The reason the world is so crazy these days... The Big Transition

We are in a transition period between the Industrial Age and the Information Age

This is me, on a chilly winter morning, next to a huge old mill wheel, in the old, industrial area of the Shockhoe Bottom district, in Richmond, Virginia, in 2019. Concreted into the sidewalk, next to one of the historic buildings, this is a reminder of the late 19th and early 20th century Industrial Age world that our society was based on for about 300 years. #steveemigphotos

You can’t turn on your TV, or open up any news app on your phone, without hearing about how crazy the world is today. There’s one crazy story after another, an endless string of them, events that people of the 1960’s or 1970’s could never have imagined possible. But we’re so used to hearing, and largely ignoring, crazy news now, that we’ve largely lost context at just how crazy today’s world is.

My favorite example is a completely nuts news story that nearly everyone has forgotten about, except me, apparently. In this local L.A. news story, we see the aftermath of a train engineer who ran a locomotive off the tracks, in an attempt to hit the hospital ship, U.S.S. Mercy, in early 2020. He did this because he believed a conspiracy theory related to the early stages of the pandemic. Let me repeat this, a man ran a locomotive off the tracks, across a parking lot, plowed through a concrete barrier and a chain link fence, in an attempt to hit a nearby ship. It doesn’t get a whole lot crazier than that.

In the world I remember as a kid, this would have made national news, it would have been a local topic of conversation for weeks, and people would still be talking about it ten years later. In today’s world of one crazy story in the news after another, this nutty event, which luckily didn’t harm anyone, has been completely forgotten. It’s been lost in the endless parade of craziness we all see in the media and experience day after day.

My point here is not about the pandemic or conspiracy theories, or even that it’s possible to drive a train across a parking lot, off of the tracks. My point is that we are in the middle of so much change and chaos, that completely crazy, real events have become an everyday thing. Some people think we’re nearing the end of the world, the fabled rapture from the book of Revelations in the Bible. (That whole book is a dream or vision, by the way, that’s what “in the spirit” means in Rev. 1:10). Some people blame video games, metal music, Harry Potter books, the “woke” culture, the shift away from traditional religions, and the decline of culture in general. I don’t think any of those things are why the world is so crazy today. I believe we are in a transition phase, in between the fading Industrial Age society and the emerging Information Age society.

This concept was first really explored and explained in the 1980 book, The Third Wave, by futurist Alvin Toffler. In that book, and several other books he wrote over the next 26 years, he explained why he believed the U.S., and many other countries, were leaving the “industrial-based society” and moving into an “information-based society.” In 1980, as most American factories around the country were still thriving, that was a radical idea. Now, 43 years later, in one sense, this idea is common knowledge. If you ask an average person, “Is the U.S. in the Industrial Age or the Information Age?” They will almost certainly say, “We’re in the Information Age.”

As a serious reader, and fan of, Toffler’s work, I believe we are not actually in the Information Age yet. I believe we’re in a decades long transition period in between the late Industrial Age and the early Information Age. Yes, thousands of American factories died out, and tens of millions of factory jobs have been outsourced or eliminated by new technology. That continues to happen. But the fall of the American manufacturing sector as the main source of U.S. jobs is just one part of this transition. To get into a functional Information Age, every other part of American society also has to make the transition into an Information Age business model, at least an early stage of it, and that hasn’t happened yet. Many industries have mostly made the transition to an Information Age business model, but many other industries, and institutions, have not. I call this period of transition between the two ages The Big Transition.

The Big Transition, in my thinking, is the idea that were are in transition between these two ages, a period of time of massive change, when we have some parts of society still working from Industrial Age ideas, mindsets, and models, and some parts of society are working from Information Age ideas, mindsets, and models. Very simply, the world is so crazy today because some parts of society are still in the old paradigm, and some are in the new paradigm. It’s kind of like the whole world is going through puberty all at once. It’s weird, awkward, confusing, and people are kind of making things up as they go in many parts of society.

Instead of transitioning from a child to an adult, huge parts of human society are moving out of a world with lots of factories making physical, mass market goods, huge department stores and malls, a few channels of mass media, and a highly conformist workforce, mostly doing rote, repetitive jobs. We are moving into a world with far more digital and non-tangible products, for more niche products, with millions of channels of media and interpersonal communications, with fewer brick and mortar stores, lots of online and on-phone shopping, with products shipped to our front doors. It’s a world where only 8% or 9% of workers manufacture physical goods, and more than a third of the workforce does highly creative, mostly mental work, not physical labor. The rest of the world is adapting to all the new ideas, technology, and new types of work and life that these changes make possible. That’s a huge change in everyday life for everyone involved. The Big Transition is the idea that we are in this long transition period, stretching from about 1956 to 2040 or beyond. This period started with really slow levels of change, but the rate of change has been steadily increasing for over 60 years now, and the 2020’s appear to be the peak in the rate of change.

Brainstorming with his highly intelligent wife, Heidi, Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave is the broad, incredibly well researched, explanation of why all this is happening. He explains that the First Wave of civilization was the transition from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society, beginning about 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave was the transition from the agricultural society into the industrial-based society, beginning about 350 years ago. Now we’re into the Third Wave of change, and it is happening far faster than the previous waves.

If this idea interests you, in this 2007 interview with Alvin Toffler, he explains the basic idea of The Third Wave, about 20 minutes. I highly recommend reading Toffler’s last book, Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2007, or reading The Third Wave (1980). All of his books are mind blowing in their detail and well thought out ideas about where society is heading. Toffler died in 2016, and it’s been 16 years since his last book was published.

The “information-based” society he began to imagine and explain 43 years ago continues to grow and evolve. Many of his insights into all the various nuances of this new society are still prescient today. For example, was talking about large numbers of people working from home in the future, way back in 1980. He called it “the electronic cottage,” describing the idea in a time before widespread, functional personal computers, and 20+ years before smartphones. But amid all the ideas and concepts put out by other people since, The Third Wave concept is largely lost to time, unknown to most people. Yet it explains the chaos and change in today’s world better than any other theory I’ve seen.

I started using the term,” The Big Transition,” in my own writing back in about 2016, when I realized the “Retail Apocalypse” was the transition from the Industrial Age goods distribution system into the Information Age goods distribution system. This is a definite part of the transition into the Information Age, but one that began years after his last book. I see this as just the idea that we are in this long transition period, while Toffler’s Third Wave is the entire body of ideas explaining why this is happening, and the nuances of how it is happening, and how he pictured different aspects may play out.

To recap, I believe the world seems so crazy because we are in a 85-90 year long transition period in between the late Industrial Age and the early Information Age. Every business, institution, and individual must make the change from an Industrial Age mindset and model to an Information Age mindset and model, to be viable in the new age. The world seems so crazy because we have huge levels of change happening in many different aspects of society, all at once. Once nearly all parts of society are working from an Information Age mindset and model, things will calm down quite a bit. But we’ve got at least 12 to 15 more years before that happens, in my estimation.

Writer’s note- 2/26/2024- I just stumbled onto one of my earliest explanations of “The Big Transition.” The concept had already been with me for 2 or 3 years. Here’s a blog post from April 7, 2019, where I did a solid job of describing what I mean by The Big Transition, for anyone interested in check it out.