THE THIRD WAVE
Under these circumstances it is no surprise that recent years have seen massive, almost indiscriminate, public resistance to new technology. The early period of the Secotid Wave also saw attempts to block new technology. As early as 1663, London workers tore down the new mechanical sawmills that threatened their livelihood. In 1676 ribbon workers smashed their machines. In 1710 rioters protested the newly introduced stocking frames. Later, John Kay, inventor of the flying shuttle used in the textile mills, saw his home wrecked by an infuriated mob and ultimately fled England altogether. The most publicized example came in 1811 when machine wreckers calling themselves Luddites destroyed their textile machines in Nottingham.
Yet this early antagonism to the machine was sporadic and spontaneous. As one historian notes, many of the cases “were not so much the result of hostility to the machine itself as a method of coercing an obnoxious employer.” Unlettered workingmen and women, poor, hungry, and desperate, saw in the machine a threat to their individual survival.
Today’s rebellion against runaway technology is different. It involves a fast-growing army of people—by no means poor or unlettered—who are not necessarily anti-technological, or opposed to economic growth, but who see in the uncontrolled technological thrust a threat to themselves and to global survival.
Some fanatics among them, given the chance, might well employ Luddite tactics. It doesn’t take much to imagine the bombing of a computer installation or a genetic laboratory or a partially constructed nuclear reactor. One can even more easily picture some particularly hideous technological disaster triggering a witch-hunt for the white-coated scientists who “caused it all.” Some demagogic politician of the future may well rise to fame by investigating the “Cambridge Ten” or the “Oak Ridge Seven.”
However, most of today’s techno-rebels are neither bomb-throwers nor Luddites. They include thousands of people who are themselves scientifically trained—nuclear engineers, bio-chemist, physicians, public health officials, and geneticists as well as millions of ordinary citizens. Again, unlike the Luddites, they are well organized and articulate. They publish their own technical journals and propaganda. They file law-suits and draft legislation, as well as picket, march, and demonstrate.
This movement, often attacked as reactionary, is actually a vital part of the emerging Third Wave. For its members are the leading edge of the future in a three-way political and economic battle that parallels, in the field of technnology, the
struggle over energy that we have described earlier.
Here, too, we see Second Wave forces on one side, First Wave reversionists on the other, and Third Wave forces struggling against both. Here the Second Wave forces are those who favor the old, mindless approach to technology: “If it works, produce it. It it sells, produce it. If it makes us strong, build it.” Imbued with obsolete, indust- real notions of progress, many of these adherents of the Second Wave past have vested interests in the irresponsible application of technology. They shrug off the dangers.
On the other side, we find once more a small, vocal fringe of romantic extremists hostile to all but the most primitive First Wave technologies, who seem to favor a return to medieval crafts and hand labor. Mostly middle-class, speaking from the vantage point of a full belly, their resistance to technological advance is as blindly indiscriminate as the support of technology by Second Wave people. They fantasize about a return to a world that most of us—and most of them— would find abhorrent.
Ranged against both these extremes is an increasing number of people in every country who form the core of the techno-rebellion. They are, without knowing it, agents of the Third Wave. They begin not with technology but with hard questions about what kind of future society want. They recognize that we now have so many technological opportunities we can no longer fund, develop, and apply them all. They argue, therefore, the need to select more carefully among them and to choose those technologies that serve long-range social and ecological goals. Rather than letting technology shape our goals, they wish to assert social control over the larger directions of the technological thrust. The techno-rebels have not as yet formulated a clear, comprehensiveprogram. But if we extrapolate from their numer ous manifestos, petitions, statements, and studies, we can identify several streams of thought that add up to a new way of looking at technology—a positive policy for managing the transition to a Third Wave future.
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