Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century

xxii, 585, [1] p. Index From the world-renowned author of the national bestsellers Future Shock and The Third Wave comes the culmination of a 25-year effort to map the astounding changes propelling modern man into the 21st century. Toffler provides the insight the reader needs to survive and prosper in the tumultuous years ahead. From Wikipedia: "Alvin Toffler (born October 4, 1928) is an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity. A former associate editor of Fortune magazine, his early work focused on technology and its impact (through effects like information overload). Then he moved to examining the reaction of and changes in society. His later focus has been on the increasing power of 21st century military hardware, weapons and technology proliferation, and capitalism. He founded Toffler Associates, a management consulting company, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, visiting professor at Cornell University, faculty member of the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, an editor of Fortune magazine, and a business consultant.Toffler explains, Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they re emotional, they re affectional. You can t run the society on data and computers alone. Toffler is also frequently cited as stating: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn." The words came from Herbert Gerjuoy, whom Toffler cites in full as follows: "The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction how to teach himself. In his book The Third Wave Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of waves each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside. First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures. Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation. Toffler writes: The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy. Third Wave is the post-industrial society. According to Toffler, since the late 1950s most nations have been moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society, one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource. His description of this (super-industrial society) dovetails into other writers' concepts (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler s key maxims is change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways ). In this post-industrial society, there is a wide diversity of lifestyles ( subcultures ). Adhocracies (fluid organizations) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources (see ersatz) and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians instead of proletarians), who are loosely affiliated. Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personal.…