FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE VERMILION PAGODA

Mass production, however, was meaningless, without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution.

It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening cracks of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the world, organized convoys of ships and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CIVILIZATION

Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs and wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendors could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time.

The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palaces of trade**—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers* representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store hi New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage shaped like a Chinese pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the world’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

Custom distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself.

What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies the energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the techno-sphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development.

As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into a mass production system which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system.