THE THIRD WAVE
The human race has been busy constructing a worldwide exchange network—a market—for at least 10,000 years. In the past 300 years, ever since the Second Wave began, this process has roared forward at very high speed. Second Wave civilization “marketized” the world. Today—at the very moment when presuming begins to rise again—this process is coming to an end.
The immense historical meaning of this cannot be appreciated unless we are clear about what a market or exchange network is. It helps to imagine it as a pipeline. When the industrial revolution burst forth on the earth, launching the Second Wave, very few people on the planet were tied into the money system. Trade existed but only the peripheries of society were touched by it. The various networks of jobbers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, bankers, and other elements of the trade system were small and rudimentary— providing only a few narrow pipelines through which goods and money might flow.
For 300 years we poured earth-cracking energies into building this pipeline. It was accomplished in three ways. First the merchants and mercenaries of Second Wave civilization spread around the globe, inviting or coercing new populations to enter the market—to produce more and presume less. Self-sufficient African tribesmen were induced or compelled to grow cash crops and dig copper. Asian peasants who once grew their own food were put to work on plantations instead, tapping rubber trees to put tires on automobiles. Latin Americans began growing coffee for sale hi Europe and the United States. With each such development the pipeline was built or further elaborated and more and more populations drawn into dependence on it.
The second way in which the market expanded was through the increasing “commoditization” of life. Not only were larger populations enmeshed in the market but more and more goods and services were designed for the market, requiring a continual enlargement of the “channel capacity” of the system—a widening, as it were, of the diameter of the pipes.
Finally, the market expanded in another way. As society and the economy grew more complex, the number of transac-tions required for, say, a single bar of soap to pass from producer to consumer multiplied. The more intermediaries, the I more ramified the maze of channels or pipes became. This growing elaborateness of the system was itself a form of further development, like the addition of still more special tubes and valves to a pipeline.
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