AfterWords Interview with Alvin Toffler

I read the Third Wave back in the eighties and didn't understand a word of it. Alvin and Heidi are neologism machines and the jargon was impenetrable to my brain at that moment in my intellectual development. Toffler has some compelling ideas to offer in this interview which revolves around his new book, Revolutionary Wealth. From the broad description he offers, I get the sense that it functions as a conservative counterpoint of view to Thom Friedman's The World is Flat (in which I got bogged down over the holidays).

The essential ideas seem to be:

• The information economy is creating self-sufficient "prosumers" who increasingly provide for themselves by creating ad hoc associations that produce what they require.
• Traditional systems like the federal government and its attending agencies and the U.S. public school system are based in an industrial model of mass production and are not responding quickly enough to external technological and cultural change to remain relevant to consumers and citizens in this increasingly accelerating environment of change.
• We need to refashion these institutions (read: get rid of big government) so that their ongoing/impending collapse does not continue to take our precious cultural values along with them

There appear to be a compelling set of foundational ideas at work in Toffler's work (the "chemically optimistic" nature of the American spirit, we're in a period of rapid, global change, change is hard for humans and the systems they build, the industrial society has given way to a knowledge society, etc.) but the solution that is offered is a classically conservative trope and not to my taste. However, both Toffler and his interviewer, Newt Gingerich, describe his views as overtly optimistic, i.e., we will experience great tribulation as we deal with inevitable, massive, global changes but we'll come out stronger and improved in the end. This point I can accept...I'm an optimist too. I just read the Federalist Papers and one of the main points that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay hammer on again and again is this notion that Americans are by nature superior in their tendency towards industry, creativity, and a willingness to work together for the common good. This is an idea that is at least as old as our nation.

I do believe that technology has a critical, if not, predominant role to play in the ability of underrepresented classes of humans across the planet to begin to participate meaningfully (both personally and professionally) in an expanding global economy but not at the expense of the kinds of fundamental social systems and networks that support those who are not self-motivated enough to make this happen for themselves.