Alvin Toffler
Strategies for Survival
By Blake Harris
- Editor and Bryan M. Gold - Assistant Editor
Alvin Toffler is one of the world's best-known futurists and
social thinkers. His books, such as Future Shock, The Third Wave
and Powershift, continue to be read in more than 50 countries.
They have drawn comment from and have affected the strategic thinking
of leaders from around the world and have significantly influenced
contemporary thought about the information revolution,
social transformation and the speed of change. Toffler works in
close intellectual partnership with his spouse, Heidi Toffler,
who has co-authored many of his works.
Q: You have written
extensively about the breakup of the industrial system, which you
define not just as an economic and political system, but also as the
entire culture -- a whole set of institutions and our integrated way
of life. As we enter the new millennium, during the tremendous
changes and turbulent times that lie ahead, are there lessons from
the past that humanity must not lose sight of? What must we try to
hang on to?
A: An acceleration
of change has consequences that are not necessarily a result of
whether the change is good or bad, but just acceleration itself
creates consequences and some difficulties for us. While I recognize
that, nevertheless, I believe that we need to let go. There are
many things that we need to let go. Rather than focus on hanging
on, we need to focus on inventing.
As an American, I want to hang on to my Bill of Rights, for
example. I don't think the current Bill of Rights necessarily
answers all the questions that we need to answer about the 21st
century -- the kind of rights that we may need guarantees for. For
example, rights having to do with genetic engineering or having to
do with privacy or having to do with a variety of other issues
raised by the kinds of changes that are taking place today. What I
would like to do is hold on to the rights that we have, but expand
them to take account of the new ones. So there are certain things I
want to hang on to. I certainly want us to hang on to whatever
personal relationships that we weave in the course of our lives, our
family relationships and companionship and so on. But I believe that
the main message that ought to be sent to the readers of any
magazine that goes to government is not what to hang on to, but what
it is going to have to change.
Institutions change at different rates. Businesses change
rapidly because they are under enormous competitive pressures and
for a variety of reasons. Business corporations, as an institution,
for good or for ill, change quickly. School systems change extremely
slowly. Political systems are even more rigidly resistant to change
when it comes to the structure of government, and so on. So what you
have are enormous forces that are converging on the society --
technological, social, economic and a whole variety of forces --
making the current set of institutions inappropriate for where we
are going, including the kind of governments that we now have. So
while there are certain things, obviously, we want to keep, rather
than saying what we should hold on to, we have to be talking about
what do we have to change. And how we do that peacefully, because
change implies conflict and brings conflict with it.
Conflict is the other side of change, and conflict can be
creative. It can be positive up to a point. But beyond that point,
it can be destructive and deadly. So the question is how do we
prepare ourselves, whether we are a state or county or city, or for
that matter, a national government? How do we prepare ourselves to
make the fundamental kinds of changes that I think are going to be
necessary to cope with this wave of transformation?
Q: In the years
since you wrote Future Shock and The Third Wave, most of our society
has become far more conscious, in part because of the tremendous
impact and insight of your books, of the fact that we are moving
into a new age where many things will be very different. Since then,
we've seen the rise of the Internet and how digitalization is
changing business and organizations of all descriptions. What do you
think is particularly important for state and local government to
realize about this transformation?
A: My wife and I
have been studying change around the world for decades. And I
believe that today's tremendous changes in technology, society,
culture and politics are going to shift the balance between
centralized and decentralized organization, profoundly change
systems of taxation and revolutionize the economy. All of these are
likely to have a direct impact on the functions and authority of
states, counties and cities in the future. But even these changes
are only part of an even larger set of forces converging on us
today.
Most people are now aware that knowledge plays a new role in
the creation of wealth -- that we are moving toward what has been
called a "knowledge-based economy" or "a third-wave economy." What
is perhaps less widely understood is the transformation we are
living through goes far beyond business, far beyond markets, far
beyond economics, far beyond technology and far beyond government as
we know it today.
