The Third Wave

I've read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, but I think this book is better. Talks a lot about how we are in the third revolution or third wave as Toffler calls it. Before we had the first two waves or revolutions, the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution. This is a great book to understand the history of the slave management system and the industrial revolution and agricultural revolution were really the first two major ways to enslave people and have power over others.

This is the pdf download link for this book: https://archive.org/download/TheThirdWave-Toffler/The-Third-Wave_-_Toffler.pdf or you can go here for other options to download this book:  https://archive.org/details/TheThirdWave-Toffler

or you can get new and used copies from amazon: The Third Wave

I liked these quotes from the book:

Thus punctuality, never very important in agricultural communities, became a social necessity, and clocks and watches began to proliferate. By the 1790's they were already becoming commonplace in Britain.Their diffusion came, in the words of British historian E. P. Thompson,"at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labor."

Not by coincidence, children in industrial cultures were taught to tell time at an early age. Pupils were conditioned to arrive at school when the bell rang so that later on they would arrive reliably at the factory or office when the Avhistle blew. Jobs were timed and split into sequences measured in fractions of a second. "Nine-to-five" formed the temporal frame for millions of workers.

The question "Who runs things?" is a typically Second Wave question. For until the industrial revolution there was little reason to ask it. Whether ruled by kings or shamans, warlords, sun gods, or saints, people were seldom in doubt as to who held power over them. The ragged peasant, looking up from the fields, saw the palace or monastery looming in splendor on the horizon. He needed no political scientist or newspaper pundit to solve the riddle of power. Everyone knew who was in charge. Wherever the Second Wave swept in, however, a new kind of power emerged, diffuse and faceless. Those in power became the anonymous "they." Who were "they"?

Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that whoever owned the tools and technology—the "means of production"—would control society. He argued that, because work was interdependent, workers could disrupt production and seize the tools from their bosses. Once they owned the tools, they would rule society.

Yet history played a trick on him. For the very same interdependency gave even greater leverage to a new group—those who orchestrated or integrated the system. In the end it was neither the owners nor the workers who came to power. In both capitalist and socialist nations, it was the integrators who rose to the top.

Time and again during the past three hundred years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime.

Yet each time the ultimate outcome was the same. Each time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites.