The Big Transition: the unplanned revolution of everything
Welcome to Dystopia, the future is now, and now, The Tumultuous 2020's, is a period of massive change throughout society
Residential and commercial real estate are two of the industries that are all screwed up right now, as we work through The Big Transition. Homeless encampment at a park-n-ride parking lot, that sprang up during the pandemic, 2021. It’s gone now, they’ve moved to other locations. Studio City, California. #steveemigphotos
Nearly every business in almost every industry is now being forced to completely rethink their business model. The only exceptions are the businesses and industries that have already made the transition. What transition? The transition from an Industrial Age business model to an Information Age business model. This is the real reason the world feels so crazy these days. We are in transition.
Most business people, economists, and business news talking heads, will continue to blame this all on the Covid-19 pandemic, and the $6 trillion in new money that The Fed and the U.S. treasury created to flood the whole financial system in 2020-2022. That huge influx of money bailed out the banking system, large businesses, some small businesses, whole towns, and cities. Those stimulus checks, and the PUA, PPP, and ERC programs, turned tens of millions of Americans into Stimulus Ballers in late 2020, 2021, and into 2022. All that money, combined with the supply line disruptions caused by the pandemic business shutdowns, completely warped and fucked up the economy, the financial markets for investors, and nearly every retail industry. As big of an issue as these things are, they are just another level of the changes that were already happening, before the pandemic. The pandemic, and the Federal Reserve and U.S. government response to the pandemic, just accelerated changes that were already happening in our society overall.
At the end of January 2020, I wrote this chapter of my online book/blog, Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, explaining why the 2020’s were going to be one of the craziest decades ever. At the time, the Covid-19 pandemic was something happening in China, we had no idea it would be a big deal in the U.S.. Yet, I said in Dystopia that we were going into a great depression in the 2020’s. In chapter 13, I wrote that every business and industry was going to have to make a difficult transition, from an Industrial Age business model into an Information Age business model, except those that had already made the transition. How did I know this before the pandemic hit? Because my favorite futurist, Alvin Toffler, had introduced this idea to the world 40 years earlier.
The Toffler’s Third Wave
The late Alvin Toffler came to prominence as a futurist writer with his 1970 book Future Shock. The surprise bestseller, a product of years of research and brainstorming by Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi, looked at many emerging technologies and social trends, that they believed would completely revolutionize the world, and would speed up the pace of life itself.
Toffler followed Future Shock with ten more years of research, and then published The Third Wave in 1980. The central theme of the book was that the U.S. and other industrialized nations were moving into an entirely new type of society. The Tofflers believed we were leaving the industrial-based society and moving into an information-based society. In an era of landline phones, four channels of TV, and when average people didn’t have computers at work or home yet, Alvin and Heidi Toffler tried to imagine the coming world based on information, not on industrial production of physical items.
In the Toffler’s reckoning, the First Wave of civilization, about 10,000 years ago, was the shift from a hunter/gatherer society into an agricultural society. It took thousands of years for the Agricultural Age to spread around the globe. People began to stay in one place, and raise crops and domestic livestock. Villages turned into towns and some cities. Every person and group slowly transitioned to a completely new way of life. About 350 years ago, the Tofflers tell us, the Second Wave began, the birth of the Industrial Age. That took a couple of hundred years to spread around the world, growing and evolving as it went. Small businesses and manufacturing operations grew as machines became more advanced, and did more and more of the physical work that humans once did. Some towns and cities grew tremendously around the new, growing, factories. A few cities grew much, much larger. Again, the everyday way of life changed for every person in the new type of society. Here in the United States, Generation X was the last generation to be born into the Industrial Age society.
As Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave in the late 1970’s, the factories of America were still thriving. In the years right before the book was published in 1980, a few factories began to shut down, and move to locations with cheaper labor. After his book was published, talking about the changes in manufacturing, and other aspects of society, the mass shutdowns of U.S. factories really kicked in, giving credence to Toffler’s ideas. Industrial robots and better manufacturing machines took millions of human jobs, and outsourcing factories to places with cheaper labor took millions more. Four years later, the Apple Macintosh, the “personal computer for everyone,” debuted, and personal computers became a part of everyday life at home and in offices, killing off more traditional clerical jobs. The flood of new technology Toffler wrote about became very visible to everyday working people. The new technology, and the pace of change, increased its pace.
Technology began to invade every part of our lives. In about 15 years, we saw cable TV, VCR’s, fax machines, PC’s in the office, car phones (the first cell phones), home video cameras, personal computers at home, hand held cell phones, and then the internet, come into our lives. Everyday life began to completely change as one new technology after another changed the way people worked, shopped, socialized, learned, and communicated with each other. Along with the technology came social changes, as society tried to catch up with all the change happening in technology, and the new types of lifestyles this technology made possible.
The Toffler’s predictions weren’t perfect, but the incredible amount of research and thinking in The Third Wave did a great job of explaining the scope and types of change society was beginning to deal with. Alvin Toffler wrote several more books, building on this idea of The Third Wave. His last book was Revolutionary Wealth, published in 2006. Alvin Toffler died in 2016, and his wife Heidi died in 2019. They left behind several books and a few TV interviews explaining their ideas on where society was heading.
My personal struggles in a collapsing industry
I first discovered the Tofflers’ work in the early 1990’s, when I was reading dozens of books a year, trying to learn about business and future trends, and to work through my own personal issues, like being incredibly shy. The Third Wave idea, described in the later books, made sense to me. It was another piece of the worldview I was building, by reading dozens of books every year, combined with my own observations. I worked a series of odd jobs through the 1990’s, while reading over 200 books, and listening to another 150 on audio tape, trying to figure life out, and get my own shit together.
Then I became a taxi driver in 1999, after an injury, when I couldn’t do the heavy lifting required by my Hollywood lighting job anymore. As the taxi industry went downhill, I wound up living in my cab, working 12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. I gained a bunch of weight, and got pretty depressed. The taxi company pulled the old CB radios out of the cabs, and put in new dispatch computers. GPS and computer tech hit the taxi industry. The whole taxi business collapsed, literally overnight, when they put the computer in my cab. In one day, the amount of business I got from dispatch dropped by about 60%. I worked more and more hours each day to compensate, forced to find more business on my own, until I was working 14 to 18 hours every day. My attitude and my health continued to decline, and I just made enough money to get by, week after week.
Most of my time in the taxi was spent sitting in the cab, waiting for calls, or for rides from hotels during the day, or from the bars at night. I had a lot of time to think. On one hand, I had always been fascinated by trying to figure out where society was headed in the future. On the other hand, I didn’t think much of the internet in the first decade of it, and never learned to use it, beyond checking my email and a few Google searches every week. Because of that, I got my ass kicked by new technology in the taxi industry. I learned the pain of an industry in transition firsthand, by getting trapped in a collapsing industry, and then winding up fully homeless when it got really bad. Since I was living in my taxi, it was my home, my transportation, and my source of income. When I had to quit, I lost all of those at once.
It wasn’t Uber and Lyft that killed the taxi industry, it was the new technology of dispatch computers in the early 2000’s, years before ridesharing apps came along. Suddenly, the taxi companies could put as many taxis as they could buy out on the streets. They weren’t constrained by how many cabs a dispatcher to handle on the radio. So the taxi companies bought lots of old Crown Vics, former police cars, at auction, for $2,000 each, and put $1,000 into them to turn them into taxis. Then they found new drivers, mostly immigrants willing to work 80 hours a week for low pay, who would lease that cab for $550 to $600 per week.
