THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS
These new industries differed markedly from their predecessors in several respects: they were no longer primarily electromechanichal and no longer based on the classic science of the Second Wave era. Instead, they rose from accelerating breakthroughs in a mix of scientific disciplines that were rudi-mentary or even nonexistent as recently as twenty-five years ago-quantum electronics, information theory, molecular biology, oceanics, nucleonics, ecology, and the space sciences. And they made it possible for us to reach beyond the grosser features of time and spacejwith which Second Wave industry concerned itself, to manipulate, as Soviet physicist B. G. Kuznetsov has noted, “very small spatial regions (say, of the radius of an atomic nucleus, i.e., 1(H3 centimeters) and temporal intervals of the order of Kh23 seconds.”
It is from, these new sciences and our radically enhanced manipulative” abilities, that the new industries arose — computers and data processing, aerospace, sophisticated petrochemicals, semiconductors, advanced communications, and scores of others.
In the United States, where this shift from Second Wave to Third Wave technologies began earliest — sometime in the mid-1950’s — old regions like the Merrimack Valley in New England sank into the status of depressed areas while places like Route 128 outside Boston or “Silicon Valley” in California zoomed into prominence, their suburban homes filled with specialists in solid-state physics, systems engineering, artificial intelligence, or polymer chemistry.
Moreover, one could track the transfer of jobs and affluence as they followed the transfer of technology, so that the so-called “sun-belt” states, fed by heaw defense contracts, built an advanced technological base while the older industrial regions in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes plunged into lassitude and near-bankruptcy. The long running financial crisis of New York City was a clear reflection of this technological upheaval. So, too, was the stagnation of Lorraine, France’s center of steelmaking. And so, at yet another level, was the failure of British socialism. Thus, at the end of World War II the Labour government spoke of seizing the “commanding heights” of industry and did so. But the commanding heights it nationalized turned out to be coal, rail, and steel — precisely those industries being by-passed by the technological revolution: yesterday’s commanding heights.
Regions or sectors of the economy based ^n Third Wave boomed:nn industries,languished., Thjit the changeover has hardly begun. Today manygovernments are consciously seeking to accelerate this structural shift while reducing the pains of transition. Japanese planners in MITI — the Ministry of International
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