Seven billion superheroes: Has the 'third wave' overtaken us already?

In 1980 pioneering futurist Alvin Toffler published the sequel to his seminal Future Shock. The Third Wave broadly argued that humanity was poised on the cusp of an all-encompassing, all-pervading third fundamental social revolution — the previous two having been the Industrial Revolution and prior to that the First Wave when clans of nomadic hunter-gatherers settled down and agricultural and metropolitan society was born.

The third wave would be characterised as the Information Age. Subsequent sociologists, economists and any number of analysts from the eyebrow-raisingly named Faith Popcorn to John Naisbitt and Malcolm Gladwell have not only underscored Toffler’s prescience, but developed his basic premises in ways that have had profound impacts on everything around us. Information has indeed become the new commodity, and knowledge, coupled with skill at wielding that knowledge, has changed the way we trade, govern, wage war, educate and structure the world around us.

In the process gigantic changes have occurred, and at such mind-numbing speed that we probably haven’t even noticed most of them in our headlong stampede just to keep up with change.

It has been to our own enduring detriment — and contrary to Darwinism — that our brains had become hard-wired over many generations of bringing about change in bygone centuries that we didn’t see the exponential pace — let alone, implications — of change. Now we are the catch-up kids of the Nano-generation.

Greybeards learn from tweenies. Size has become purely a notional concept. Time is measured in unimaginable fragments and distance in unimaginable quanta. In many aspects of everyday life it is as if that one immutable superpower that distinguishes us from other creatures on this planet — imagination — is flinging itself manically against the cages of our crania. String theory, dark matter, 11-dimensional existence, folded time and space, parallel universes and artificial intelligence have transcended even customised conception, designer babies, disease-fighting nanobots the size of red blood corpuscles and genetically modified everything.

When I was a teenager growing up in an Anglican church household in Mafeking — not quite what it is today, but neither the quaint outpost under the school-masterly gaze of the British Protectorate it had been in my pre-school years — the ostensibly simple liberal step of dropping the “thees” and “thous” from the Book of Common Prayer and liturgy was an all-consuming enterprise. Revolutionary concepts such as women clergy were way, way to the rear of the backburner.

Now? My last six parish rectors, one archdeacon and a bishop have all been women. In a world unchanged for centuries, these degrees of upheaval in the space of 40 years are but a quirky insight into our turbo-charged rush to … somewhere else.

I like to think of myself as someone not only acquainted with and accepting of change, but gleefully pursuing it. Hey, in the late afternoon of my life, I cherish my comfort zones and my comfortable crepuscular routine, but I am equally vulnerable to ennui. That’s unquestionably been demonstrated to me by four months in the US!

Am I struggling to keep pace? You bet I am.

Seems to me it isn’t even about the information any longer. The internet has made almost any information imaginable as readily and speedily available as bottled water. Back in the 1980s the best competitive advantage any financial institution had on the others at the trough was 24 hours. Twenty-four hours to match the rate, the new investment product, the better location. Now they’d be lucky to have 24 seconds.

Of course, secrets and all the seductive lure of espionage are still as good and as powerful as they were in the days of Jericho, but satellites, ROVs, ARVs and an alluring array of see-through-everything technology are making secrets tougher and tougher to keep. Simple document shredders won’t cut it any more: gotta make confetti of the company files nowadays and, if you thought you’d covered all the bases, watch what Gil Grissom can learn from the cockroach in the canteen.

But these Jollywood joys are merely the visible symptoms of a far deeper, far more pervasive shift in paradigms.

After the rather slap-happy collapse of the Soviet Union, best ironically exemplified by the fact that there is more of the once insurmountable Berlin Wall in the Newseum in Washington DC than there is in Berlin itself, and the terminal brewer’s droop of apartheid, it seemed only big money, really big money held any global gravitas.

So everybody from presidents to petro-moguls to publishers went chasing it and it fuelled some wars, some tyrants, some megalithic corporations and killed a couple of hundred million people. But then, starting with a few mavericks like naughty Nick Leeson who did to the financial world what an overachieving ice-block did to the Titanic — sank the unsinkable — the cracks began appearing. Today you have to look as far as your mortgage or your pay slip or those election-sized queues at the unemployment office to know the big bully boys somehow don’t seem so tough any more.

I suppose one can still argue that the “struggle” is still between the haves and the have-nots — as Ned Beatty’s character so succinctly puts in the Mark Wahlberg movie Shooter — but that’s a specious soapie argument. It’s always been that way. Hunters followed the herds that still trek across the Serengeti. Willy Wonka had the chocolates and Charlie Bucket still dreamt of the Golden Ticket.

And yet in all these examples lies what I imagine is transpiring within society today and just around the corner. This is Hollywood’s orgasmic delight — the Rise of the Individual.

As with much of modern physics and science in which the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick did most of the original imagining that modern astrophysicists and applied mathematicians are turning from science fiction into science fact, maybe Hollywood’s fixation with the lone saviour of the universe is actually more accurate than even the Coen brothers could imagine.

The brave next wave is already being seen in more militant, savvy and discerning consumers who won’t take crap from their bankers, insurers and credit-card companies. If moms and dads can pre-order babies genetically “immunised” against cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, what’s to stop them pre-ordering customised education or holding governments instantly accountable for back-pedalling on their promises? Many of the world’s pre-eminent educational institutions are already grappling with revolutionary new academic paradigms that could see the demise of specialisation in favour of selective generalists. Imagine Bill Gates crossed with Craig Venter crossed with Barack Obama, or Karen Armstrong crossed with Angela Merkel crossed with Sylvia Earle with a side-serving of Sonia Sotomayor to keep them all in line. Imagine your garage mechanic equally at ease in chiropractic ergonomics as she is in self-corrective textile mechanics.

This will bring about new kinds of power balances — new paradigms of work relationships between employer and employee (ironically, the so-called “black economic empowerment” model might perversely precipitate precisely this and bosses will be answerable to their employees as the major shareholders). We can expect to see a different kind of competitive arena for manufacturers as each puts more and into the fight for the mind of the individual. Already conventional market research methods are tentatively stepping over the threshold into behavioural neuro-anatomy. So what’s hot on the catwalks of Paris or Parys could be determined as much by magnetic resonance scanning and understanding how the five human senses we now know teeter and totter with age, race, ethnicity, neighbourhood, diet and genealogy a few years from now as by designer whim today.

With the growth of the Individual as social super-power, seven billion superheroes, will naturally flow the pre-eminence of Personal Choice as predicator of how the world works, tugs and pulls in manifold directions. The implications of all this on justice and legislation, morality and religion, mobility and reproduction, international relations and politics, let alone our husbandry of this imperilled planet are the stuff of blogs to come.

That is if people will still write blogs in the next wave.