Think about it, put $3,000 into a car and immediately get $600 a week in rent on that car? It was a great deal for the taxi company owners. Suddenly there were many more taxis on the streets, struggling to pay their weekly lease, because the total amount of business hadn’t changed. Business actually dropped for our company, after the computers went in. More taxis meant less business per cab, and less money per driver. It was up to us drivers to find our own business, for the most part. The taxi business in Orange County, California, got more and more competitive between the drivers. One driver committed suicide in his taxi in Newport Beach. Another driver in Anaheim pulled a gun, and started shooting at fellow driver, who jumped in front of him in line at a hotel. Shit got really crazy in the mid 2000’s in the taxi business, as new technology changed the whole nature of the business.
When I first drove a taxi in Huntington Beach, California, in 1999, I was the only taxi sitting in the little bar scene downtown. There were 2 or 3 other cabs, working the inland bars, getting personal calls from bartenders or customers, on their phones. In 2003, there were 3 or 4 of us cabs on Main street in H.B. every night, as the city redeveloped, and the bar scene began to grow. One night in 2007, four years after the dispatch computers were put in, I counted 57 taxis in the three block area in downtown Huntington Beach. In four years there were 20 times as many taxis working that area, and none of us were making decent money.
That was 3 or 4 years before Uber and Lyft came onto the scene. New technology had already killed the industry, Uber and Lyft were just nails in the coffin of the taxi, limo, and airport shuttle industries. Taxis were the Industrial Age way of giving rides to people who needed rides. Uber, Lyft, and other ride sharing, and car sharing apps, are the Information Age way for people to get rides.
No one person or group set out to destroy taxi driving, it just happened, an unplanned revolution caused by new technology, changing social trends, and the possibility of new types of business models, because of the emerging technology of smartphones, phone apps, and online/on-phone payment systems. Tech people saw the emerging technologies needed to create a new business model to give people rides, and they started a business.
A bunch of different things happened around the same time, and those things, combined, led to all new business models taking over. This is what is important to remember from this post, these changes are not a small group of people setting out to destroy this industry or that business, in most cases. Part of it is the combination of new technologies, new shopping habits, and new types of work and lifestyles. The other part is the entrepreneurs who see the potential for a new business model in an industry, and the potential for a lot of profit, if they can make that new model happen. Sometimes those new ideas work well, and they take off, like Uber and Lyft, compared to the old school taxi industry model.
Sometimes those new ideas do not work out well, like the ibuyer businesses in residential real estate. I’m speaking of Zillow, Redfin, Opendoor, and other, similar businesses. Remember two or three years ago, when those new, high tech, nationwide real estate companies were all the rage? Those companies bought thousands of single family homes. They seemed like a good idea, until sales slowed down, and property values began to drop. Those companies lost billions.
They learned the hard way that the single family home market is very localized, and values are really location specific. Smart as they were, those tech real estate companies tried a new, tech-enabled business model, and it largely failed.
Other tech ideas, like little Amazon.com, a tiny start-up selling books online in 1994, wound up working out. Amazon was considered a complete joke in the business media for 7 or 8 years. Talking heads on the business channels joked about those goofballs selling books over the internet, and about how Amazon.com never made a profit. But Jeff Bezos and his crew kept it alive, and kept innovating, knowing that online sales would, eventually, become a huge business. Now Bezos is personally worth more than old blue chip companies Ford, GM, and Dupont, combined. He owns spaceships, and people talk smack because Amazon is too successful. Some new business models work, and others don’t. But ultimately, every business and industry that wants to stay in business, will have to adopt an Information Age business model.
Back to my taxi driving career in the 2000’s. My personal downward spiral continued, I became fully homeless, after I had to quit driving a taxi for both health and financial reasons. My bad luck continued, and I ended up going back East to North Carolina, where my family wound up living. My parents, my sister, and I were all born and raised in Ohio, but both my parents, and my sister’s family wound up living in North Carolina, years after I moved out. NC and I didn’t get along from the start. I couldn’t find any job there, except for driving a taxi for a year, again living in my cab, and barely making enough money to survive. I quit when my dad had a stroke, and was dying, so I could spend more time with him the last couple of months.
