Technorealism, Alvin Toffler, and the Forgotten Third Wave

Both the author&#x27;s own words and the quoted ones use big words to make the writing appear more intelligent and insightful that it really is.<p>The gist of the concept seems to be that a utopian future predicted long ago never came to pass, and despite globalization, fast communication, and free movement of goods and sometimes individuals, people devolved into narrowly scoped groups instead. There&#x27;s contention about control of institutions, control of capital, fruits to the gains of economic activity, so these groups are often at odds, and traditional solutions to their conflict are either too ineffective (government, compromise) or too drastic (protests, unrest, warfare), creating an awkward passive-aggressive state of pervasive discontent no one is happy with.<p>And all of the author&#x27;s quote-mining seems to be a response to another overwrought essay that noted that tools like protests, angry mobs, identity politics, and the Internet, that were used by progressives to further their causes, did real damage to the credibility of institutions, and both the tools and that mistrust are now being repurposed by nationalists and fascists. This seems like non-news, and is completely to be expected, but somehow the author implies they find issue with the thesis, yet arrives at a very similar conclusion.<p>All these are too many words to say people will opportunistically group together and machinate towards a local betterment for their in-group above most others. Technology has generally lowered the cost and drawbacks of this opportunistic behavior, and free discourse and free assembly laws enable much of this in parts of the world, even when for-profit surveillance is prevalent. In other places, authorities have cracked down on dissent against the regime, so people who have more to lose than gain are too afraid to make waves online. But the factor limiting unrest is their desperation, which has little to do with technology.<p>To me, all of the author&#x27;s points seem closer to realism, than technorealism. Technorealism tries to have a nuanced conversation about the things that change and the things that stay the same while living in an Internet-connected world, while this writing raves a lot about the decline of society itself and the supposed fault of a loose mob of electing a demagogue for the laughs. It&#x27;s hardly deserving of the attention it&#x27;s getting.

“The election of 2016 was the absolute subversion of the idea and practice of legitimate bureaucracy and traditional media and all the Second Wave political science.”<p>Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.

God I love these clean blogs whenever they pop up. Looks great on the phone, nice and high contrast, loaded in about a half second on my parents terrible internet. Wonder if they just hand wrote HTML or used some sort of generator?

By all means, let us understand the world through the sweep of grand theoretical terms, without too much reference to quantitative data, free of the muddling influence of specialists busy complicating their painstaking little fields of knowledge and endeavour; let us do this lest we larp somehow a life of inferior concerns: let our vision and mastery remain clear and effortless.

This article,instead of starting at first principles, starts at a hypothetical idealized future and works its way back to reality through narrowly focusing its attention, gaslighting and selective amnesia. I guess that what journalism is these days: an attempt to reconcile ideology with reality.

Captivating, well-written piece. But who is the author of this? No credits, no info: very intriguing! I&#x27;d be interested to see what else they&#x27;ve written.<p>[Edit: looking at submissions from that domain, I think the writing in a couple of the other articles seem very similar.]

This is about where the article lost me: &quot;It was Facebook, not Russia, that caused the election of Donald Trump.&quot;<p>The margin of election was small. A few tens of thousand of votes in a few states. Every factor that produced an effect that size can be said to be causal. And there were many, many factors that qualified.<p>Anybody who says that Trump&#x27;s election had a single cause is, at best, selling something. And I&#x27;m not buying.

This is backwards. Countercultures are dead. There is only one Facebook. There&#x27;s no hippie Facebook, no goth Facebook, no punk Facebook, no right-wing Facebook. Not with any market share. The Village Voice and the rest of the alternative press are gone. So is Tribe.net, which was briefly the goth Facebook. Even the Weekly Standard just went bust. Instead, there&#x27;s one big system which automatically caters to the interests of its users.

