THE THIRD WAVE
This helps explain the significance of the coming fusion of producer and consumer—what I have called the rise of the prosumer. Third Wave civilization brings with it the re-emergence of a huge economic sector based on production for use rather than for exchange, a sector based on do-it-for-yourself rather than do-it-for-the-market. This dramatic turnabout, after 300 years of “marketization,” will both demand and make possible radically fresh thinking about all our economic problems, from unemployment and welfare to leisure and the role of work.
It will also bring with it a changed appreciation of the role of “housework” in the economy, and subsequent fundamental changes in the role of women, who still comprise the vast majority of houseworkers. The powerful surge of marketization across the earth is cresting, with many as yet unimaginable consequences for future civilizations.
Third Wave people, meanwhile, will adopt new assumptions about nature, progress, evolution, time, space, matter, and causation. Their thinking will be less influenced by analogies based on the machine, more shaped by concepts like process, feedback, and disequilibrium. They will be more aware of the discontinuities that flow directly out of continuities.
A host of new religions, new conceptions of science, new images of human nature, new forms of art will arise—in far richer diversity than was possible or necessary during the industrial age. The emerging multiculture will be torn by turmoil until new forms of group conflict resolution are developed (present-day legal systems are unimaginative and woefully inadequate for a high diversity society).
The increasing differentiation of society will also mean a reduced role for the nation-state—until now a major force for standardization. Third Wave civilization will be based on a new distribution of power in which the nation, as such, is no longer as influential as it once was, while other institutions—from the transnational corporation to the autonomous neighborhood or even city-state—assume greater significance.
Regions will gain greater power as national markets and economies fracture into pieces, some of which are already larger than the national markets and economies of the past. New alliances may spring up based less on geographical nearness than on common cultural, ecological, religious, or economic affinities, so that a region in North America may develop closer ties with a region in Europe or Japan than with its own next-door neighbor or—eventually—its own national government. Tying this all together will be not a unitary world government but a dense network of new transnational organizations.
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