
Technorealism, Alvin Toffler, and the Forgotten Third Wave - cheezymoogle
http://txti.es/technorealism
======
temp-dude-87844
Both the author's own words and the quoted ones use big words to make the
writing appear more intelligent and insightful that it really is.

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'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.

And all of the author'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.

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.

To me, all of the author'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's
hardly deserving of the attention it's getting.

~~~
barrkel
Without having the (IMO) chief reference link in the article -
[http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm](http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm)
\- I think it's easy to misread this one.

What's going on is not just in-groups operating towards local betterment. It's
a disintegration of national consensus from the decline of mass (industrial)
media. Democracy can't work without at least a rough consensus on what the
truth is. The filter bubbles we increasingly inhabit lack conflict resolution
and the bubbles drift further apart. We end up with factionalism, leading to
balkanization, and unless we find a way to resolve the underlying tension,
we're on the way to violence, IMO.

~~~
sunir
The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.

Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about
anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the
argument is less important than the medium of argument.

Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing
factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of
competing ideas.

Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often
meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.

Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale
and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.

It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk
and more dynamic.

~~~
randallsquared
> The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.

But it wasn't felt.

Before TV and radio, the main method of communication was print and
conversation, so that a random person picked out of a population might come in
contact with only a few political or cultural opinions in a given day. This
continued into the age of TV and radio because only a few such opinions were
permitted by those controlling the broadcasts.

Now that people might easily come into conflict culturally or politically
hundreds of times a day, the real diversity of opinion across a large
population is apparent to a given member of that population, in a way that it
wasn't before, even if we assume that the differences were really there.

That constant conflict is a few clicks away at any moment leads many people to
internalize that they are constantly fighting for their ability to hold their
political beliefs and perform their culture, and/or to shut out most large
differences to the extent they can, while conforming themselves to minor
differences.

The only people who experienced this kind of constant churn in the past were
travelers, and mostly only while traveling. We are all travelers now.

~~~
sunir
They had general strikes and civil wars and riots. I think it was felt. With
blood.

~~~
randallsquared
You can have all those with just two sides. The difference now is that the
attempt to corral all views into two main camps is breaking down, revealing
the chaos of the actual landscape of opinions.

~~~
sunir
This analysis doesn’t fit history.

------
someguydave
“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.”

Or, widespread Internet use decreased the ability of the traditional
gatekeepers of information to manipulate voters.

~~~
kadendogthing
It ruined the safe guard of using the time tested tool of fact checking and
having credible sources of information. And opened the flood gates to bad
actors acting on irrational actors.

The internet is not some magical haven for information and knowledge. In its
current form, it's comparable to information anarchy. It's not tenable.

~~~
coldtea
> _It ruined the safe guard of using the time tested tool of fact checking and
> having credible sources of information_

The same fact-checking that got Nixon and buried McGovern, or elected Raegan
twice, or George Bush of CIA and Iran-Contra fame, or the war mongering
Clinton and Bush Jr., or the more-of-the-same Obama?

~~~
kadendogthing
The same fact-checking system that got Nixon impeached, that revealed the Iran
contra controversy, and the one that lead to one of the largest protests
against a war in American history (the Iraq war protests).

You took events that transpired and then placed the blame on the system that
allowed us to correct for these events in the first place (or at least attempt
to). I'm sorry your criteria for a functioning and healthy media system is one
that A) Never makes mistakes B) Can preemptively stop government officials
from doing bad things.

I'd be interested to see you expound on the statements you made.

~~~
tomjen3
The system didn't correct anything. Not one of those presidents went to jail,
not one of those who followed them learned anything, and none of the issues
were stopped because of it, their had either already happened or are still an
ongoing issue.

~~~
kadendogthing
>(or at least attempt to).

Hello thanks for reading.

------
komali2
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?

~~~
theoh
It's [http://txti.es](http://txti.es), which you could have checked for
yourself.

~~~
RickS
Sometimes on HN a comment will pop up on a biology article from a Ph.D
biologist, or the sort. There are lots of severely brilliant people here whose
familiarity with web tech is well below average, but who nonetheless add
immense value to the community.

For that reason it's a mistake to assume that everyone on this website is
evenly skilled just because _you_ have the wherewithal to check whether the
TLD is a web service or a private domain, or to intuit that the name in the
footer might be a company and not a random string.

So while perhaps this person _could_ check for themselves in the most literal
sense, it's uncool to use a tone that implies their inferiority for not having
done so.

When you make people feel bad for asking questions, you teach them not to try
and get smarter, and that's a bad thing for everyone.

------
escape_goat
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.

------
narrator
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.

------
mrspeaker
Captivating, well-written piece. But who is the author of this? No credits, no
info: very intriguing! I'd be interested to see what else they've written.

[Edit: looking at submissions from that domain, I think the writing in a
couple of the other articles seem very similar.]

~~~
mc32
It's probably best its authorship is (for now) unknown, this way people can
make judgements on their own rather than thinking is right or wrong based on
how they perceive the author(s).

~~~
shanghaiaway
Why?

~~~
edoceo
Because humans judge the quality of the message by the messenger. If the
messenger is unknown, we (likely) just focus on the message

~~~
Alex3917
Especially since the first sentence alone is enough to tell it was probably
written by someone well known.

------
wpietri
This is about where the article lost me: "It was Facebook, not Russia, that
caused the election of Donald Trump."

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.

Anybody who says that Trump's election had a single cause is, at best, selling
something. And I'm not buying.