The point of putting my own story in here is to share that I get how fucked up it is to be in an industry that is collapsing. You may be really good at your job, but new technology is being created, and times and the work world are changing. Your whole career can suddenly become obsolete for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Most people don’t have the time or interest to spend much time studying future trends. Next thing they know, they’re getting laid off from what seemed to be a solid company. Even a geek like me, who had been fascinated by future trends in the economic world, I didn’t pay attention to the internet, and the emerging technologies that eventually killed my job as a taxi driver.
Part of the time I was out of work in NC, back in 2009-2011, I stayed in homeless shelters, and went to the library every day. I started reading lots of books again, and I started blogging. It was during that time that I ran into Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s final book, Revolutionary Wealth. At that point, I had not only seen The Third Wave idea play out over about 15 years, but I, personally, got my ass kicked in an industry that collapsed. I really started looking around, and realized several other industries had made the transition from the Industrial Age business model into an Information Age business model, or were in transition.
In those years, the aftermath of the Great Recession (or Global Financial Crisis, as it’s usually called today), it was becoming obvious that other major industries were hitting crisis points, malls and retail stores were the most obvious, at that time. Alvin Toffler addressed that in Revolutionary Wealth. He wrote that there would be many other industries hitting crisis points in the coming years. Guess what, we are in those “coming years” now.
The Big Transition
In the 2010’s, I began to refer to this as The Big Transition, in my personal writing, trying to understand everything that was happening. The Big Transition, to me, is the basic, core idea that Alvin Toffler introduced us to in The Third Wave, in 1980. Here’s The Big Transition concept: Our modern societies are leaving the Industrial Age, and moving into the Information Age. This is a long, 80 or 90 year transition period, and the pace of change in society is accelerating. That’s it, the core idea that we are in this long, crazy, transition period. To me, this makes a lot of sense, and the chaotic nature of today’s world makes sense, from this perspective. It gives us a solid framework to look at different trends and events, and figure where each business, industry, or institution is in this process. But this idea has been lost in the 18 years since Alvin Toffler’s last book came out, amid all the competing theories and lines of thinking since.
According to the Tofflers, this transition began about 1956, when the number of “white collar” office workers first outnumbered the number of “blue collar” factory workers. This means that, in 2024 we are about 68 years into this 80 or 90 year transition phase. Yes, 80 or 90 years is my personal estimate, taking into account the accelerating rate of change. Things have hit critical mass, we have different industries all around us that are at different places in this transition from Industrial Age business models into Information Age business models.
While The Third Wave, and Toffler’s later books, went into many different aspects of how this transition could play out, and how it was playing out in politics, business, social life, and just the ways we look at, and think about, life in the world. The underlying concept, the basic idea, was that our society is moving out of the Industrial Age, and into the Information Age. That’s The Big Transition, in my thinking, this basic, core idea.
If this basic idea makes sense to a person, then they can look at this industry or that institution, and ask, “OK, where is this industry with respect to The Big Transition? Has this industry largely gone through The Big Transition? Are they in the middle of the transition period? Or are they holding back, trying to maintain the Industrial Age status quo, trying to avoid the transition altogether? There are businesses, industries, and institutions at all of these places now.
Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now
Putting all the pieces of this puzzle together, I think the 2020’s are the Critical Mass stage of this transition. There were several medium and long term trends coming together leading up to 2020, in addition to Toffler’s Third Wave/The Big Transition concept. That’s why I wrote Dystopia in late 2019 and early 2020. I had a whole bunch of interconnected thoughts and ideas about where society was heading in the 2020’s, and I needed to work them out into something reasonably coherent.
I didn’t see a pandemic coming, but I saw many other trends, most of which got amplified by the pandemic, and the $6 trillion that were added to the economy, in response to the pandemic. The underlying economic issues already happening. The Fed was lowering interest rates in the summer of 2019, and then we had the Repo Market Crisis in September of 2019. The powers at be, and many problems we’ve never fully dealt with in recent decades, like the runaway government deficit spending, the largest debt load on individual people, businesses, and governments ever in history, the shift from a gold-backed dollar to a fiat currency in 1971, and the standard of living for most people declining over 40 years, have led us into an unsustainable point in society. As a country, the U.S. has been “kicking the can down the road” for many major societal issues, and we’re just plain running out of road.