What we are seeing is an emergence of a completely new way of
life. Or, put differently, a new civilization. We talk about
connectivity. We are busy connecting everybody to everybody. We talk
about how every business and every person is now connected, or soon
will be. That's what today's titanic struggle in the
telecommunications, television, Internet and the e-commerce
industries is all about -- who will connect who to whom.
But there is another, largely overlooked level of
connectivity. And that, I think, is really important. Today's
changes in technology and the economy are increasingly connected to
other kinds of changes in society. We are connecting technology to
politics, politics to culture, culture to science, science to family
life, family life to religion, religion to ecology and so on. All
the different spheres of social existence are also being wired
together more tightly than they were -- which means that a decision
in any one of those ramifies through the entire system and creates
changes on down the line.
You can't change something in the ecology without it having
an effect on social life. You can't change something in the social
system without it having an effect, indirectly or directly, on
business or on technology or on politics. So I believe that all
these different aspects of life, all of which are being changed and
which form a larger social system or civilization, are now more
densely interconnected. Therefore, the connectivity that most people
talk about -- digitalization, wired up or wireless connections and
so forth -- is only a small piece of a much deeper form of
connectivity that will alter the way we think and the way we live.
And, indeed, will alter the relationships of cities to counties,
counties to states, states to Washington, Washington to Tokyo, Tokyo
to Brussels.
All of these subsystems of the society, if you want to think
of it that way, or these spheres of social life, were always
interconnected to some degree. But today, the feedback processes
between them are so rapid and complex that nobody understands them
very well. In turn, as digitalization effects each of these parts of
society, everything from consumer wants or needs to law, values,
finance and the way we run our governments must and will be
transformed.
Q: How do you see
digital democracy developing in the future?
A: Well, my wife
and I wrote many years ago in our book The Third Wave that one does
not have to counterpoise direct democracy and representational
democracy. There are many, many ways to fuse these two together. The
Internet is going to have an enormous impact on both of those forms.
The Internet means that you can organize a constituency almost
instantaneously behind any proposition that somebody wants to put
forward. Some of those will be constructive and some of those will
be hateful. We see that already. But the fact that you can have
instantly organizable, temporary constituencies means that
underneath the formal operations of our governmental systems -- with
the machinery of elections and the formal processes by which we
convert candidates into 'representatives' -- underneath that
something is going on that is much deeper.
Virtually nobody in America believes in government. And that
is true not just for Washington, it is true for city hall, it is
true for wherever. I believe, moreover, that almost nobody considers
themselves 'represented,' even though we have a system we call
representative government and, that in some respects, it is
pseudo-representation. But in other respects, even at best, people
who have given sweat equity to political activity, or who have
contributed money, even some of the people who have contributed huge
sums of money, all feel unrepresented.
I can cite individual cases of people -- leave aside the
poor, leave aside minorities, leave aside people who have
classically felt unrepresented. I can tell you there are giant
campaign contributors who feel totally alienated from both parties
and feel that they are unrepresented by the present system. When you
stop and look at what is happening to the system -- well, I'll quote
a senator, a friend of mine. When we wrote the book Powershift,
which came out in 1990, he called. "I just want to have an
intellectual conversation," he said. "I can't do that here in
Washington. I never have more than two-and-a-half minutes of
unbroken attention." And then, on another occasion when we had
dinner with him, he said, "Two-thirds of my time is spent on public
relations and fund-raising. Then I'm on this committee, this
subcommittee, this task force, this joint committee, this other
group. Do you think I can possibly know everything I need to know to
make intelligent decisions?" He honestly said, "I can't. Therefore,
my staff makes the decisions, or many of them." And my question to
him was, "Who exactly elected your staff?"
So there is a fundamental disjuncture -- a break between the
way the system is designed to work and the way the system actually
works. It is dysfunction. And that means that we are going to face
profound constitutional questions in the decade or two ahead. And we
are kidding ourselves if we think we can escape that.
Q: Looking more
broadly at the question of "powershifts" -- your book on this
subject made an excellent case to the effect that "the substitution
of information and knowledge for labor has brought us to the edge of
the deepest powershift in human history." How, in your view, is the
relationship between governments and their citizens changing? In
what ways is government going to have to deal with citizens
differently?
