"THE SECOND WAVE" by: Alvin Toffler

Three hundred years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force is set loose on the world--the Second Wave--collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions.

During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories--the “primitive’ and the civilized.”The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over the agricultural revolution.

The “civilized” world, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colorful admixture.

However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In all of them life was organized around the village. In all of the, a simple division of labor reviled and few clearly defined castes and classes arose: nobility, priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves or serfs. In all of them, power was rigidly authoritarian. In all of them, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities.

There were exceptions--nothing is simple in history. There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. But despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilization as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization the civilization spread by the First Wave.

During its dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C. and in Burma A.D. 100.Vast bureaucracies florists in Baby like and Egypt. Great urban metropolis grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, oceans and mountains from Cathay to Calais Corporations and incipient nation’s existed. There was even in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine.

Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a first Wave world. Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever.

This was the world in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic counter civilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touches every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the first Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave us Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together--assembled them, like a machine--to form the most powerful, cohesive and expansive social system the world had ever know: Second Wave civilization.