&gt;It was the intervention of Twitter and 4chan.<p>The author has lost the plot.<p>&gt;It&#x27;s pretty apparent that the reason Trump won wasn&#x27;t Russian intervention (note the extremely Second Wave nature of the explanation: nations playing at geopolitics).<p>Ah yes, a nation pouring an immense amount of resources into propaganda targeting a specific subsection of american society and having close contact with the currently elected administration definitely wasn&#x27;t the reason they got elected.<p>Let&#x27;s Correct the Record (don&#x27;t spritz all over your keyboard HN):<p>Russia abused Twitter&#x2F;Facebook. But Twitter and Facebook aren&#x27;t _the_ reason he got elected though. Facebook and the like are useful tools because you can post anything and have it reach a large, &quot;odd&quot;&#x2F;targeted audience. But without that audience, without that sounding board, the information is nothing. Facebook and Twitter, and all the other social media platforms have significant design flaws with their raison d&#x27;etre: the spread of information across some social graph.<p>Assuming that the social graph is comprised of rational actors is a question that keeps getting begged in these discussions. There is no evidence for this being the case and all the evidence against that assumption. So we should correct for it. Just like the existing media platforms do (well, with the exception of one notable media giant who loves abusing that fact who&#x27;s had a hand in creating the absurd situation we find ourselves in today).<p>We need to fix the problems we know about. That&#x27;s all. It wouldn&#x27;t hurt to remember why the media is structured the way it currently is (or was). In any system that gets re-implemented, there is always a duplication of efforts and lessons learned. These New Media systems will be no different.<p>The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of &quot;today.&quot; And it&#x27;s sad to say we&#x27;ve basically created problems where there never needed to be. Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.<p>&gt;But the core of the &quot;brain-force economy&quot; is politically retarded - it has a low political IQ and has not achieved political self-consciousness. The old smokestack barons and trade union leaders who dominated during the second wave are still running rings around you guys in Washington.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s not so much as a new wave, but a new class of citizens who desperately need to become actively engaged in the political process. And understanding that the systems they&#x27;re creating has lead to new power structures and information conduits, and with power comes responsibility. A responsibility to ensure the consumers of their platform are not unduly influenced by incorrect, false, and misleading information (Facebook tried doing this but was lambasted by the right, can&#x27;t imagine why). A responsibility to support good governance and to support policies that provide a continued foundation for a functioning, healthy, productive, peaceful society.<p>The situation we&#x27;re in isn&#x27;t a technological problem. It&#x27;s a social one.

The most important part I got out of the article was the side link about the Third Wave (information age):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criticalthink.info&#x2F;Phil1301&#x2F;Wave3lec.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criticalthink.info&#x2F;Phil1301&#x2F;Wave3lec.htm</a><p>In order to remain in the Second Wave (industrial age), the following would need to happen:<p><pre><code> 9. Families will become non-nuclear. Many say the family is falling apart today. They define the family as a husband-breadwinner, mother-housekeeper, and a numebr of children. This is the &quot;nuclear family&quot; which was created and idealized by the Second Wave. It is falling apart, because the Second Wave industrial complex system is falling apart. If we really want to maintain the nuclear family, here&#x27;s what we would have to do: * Freeze all technology in its Second Wave stage to maintain a factory-based, mass-production society. * Block the rise of the service and professional sectors in the economy. White-collar, professional, and technical workers are less traditional, less family-oriented, more intellectually and psychologically mobile than blue- collar workers. * &quot;Solve&quot; the energy crisis by applying nuclear and other highly centralized energy processes. The nuclear family survives better in a centralized society. * Return to mass media, and ban cable television, cassettes, local and regional magazines and radio programs. Nuclear families work best where there is a national consensus on information and values, not in a society based on high diversity. * Forcibly drive women back into the kitchen. Reduce wages for those who insist on working. The nuclear family has no nucleus when there are no adults left at home. * Slash the wages of young workers to make them more dependent, for a longer time, on their families. * Ban contraception. This makes for independence of women and for extramarital sex, a notorious lossener of nuclear ties. * Cut the standard of living of the entire society to pre-1955 levels, since affluence makes it possible for single people, divorced people, working women, and other unattached individuals to &quot;make it&quot; economically on their own. * Resist all changes in our society which lead toward diversity, freedom of movement and ideas, or individuality. The nuclear family remains dominant only in a mass society. </code></pre> This is the only explanation of provincial US populism, Trumpism, the Alt-Right, etc etc etc that makes any sense to me. I think that the yearning to go back to a memory of how things were is an instinctive desire deeply rooted in the psyche like sexuality, religion or political affiliation that can&#x27;t be changed. It may not be mine, but I sympathize with aspects of that sentiment.<p>The great tragedy of it though is an inability to imagine something akin to the nuclear family in a post-industrial society. They don&#x27;t imagine a coal miner doing subsurface work on the moon. This is why I think that the current hardline focus on escaping the reality of a changing world is going to be short-lived. At some point, as traditionalists get more of what they want, the idealists of the world will pull away to such an extent that their new normal will have the wholesome things manifested rather than just shadows of what once was.