FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Space

THE THIRD WAVE

In each country a new political architecture emerged these conflicts and debates. A close look at these structures reveals that they are built on a combination of old Wave assumptions and newer ideas swept hi by the industrial age.

After millennia of agriculture, it was hard for the founders of Second Wave political systems to imagine an economy based on labor, capital, energy, and raw materials, rather than land. Land had always been at the very center of life r self. Not surprisingly, therefore, geography was deeply embedded in our various voting systems. Senators and congressmen in America—and their counterparts in Britain and many other industrial nations—are still elected not as representatives of lontno «r.~-i <-ias<? or o’-pima.tional, ethnic, sexual, or life-style grouping, but as representatives of the inhabitants of a particular piece of land: a geographical district.

First Wave people were tvtvcallv immobile, and it was therefore natural for the architects of industrial-era political systems to assume that people would remain in one locality all their lives. Hence the nrwa^nce, even today, of residency requirements hi voting regulations.

The pace of First Wave life was slow. Communications were so primitive that it might take a week for a message from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to reach New York. A speech by George Washington took weeks or months to filter through to the hinterland. As late as 1865 it still took twelve days for London to learn that Lincoln had been assassinated. On the unspoken assumption that things moved slowly, representative bodies like Congress or the British Parliament were regarded as “deliberative”—having the tune and taking the time to think through their problems.

Most First Wave people were illiterate and ignorant. Thus it was widely assumed that representatives, particularly if drawn from the educated classes, would inevitably make more intelligent decisions than the mass of voters.

But even as they built these First Wave assumptions into our political institutions, the revolutionaries of the Second Wave also cast their eyes on the future. Thus the architecture they constructed reflected some of the latest technological notions of their time.