Exiled to Malibu

A capitalism in which manufacturing turns out modest production runs with easily customised products? The possibilities were being exaggerated decades before 3D printing. Review of one of the most influential forecasters and forecasting books: Alvin Toffler, The third wave, Collins, 1980.

Alvin Toffler used to be a Marxist – he and his wife were for five years Communist Party (USA) trade union organisers at a car factory and steel foundry – and, despite his long-established disenchantment with Marxism, it shows. He’s one of a long line of distinguished ex-Marxist commentators on what might broadly be turned technology and society: James Burnham (The managerial revolution, 1941), David S Landes (The unbound Prometheus, 1969), and not a few of the contributors to Technical change and British economic performance (1980), by Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit. Like his predecessors, Toffler has rejected Marx’s method; but like them, too, he has tried to match Marx in his ambitious scope. The third wave boasts 28 chapters, more than 500 pages, as many references, and a 14-page index (Abortion to Yom Kippur War). Its subject is, quite simply, Everything.

Toffler’s Future shock (1970) was, he notes, about the costs of accelerated change. Wave is about the costs of not pursuing a particular sort of change that, Toffler believes, is already upon us. But it’s more optimistic than Shock. Briefly, Toffler’s thesis is that waves 1 and 2 (the agricultural and industrial revolutions) have largely subsided, and that wave 3 – the ‘demassification’ of society – has begun to break.

‘Demassification’ is, like many of Toffler’s catchy and alliterative subheadings (‘The Vermilion Pagoda’, ‘The Covert Curriculum’ and so on), a term that describes more than explains. Politically, it means the breakdown of traditional, monolithic institutions (big business, unions) into the kind of teeming pressure groups that plague Washington’s Capitol Hill. Economically, it means that nations go in for decentralised, regional growth, and that employees turn toward working from computers at home. Sexually, it means the collapse of straitlaced ‘nuclear’ families and the rise of ‘aggregate’ ones – of divorced parents who have remarried and now have two sets of kids. And technologically? That’s the best story the book tells.

Toffler’s observations on other matters can be fairly easily dismissed (how can demassification account, say, for the Born-Again religious/political consensus that characterised the American elections of 1980?). His remarks on technology and its relation to culture, however, cannot so easily be wished away. There’s Whirlpool, who will talk you through repairing your fridge over the phone. There’s the fact that, between 1974 and 1976, more building materials were sold to American homeowners than to contractors. There’s Japan’s experimental Hi-Ovis television network, which allows viewers in Osaka to transmit images of themselves to each other through microphone-and-camera rigs installed in their living rooms. And so on.

Toffler contends that, like other aspects of human culture, technology is becoming more and more demassified, which means that it’s becoming more and more geared to individual needs. Or at least it is when it’s delivered by intelligent third wave corporations who have learned that consumers like producing – ‘prosuming’ – things themselves. Wave is enthusiastic about automated small batch production, about configuring different products from a fixed range of components, and about allowing consumers to select variants of the same product. In short, it argues that products must be designed to be customised, if only because people’s lifestyles are now diversifying so rapidly.

This may all appear a little familiar (sort of Ernst Schumacher meets Electronics Times meets Marketing Week). Yet Toffler has noticed some important trends, and both product planners and industrial designers will have much to learn from what he says. True, the emergence of computerised production and carefully segmented distribution may have little to do with his rather grandiose waves, and a lot more to do with plain old commercial pressures; but nevertheless, the results in terms of hardware are likely to be the same. What that means is that today’s products must, if they are to appeal, look different from other types of products, from similar types of products made by rival manufacturers, and from their parents. It means that modularity and versatility are going to be more important, and, as a consequence of this, that the psychological aspects of ergonomics (control fascias, instruction manuals) are going to be important too.

In the US, Wave was given decidedly mixed (demassified?) reviews. Privately, Toffler suggests that this was because the US literary community never likes bestsellers, futurists, or technology – and hates cheerful books. Still, the public response has been favourable, and so was that from technocratic quarters: Business Week recently featured Toffler in a four-page interview, and, Toffler says, West German premier Helmut Schmidt’s speechwriter raves about him.

You can understand why. Toffler’s book concentrates on the problems and opportunities of a technologically developed world – the North, in other words. More than that, it seems based on a peculiarly West Coast way of looking at things. Toffler is moderate in his appreciation of individualism, and is no Tom Wolfe. He lives in New York, and probably laughs as much as the next man at the jokes Woody Allen made about the West Coast in Annie Hall, or the one actor Roy Scheider tells: ‘in New York you know you’re crazy, in LA they think they’re sane’. But it is images of Californian computer buffs, Californian health food freaks, and – yes – Californian surfers that spring to mind when reading his book.