A day of reckoning is coming on many different social and economic fronts. Insurmountable levels of debt, wages not keeping up with inflation, political polarization, the fact that political leaders are completely out of touch with average people’s real lives and issues, institutionalized racism, sexism, ageism, and other isms, and a host of other social issues, all these issues will demand real action in the next several years.
A meme I created, thinking about the current level of surveillance everywhere, juxtaposed with the fact that nearly every person has a camera in their phone. Goerge Orwell didn’t see that one coming. #steveemigmemes
Another thing that is collapsing, and the 2020’s will prove, is that authoritarian countries, with strong, top down power structures, will not work well in the Information Age. Top down control, using much of our technology for surveillance and control of the population, won’t produce an economically viable country in the Information Age for any length of time. No economy, no nation. Today’s hyper-connected societies of light speed communication at all levels, depend on the free communication between people throughout the society.
Metcalfe’s Law tells us that the value of a network is the square of the number of nodes in that network. I won’t argue that law, that’s way above my knowledge base. But it implies that all of those nodes have to be free to communicate with each other at all times, for the network to reach its full potential. Censorship or blocking communication between certain groups schools of thought within society renders big parts of our communication networks impaired, if not useless. So using all of today’s technologies for elite level surveillance and control techniques breaks down the real world functioning of those communication networks. This is a theme worthy of a book all its own, but I’m just pointing out this general idea here.
There is great potential in today’s hyper-connected world, as we have seen in the rise of entire, worldwide industries, that didn’t exist 20 or 40 or 50 years ago. We have communications systems where nearly everyone on Earth can talk, text, or share photos, audio, and video, with nearly everyone else in the world. All kinds of people have ideas or talents and skills that can lead to great innovation, which can benefit society at large in many ways, including economic development. But censoring or blocking large parts of these communications systems dramatically decreases the potential for innovation, which seriously curbs any economic growth.
Obviously, for power brokers in society, this is a two edged sword. The unlimited free speech that makes incredible innovation much more possible, and much more likely, can also lead to groups calling out ineffective leaders or power structures, when they stifle innovation. Conversely, using these same communication systems and technologies for massive surveillance and top down control largely shuts off the potential for economic development, and other innovation.
When ideas in people’s head are the source of much of our economic development, a highly restrictive system will simply drive the most creative, talented, and driven people to another region or country to work. This will become much more obvious as it plays out in multiple countries in the next several years.
The geopolitical chaos that’s getting more intense now, in many parts of the world, will leave most of the world population worse off than they are now, in the short and mid term. The continual chaotic events around us, and consistently declining standard of living in the U.S., and elsewhere, will further fuel the fire of the already bubbling populism. That populism will continue to spring up one place after another, in one group after another, focused on one issue after another, until real action on these issues actually happens. Again, as a society, we’ve kicked many cans down the road for too long, and we’re running out of road.
This is our Dystopian Future, we’re in it, right now. Welcome to Dystopia, The Future is Now, as I wrote four years ago. It’s not the authoritarian, Orwellian state predicted in the book 1984. Sure Big Brother is watching, but so is “Little Sister,” and she’s got faster thumbs. “Little Sister” is all the everyday people, who also have cameras, video, and the means to distribute media globally. Orwell did not see that one coming. Our dystopia is also not a post-nuclear war, apocalyptic world, with people fighting for gasoline amid the ruins of cities, and driving really cool rat rods, like in the Mad Max movies. Our real world Dystopia is not the worlds of Fahrenheit 451, Soylent Green, Minority Report, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, Mad Max, Blade Runner, The Terminator, Gattaca, Aeon Flux, Tank Girl, V for Vendetta, or The Hunger Games. The apocalypse isn’t nuclear, it’s economic and it will be social in time.