~~~
georgeecollins
This is missing the point that cable news always gave Trump a huge share of
attention even when he was a fringe candidate. During the campaign Fox would
interrupt programming to show him speak live. Lots of candidates of all
ideologies would love that. Why did they do that for him? Ratings.

~~~
wpietri
Fox? That is probably not why Fox does it. Fox is owned by a right wing
ideologue, and Fox News was started and run by Nixon's former TV guy. Profit
matters to them, but ideology definitely is primary.

------
Animats
This is backwards. Countercultures are dead. There is only one Facebook.
There'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's one big
system which automatically caters to the interests of its users.

~~~
Barrin92
whether we are legally or physically on the same platform (facebook), has
little to no bearing on whether we are cross-exposed to content.

So yes tribalism can absolutely exist on facebook. It is a digital platform,
not a supermarket. There is no guarantee you ever bump into someone you don't
want to bump into, and completely isolated communities can be formed on the
same base-structure. Reddit has made this sort of design explicit.

------
kadendogthing
>It was the intervention of Twitter and 4chan.

The author has lost the plot.

>It's pretty apparent that the reason Trump won wasn't Russian intervention
(note the extremely Second Wave nature of the explanation: nations playing at
geopolitics).

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't the reason they
got elected.

Let's Correct the Record (don't spritz all over your keyboard HN):

Russia abused Twitter/Facebook. But Twitter and Facebook aren'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, "odd"/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'etre: the spread of information
across some social graph.

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's had a
hand in creating the absurd situation we find ourselves in today).

We need to fix the problems we know about. That's all. It wouldn'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.

The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's
sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be.
Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.

>But the core of the "brain-force economy" 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."

It'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'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'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.

The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.

~~~
froasty
>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't the reason they
got elected.

Here are a few questions for you: Why did Russian ad-buys during the 2016
campaign fund both extremist sides of the political spectrum? For an example,
why did they try to simultaneously organize pro- and anti-gay rallies in
Kansas?^1 And just who is Vladislav Surkov?^2

>The U.S. had a useful law for dealing with the problems of "today." And it's
sad to say we've basically created problems where there never needed to be.
Time to re implement the Fairness Doctrine -- across the board.

Okay, now where is the threshhold to qualify for consideration in the Fairness
Doctrine, particular in a society with manifold subcultures? Is it party
members? Is it adherents? Is it hashtags? Who gets to be on the Fairness
Board? How are violations handled? Who gets to determine what speech is
acceptable (because clearly revolutionary parties exist)? When is a platform
accountable? Are foreign platforms accountable? Are personal servers
broadcasting or narrowcasting?

>It'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'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'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.

In so many words, you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of
Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to
just make stronger and faster horses.

>The situation we're in isn't a technological problem. It's a social one.

The notion that it's a monocausal issue of social policy has been addressed
thoroughly for decades by luminaries such as Marhsall McLuhan and Jacques
Ellul. The Medium _is_ the Message. For a more up to date take, I _strongly_
recommend that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.

\---

[1] [https://www.advocate.com/media/2017/11/03/why-did-russia-
pro...](https://www.advocate.com/media/2017/11/03/why-did-russia-promote-
kansas-rally-against-westboro-baptist-church)

[2] [https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg?t=126](https://youtu.be/Y5ubluwNkqg?t=126)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg#Definition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg#Definition)

~~~
kadendogthing
>you're advocating for fixed fortifications in an age of Blitzkrieg.^3 Or to
paraphrase Toffler, instead of automobiles, we need to just make stronger and
faster horses.

I'm sorry, there is nothing to respond to here if you're going to make that
kind of equivocation. Reread my post and respond in a non-disingenuous manner.

I know it's hard for tech people -- who generally have no kind of appreciable
liberal education -- to appreciate social systems (even though people on
"hacker" news should definitely be intimately knowledgeable and interested in
how these systems act). Asimov was right, technology is moving faster than our
social practices and wisdom know how to handle.

> that you read Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death.

I have, and your post makes no use of your superficial use of this source.
Your entire post is basically responding to a straw man. Try something
substantive.

------
zackmorris
The most important part I got out of the article was the side link about the
Third Wave (information age):

[http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm](http://www.criticalthink.info/Phil1301/Wave3lec.htm)

In order to remain in the Second Wave (industrial age), the following would
need to happen:

    
    
      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 "nuclear family" 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'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.
      * "Solve" 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 "make it" 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.
    

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't be
changed. It may not be mine, but I sympathize with aspects of that sentiment.

The great tragedy of it though is an inability to imagine something akin to
the nuclear family in a post-industrial society. They don'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.

~~~
julius_set
Can you expand more on what you mean by “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.”

~~~
zackmorris
Ya sorry my comment was kind of vague. I just meant that times are changing so
quickly now that fundamentalism is becoming increasingly harder to maintain.

I think that a sustainable Third Wave culture akin to the Federation on Star
Trek that embraces true technology that improves lives (as opposed to the
distractionary and zero-sum vulture capitalism that we have now) will feel
tangibly real in a way that authoritarianism can never be. Like how the
internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it but in a physical
reality where everyone has renewable energy and makerbots.

