FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

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

THE ARCHITECTURE OF CIVILIZATION

relay messages by shouting from one tower to the next. The Romans operated an extensive messenger service called the cursus publicus. Between 1305 and the early 1800’s, the House of Taxis ran a form of pony express service all over Europe. By 1628 it employed twenty thousand men. Its couriers, clad in blue and silver uniforms, crisscrossed the continent carrying messages between princes and generals, merchants and money lenders.

During First Wave civilization all these channels were reserved for the rich and powerful only. Ordinary people had no access to them. As the historian Laurin Zilliacus states, even “attempts to send letters by other means were looked upon with suspicion or . . . forbidden” by the authorities. In short, while face-to-face information exchange was open to all, the newer systems used for carrying imformation beyond the confines of a family or a village were essentially closed and used for purposes of social or political control. They were, in effect, weapons of the elite.

The Second Wave, as it moved across country after country, smashed this communications monopoly. This occurred not because the rich and powerful grew suddenly altruistic but because Second Wave technology and factory mass production required “massive” movements of information that the old channels simply could no longer handle.

The information needed for economic production in primitive and First Wave societies is comparatively simple and usually available from someone near at hand. It is mostly oral or gestural hi form. Second Wave economies, by contrast, required the tight coordination of work done at many locations. Not only raw materials but great amounts of information had to be produced and carefully distributed.

For this reason, as the Second Wave gained momentum every country raced to build a postal service. The post-office was an invention quite as imaginative and socially useful as the cotton gin or the spinning jenny and, to an extent forgotten today, it elicited rhapsodic enthusiasm. The American orator Edward Everett declared: “I am compelled to regard the Post-office, next to Christianity, as the right arm of our modern civilization.”

For the post office provided the first wide open channel for industrial-era communications. By 1837 the British Post Office was carrying not merely messages for an elite but some 88 million pieces of mail a year—an avalanche of communications by the standards of the day. By 1960, at about Hu-the industrial era peaked and the Third Wave began its surge, that number had already climbed to 10 billion. That same year the U.S. Post Office was distributing 355 pieces of domestic mail for every man, woman, and child in the nation.*