The Big Transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age wasn’t a conspiracy of a small group of people. It was started by tens of thousands of different people, working in dozens of different fields, over several decades, for thousands of different reasons. One group led to a social change here, others to a new technology there. All of these, over many decades, have built upon each other, to offer us new technologies, new opportunities, and new ways of living our lives, as human beings on planet Earth. All of these thousands of innovations and new social ideas have led to our current Dystopia. Our Dystopia in the 2020’s is CHANGE. Lots and lots of change is happening, on many different levels, all at once.
This change has led to the unraveling of the economic system that seemed so stable in the decades right after World War II. The Baby Boomers, and most of Generation X, were born into the very end of the Industrial Age, a world that moved much, much slower, and seemed much more stable, than today’s world. But the seeds of change were growing.
New technology made new lifestyles possible, and new social ideas and the rise of long suppressed groups led to new social norms. New social norms led to the need for new forms of technology. They feed off each other. This is what Alvin and Heidi Toffler were looking at in the 1960’s and 1970’s, which led Alvin to write The Third Wave published in 1980. Suddenly, corporations got bigger, they bought up local or regionally owned factories, and moved those factories to places where higher profits could be made using cheaper labor or newer technology.
The economic unraveling of The Big Transition became real to most people when the factories began to shut down. The apocalypse wasn’t a nuclear one, it was economic. Go look at the worst parts of Detroit, or Gary, Indiana, or Youngstown, Ohio, or the Main Streets of small towns all across the U.S.. We didn’t need a nuclear war to create ruins in our cities, the economic collapse did it. No group of people set out to ruin cities, it just happened as this huge wave of change began to wash over society at large. It just happened. And it is going to keep “just happening,” whether you or I happen to like it, or not.
The people in power at all levels, the old status quo, whether it’s the PTA at your kid’s school, or major power brokers behind the scenes in a corporate boardroom, or in offices in Washington D.C., London, Tokyo, or Beijing, they’re trying to keep the change from happening. But they’re fighting the tide. As Alvin Toffler told readers over 40 years ago, we are leaving one kind of society, and moving into another kind of society. Like it or not, it has been happening for decades, and it will keep happening.
Everyone gets caught up in the particulars of their own life, which is natural. But there’s a much, much bigger picture going on here, and we all have to figure out how to survive this crazy period of change. Not only that, we have to figure out how to thrive in the new society that is emerging, and build the needed pieces of that society that don’t exist yet.
Our Dystopia is change, the change that’s necessary to move into a new, scary, but ultimately better form of society. All kinds of people and groups will find enemies in this time of great change and chaos. Finding enemies in chaotic times is easy. There will be intense fighting in the business and economic world, the social world, and the geopolitical world. But this is all part of the overall transition happening, the transition into a new, functional, Information Age society.
The telephone industry has made it through the transition. Manufacturing has somehow survived the closing of the factories, all of our day to day necessities still get made, just in different places. The music industry has survived the transition. The publishing industry has survived the transition. So has the video, TV, and movie industries. The retail sales and goods distribution industries are working through the transition. The computer industry rose up, and made it through the transition, now you carry a super computer, that you call a phone, in your pocket or purse. Now the rest of the industries, and society as whole needs to catch up. We need to create new businesses, new jobs, new ways of communicating and new ways of exchanging money, for the world that is emerging. We can look to the industries that have made this transition, and see what worked, and what didn’t, to help us figure out the change in other businesses and industries.
If this basic concept, the transition from the old Industrial Age, into the new, emerging Information Age, makes sense to you, then it can help us make better decisions in these turbulent times. We all want a better world for ourselves, our families, and our friends. Can we keep that in mind and actually build a more functional society on the other end of this transition period? Can we push through the crazy dystopia years and build something better? We’re all going to find out eventually. This is The Third Wave, The Big Transition as I’ve been calling it, the Unplanned Revolution of Everything. It’s going to be a rough ride, but there’s a point to it all, to build a more functional world overall, for all people.
