving forward. 

Many things have not hit their main Disruption point yet, or at least haven't hit the critical mass Disruption.  Our higher education system is just beginning to hit disruption, our K-12 education system hasn't been disrupted, our legal system hasn't been disrupted, and our government (in the way I'm speaking) hasn't been disrupted.  So there's A LOT of societal disruption still to come.

The Big Transition is a huge concept.  There could be dozens, likely hundreds, of books, written on the various aspects of it.  I see it as the background theory encompassing all kinds of smaller, but still very large, and very important, changes of all kinds.  I'm just beginning to share and spread this idea, and a book on this concept isn't in the works yet, because of my own personal issues I'm dealing with right now.  Hopefully I'll be able to put more effort into this idea, and provide a much more in depth look into this concept, before too long.

-Steve Emig, 8/26/2019