A: Well, as access
to information and misinformation becomes more widespread, all kinds
of authority is coming into question. It is not just that we
question the authority of our governments -- and frequently with
justification. But we question the authority of the doctor, because
when my wife or my daughter goes to our doctor, she knows more about
the disease than that doctor who has to deal with 60 different
diseases. We are looking at one. We have access to medical
literature. We have access on the Net. We prep ourselves before we
go in there. And, therefore, there is a change within the power
relationship between the doctor and the patient.
The same thing is true across the board. Many, many other
power relationships in this society, and all relationships have an
element of power in them -- the shift of the availability of
information changes things. In business, for example, it has already
changed the relative power of the manufacturing sector to the
retailing sector. And now you hear throughout industry, whoever owns
the customer has the power, as distinct from the manufacturer or the
supplier. The availability of information -- in the case of retail,
it is the information they are getting out of their optical scanners
and other kinds of information that they have -- prepares them
better to fend off the pressures from competitors and/or, in the
case of the big supermarket, the big food companies, the
manufacturers. So what you see, as information becomes available, it
shifts power relationships.
And I believe that we are, moreover, moving into a pretty
dangerous period. The dark side of the new technologies, with deep
political implications, is what we call the end of truth. First,
when you download something from the Internet, you can't always be
sure what you are reading is what was input by whoever it says did
it. So there is a great deal of insecurity about the information
that is available on the Net. Second, you have technologies now that
make deception cheap, easy and available. And these are not just by
interfering with Internet-based information.
Look at the movies. The special effects began a few years ago
with a movie called In the Line of Fire. In that movie, producer
Jeff Apple digitized an actor, Clint Eastwood, into existing film of
the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas. And when you saw that movie, you
could not tell that Clint Eastwood had not been a Secret Service man
there to protect Kennedy. Subsequently, you've got movies like
Forest Gump, where Tom Hanks meets Nixon and chats with him.
Scientific American did an article on how digitization can be used
photographically for deception. It showed a picture of President
Bush walking in what seemed like the Rose Garden, followed about six
feet behind by Margaret Thatcher. In the next photograph, they are
walking side by side. In the next photograph, they are practically
holding hands and whispering in each other's ear -- and all of that
is easily manipulated.
So there are now tremendous new technologies of deception
and, as yet, not very many technologies for verification. Then you
add to that one further feature, and that is not technological but
intellectual and philosophical -- the rise of a whole school of
philosophy called post-modernism which, in fact, challenges the very
conception of truth. You put all those together, and you are moving
into a period, I think, which will feed the political cynicism of
the population. It means that seeing is not believing. Reading is
not believing. Hearing is not believing. And that means you are
going to have a lot of very, very cynical people, even more so than
today.
The flip side of this is the danger that you will also have a
fractional population that will believe only one thing and believe
that thing fanatically -- the danger of a split between the cynics
and the fanatics. And that could have enormous political
consequences.
Q: In terms of the
new emerging dark side of the technology, do you feel this is
inevitable? Are there things that can be done to help deal with
this?
A: I think what is
happening, for good or for ill, people are becoming much more media
savvy. They are becoming skeptical. They need to be skeptical and,
to a point, it is justified. I think it has a lot to do with
political campaigning, the kind of messages, the fractionalization
of audiences into different constituencies, the pressure of sound
bites. And some very serious thought needs to be devoted to how
governments and how politics in general, and political people in it,
communicate, and through what channels they can communicate. All of
that is going to change.
It is not that everything is going to be reduced to a
push-button vote, I don't believe that's true, and I think that's a
simplistic model. My wife and I frequently were accused of favoring
push-button democracy. That is by people who have not read what we
have written. So I don't think that's what is going to happen. But I
think you also have lots of people who have been displaced by this
revolution.
