Some interesting perspectives on the world today, and definitely informed me that what I see happening is not just happening in my little corner of the galaxy. I have the insight, now, into the deep fundamentals which are part of the rhythmn of the next wave, the third wave. Little did I image that what I thought I sensed was actually part of the wealth tectonic plates shift.

My favorite author of all time!

A terrific explanation of the forces driving change throughout the world. One two three four five six seven eight nine......dear lord, really nine more words required. Smells like second wave thinking to me!

I remember being blown away as an undergraduate in the 1970s by popular sociological and futurist books on socio-technological challenges about the future such as Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave, (1980), David Riesmann (The Lonely Crowd, 1950), Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers(19 59) and The Waste Makers(1960), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Marshall MacLuhan (The Medium is the Massage, 1967), the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth (1972), Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener's The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years. Dizzy and heady stuff indeed!

Years later I read the Toffler's Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Centur (1990) and War and AntiWar (1993). For me, the spell spun by Future Shock still persisted into the first book but fizzled out for me in the second book. I was quite disappointed by Revolutionary Wealth(2006), when I read it in 2022 -perhaps the problem was reading it so long after it had been published. It strikes me as a book written at breakneck speed, firing off scattershot tidbits of striking, under-researched news, uneven, shallow and embarassingly market and. Techno-optimist. Very little analysis or view of the forest, occluded by unevenly and unsteadily planted treelets and hype:

A new way of life based on revolutionary wealth is still taking form in America -plug-in/plug-out jobs, glitter and hype, speed, commercialism, 24/7 entertainment, speed, cleaner air, dirtier television, rotten schools, speed, a broken health service and longer life, speed again, perfect landings on Mars, information overload, surplus complexity, reduced racism [sic], hyper-diets and hyper-kids[...]

It might help to think about America not simply as the world's most powerful nation-state, which is it currently is, but as the world's greatest social and economic laboratory [...] It is the main place where new ideas and new ways o life are eagerly tried -and sometimes pushed to stupid, even cruel extremes- before they are rejected, Experiment are under way in this lab not merely with technologies but with culture and the arts, sexual patterns, family structure, fashion, diets and sports, strat-up religions and brand-new business models.

One might be forgiven for acerbically thinking that it is a mad inventor's lab, the experiments aren't thought about, planned, created or reviewed, they are simply tried out ...and to be brutally honest, some of “stupid, even cruel extremes” have not been rejected.

Logic is not always a strong point of the book and it is frequently lost in the froth of excitement about the new and wonderful opportunities that the authors feel could come about. For example, the Tofflers are scathing about present-day education in the US, and are over-optimistically excited about new media's educational potential:

Young people have always educated -and miseducated themselves. Today, however they do with the dubious help of the new media. Games and cell phones are hidden behind open textbooks. Text messages fly back and forth even as the teacher drones on.

It is as though while teachers incacerate kind in classrooms, their ears, eyes and minds escape to rove the cyberuniverse. From a very young age, they are aware that no teacher and no school can make available even the tiniest fraction of the data, information, knowledge -and fun- available online. They know that in one universe they are prisoners. In the other, free.

Note how the final sentence undermines the second sentence's “dubious help pf the new media”assertion. So, are children to be left free to rove the contradctory thickets of news, games, sound-bytes, fake news and predators of the cyberuniverse? Is that the Tofflers solution to the education problem? Or consider the following concluding, supposedly cheerful, remark:

Having generated more new data, information and knowledge than all our ancestors combined, we have organized it differently, distributed it differently and combined and recombined it in new and more transient patterns. We have also created new cyberworlds in which ideas, magnificent and terrifying alike, bounce off one another like trillions of intelligent Ping-Pong balls.

What does this metaphor of ideas as trillions “Ping-Pong”balls bouncing against each other, supposed to mean?

Some of the Tofflers throw-away comments are startling spot on, others are downright silly, or wrong on so many levels:

As sex ratios change in many countries, with male babies outnumbering baby girls -120:100 in China, for example- the shortage of women is likely to promote male homosexuality, leading writer Mark Steyn ask, tongue in cheek, whether China is “planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta”.

The authors are also blinded by their ideas on the importance of “prosumers” to the point of stating:

Prosuming could even, ultimately, transform the ways in which we deal with problems such as unemployment [...} The reasonable [textbook] assumption was that if a million workers were out of jobs, the creation a million jobs woud solve the problem.

In the knowledge-intensive economy, however, that assumption is false. First, the United States and other countries no longer even know how many unemployed there are, or what that term means when so many people combine their “job”with self-employment and/or create unpaid value by prosuming [...] The problem of unemployment thus becomes qualitative rather than merely quatitative [...] The largely overlooked reality is that eveb the unemployed are employed. They are as busy as all of us are, creating unpaid value.

This is breathtaking, even offensive, blindness to the very real problems of unemployment, subemployment and the worst abuses of the gig economy, on the level of Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" supposed rejoinder to the starving crowds demand for bread during the French Revolution.

If you are willing to suspend disbelief and have factoids and snippets of snappy ideas flood over you, you will probebly love this book. If you hope to make more sense of what is going on, you can buckle down and start trying to reengineer the structure of this book, cross out the obsolete, incorrect ideas and the hype filter out the interesting and vauable insights. Be warned though, this salvage attempt will take (considerable) time and effort.

I always seem to read their books years after they are written. This book feels like it is so current to what is going on in our world today.

This is the latest offering by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler. As always, their ideas about the future are exciting and innovative. The emerging information wealth revolution comes complete with "prosumer" class who create (those who create goods and services "for [their] own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchange"). While there is no doubt that the Internet will change the world, there is some debate about what that change will mean for the future. Interesting and thought provoking as always but not one of my notable books this year.

I was a huge fan of the Toffler’s “The Third Wave”, which came out when I was in high school. Given its timing and its message, it was one of the books that set the direction of my education and career, and one of the few I’ve read multiple times. Now I read their “Revolutionary Wealth” thinking, or hoping, that this would describe wealth generation as we move farther into the third wave – the information economy. The Tofflers write like they always do, short chapters with leading questions going into the next. But in this case, I found a lot repetitive, both within the book and compared to their earlier books. This was written ten years ago, and “The Third Wave” about 30 years ago. I put myself into my 2006 mind and think about what is presented and I think it’s all reflecting what “The Third Wave” said or implied about the future. I didn’t really get any great new insights into the future with this one. I was also a bit disappointed with the content given the title. I expected more specifics on wealth creation, but I didn’t get it. OK for a Toffler junkie, good for a review of “The Third Wave” concepts, but not necessary reading.

The definitive text on what is going on in our global economy in the 21st century. Brilliant.

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Toefflers' book discusses how wealth is created in a post industrial age. Not overly well written but has the showings of some innovative thoughts.

An insight to what the future will hold and how wealth will be created. An in depth analysis of the past as well as the present and their argument towards why knowledge will be the capital of the future. So breathtakingly logical, so simple and yet something that blinds most of us as it sits right in front of our eyes today.

from the library c2006

p417 home test kits for women's hormones

read carefully up to p 189

early history of human is not feminist, present history of prosuming is right on

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