On the other hand, I believe the positive consequences of
digitalization, electronic commerce and new technology are, in fact,
to make possible the substantial alleviation of poverty. Whereas
most people worry about the division between the info-rich and the
info-poor, something that we talked about decades ago, I have grown
less pessimistic and more optimistic as the price of computers and
broadband communication go down. I spoke, for example, to thousands
of teachers in Mexico and they raised this question. "We are poor,
we are a poor country, a poor region. Aren't we going to be left
out?"
I asked one question. "Please raise your hand if you have a
television set." They all raised their hands. In a few years, that's
what a computer is going to look like. That is going to be the
computer. And now we have companies giving computers away free. So
the fact is that we are moving toward extremely cheap computing
power, extremely cheap broadband communication, and the consequences
of those are going to be a billion people networked together around
the world.
Q: Given what you
said earlier about letting go, should we be fearful of what's to
come, or joyful for what is happening? And given that, what should
governments being doing to better prepare for the transformation
ahead?
A: We should not
blindly embrace, but we should certainly not blindly resist or
blindly try to hang on. My wife and I have what I call a bittersweet
approach. The world that we are creating -- it's not just coming
toward us, we are creating this new world, some of us. In fact, most
of us, one way or another, are contributing to the creation of this.
The world is going to be different: That doesn't mean it is going to
be utopia, that doesn't mean it is going to be a distopia. There is
still going to be sickness, there is still going to be age, there is
still going to be problems with kids, and family life and love and
interpersonal relationships and the stuff that people feel
emotionally very close to. We are going to have political problems.
And we are undoubtedly going to have wars, and so on.
So the idea that we are going through a transformation does
not mean that the other side of that is going to be all black or all
white. We are going to have a very different way of life. Different
is the key term. And it will create its own set of new problems.
Enormous moral problems arise, for example, out of biotechnology and
genetics. The Europeans are going crazy about genetically altered
food right now. Their panic may be overdone and may be stoked for
economic and trade reasons, rather than for the ostensible reason.
But, be that as it may, we are going to face profound issues of what
do we mean by being human. What is the definition of human? How will
that change as we begin to effect our own evolution? We have the
tools to do that now.
I believe that will create enormous political strains,
enormous religious movements, good or bad, that will play a role in
all of this -- a greater role than they do at present. And it is
going to be just a very, very, very different world. And to say,
"Let's hang on," is like saying to the peasant family in medieval
France or Germany, "There's an Industrial Revolution coming at you,
but you don't have to change. You stay in your village and maintain
village ethics, and village morality, and the ignorance that went
with living in a village, and the lack of democracy that went with
living in a village, and so on." I'm not in favor of hanging on. I'm
in favor of trying to make sense of the changes that are occurring,
attempting to develop some strategies, personal and
organizationally, that anticipate what is coming.
We coined a phrase in Future Shock. We said if we want to
have a democracy, it needs to be anticipatory democracy, not just
participatory -- anticipatory -- because the changes come so rapidly
that you can easily have your democracy swept away. And what we now
have is a mass democracy that is appropriate for mass production,
mass distribution, mass consumption, mass media, all the rest of
that. And it is the political expression that is built on those and
those systems that are falling apart.
Economically, it used to be that the aim of production was to
make a million identical objects that were absolutely
interchangeable. Now you hear about mass customization. It becomes
cheap and possible to customize products, personalize products, turn
out one-of-a-kind. A woman can go get a pair of jeans measured by
computer, cut to her shape, not just size 10 or size 12 or whatever
the case may be. We are customizing production and moving toward a
system that makes it possible to "demassify" mass production. The
same thing is true of markets. We used to talk about mass marketing.
Now we talk about niche markets. We talk about micromarkets. We talk
about markets of one, person-to-person marketing, one-to-one
marketing. These have all kinds of social and other parallels.
For example, we see it in the media. In our system, you
create a product and you have a market over there, and it is the
media that created the knowledge among the consumers that there was
a product to buy. But, the fact is, we grew up when there were three
televisions networks and three jokes the following morning. Now,
we've got not only a multiplicity of cable and satellite channels,
but the Internet -- which is, in effect, an infinite stream of
channels coming into the home. And what that does is provide
precision targeting for the manufacturer or the seller to reach the
customer on a one-to-one basis. The mass society, and the consumers
in a mass society, may have accepted identical, one-size-fits-all
products. But more and more people today not only yearn to do "my
own thing" but to "buy my own thing, to be my own thing, to learn my
own thing." And they demand that they be treated as individuals, not
part of the mass, if you stop and look at the social consequences of
this.
In the same way, I believe that racial and ethnic
identifications are also demassifying in parallel to what is
happening in the economy and the media today. Yes, a Million Man
March can be organized. It can materialize and that is a mass event,
for sure. But if we look more closely at the way things are going,
we find race relations in the United States are not just a
minority/majority issue. It is not just black and white any more.
The key identifications people are making inside their heads, and in
their groups, are often subethnic. So categories like Hispanic, or
Black, or African American, or Asian -- categories that lump many
different cultures together -- are increasingly inadequate to
explain how people identify themselves. Americans of Mexican origin
are keenly aware of how different they are from Americans from
Guatemala, or El Salvador, let alone Puerto Rico or Cuba. Often
there are tensions, as between Cubans and Mexicans -- the way they
recently had a big fight, for example, over the control of the
Spanish-speaking media in the country.
Women, as a category, are increasingly aware of narrower and
narrower subidentifications. At one level, we still see the mass
media spreading in the world. But underneath that, we are all
identifying ourselves much more precisely within narrower and
narrower groups. And, thus, we see greater and greater diversity,
not just in products and services, or in the music we listen to, but
things like resurgent regional cuisine. At every level, I believe,
you are seeing this.
At the same time, there is a growing sense of complexity.
Boundaries are blurring, relations grow more temporary,
decision-making more pressurized and the speed of change continues
to accelerate. And that is what political and administrative
leaders, and business leaders, are up against today -- all
decision-makers. When you put all that together, you get an impact
that is not just additive, but cumulative.
Politically, there are more different interests to satisfy.
It becomes harder to create consensus. Pressures for
decentralization grow. And even decentralized units face demands for
autonomy by subunits. Cities want autonomy. The Valley wants to
secede from Los Angeles. And all this will be intensified by the
coming hurricane of changes yet to come and these are going to hit,
for example, the tax system.
The third wave brings with it an upheaval in taxation.
E-commerce -- I do not believe that e-commerce should be slowed. I
believe that e-commerce is in a stage of chaotic, explosive
development, that it should be allowed to go untaxed for at least a
period of time until it takes shape. And I know this represents a
real threat to the financial underpinnings of many communities. But,
nevertheless, e-commerce should not be slowed or stopped in my
judgment.
I think we will see a shift from sales taxes to other kinds
of taxes, to other kinds of fees. I think we are going to be looking
for all kinds of alternative sources of taxation. Faced with all of
these challenges, American governments at all levels need to take a
deep look at their future, and to find strategies for success and
survival.
What new functions will justify the existence of a political
entity that lies between the federal government and the
municipality? Businesses everywhere are flattening their
hierarchies. They are eliminating layers of management. They are
disintermediating unnecessary go-betweens between levels of
management. What does that portend for the county or the state?
What's your strategy for confronting those changes? Do you have a
coherent strategy based on a realistic image of the future? There is
a growing pattern amongst leaders in business, government and
politics to throw up their hands and say that things are changing so
fast that strategy is obsolete; you can't have a strategy -- things
are too unpredictable. And that all you need to do is to be quick
off the mark, agile, [and have] the ability to respond rapidly and
quickly to circumstance.
I would argue that is not adequate. Without a strategy, you
become part of somebody else's strategy. So I believe that in order
to rethink, reconceptualize, the role of government, you have to
start asking profound, fundamental questions and also begin to
develop a strategy for dealing with this hurricane of change that
I've described -- strategies that may be switchable, quickly
changeable, with backward contingency plans. But, nevertheless,
strategy -- not just ad hoc, shoot-from-the-hip responses.
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