Powershift

What Hacker News says

1. JakeAlJun 2016
   The writers and commentators of today tend to fall into niche categories or just write fiction. There is Nicholas Carr's and Douglas Rushkoff. The latter even wrote a book called Present Shock.

   Most people I can think of are also of the past such as Vinge, Marshall McLuhan or Freeman Dyson (who came up with the idea of the Dyson sphere, not the vacuum) who were also brilliant. McLuhan is a joy to read or listen to. He has several interviews on YouTube.

   Esther Dyson (Freeman's daughter) and Nicholas Negroponte were others I read growing up along the lines of Toffler. I remember the latter's Being Digital as being profound at the time but passe in today's world since all of the marvels of the future he talks about came to fruition. Negroponte also came up with the One Laptop Per Child which lost it's relevance in a world of smartphones.

   Others I thought of were Neal Stephenson (his non-fiction works are awesome, especially In the Beginning... was the Command Line and that book-long article he wrote for Wired about wiring Cambodia). Stephenson's fiction is great too and puts William Gibson to shame when it comes to cyberpunk, but Gibson wrote his prior to the PC era. Rudy Rucker was also quite good at the time but his best non-fiction works such as Infinity and the Mind (a must read for you math geeks) are out of print. I also liked The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra a lot growing up.

   I looked on Goodreads for authors that are similar to Toffler and while I recognized a couple of them I didn't see anyone worth mentioning.

   Toffler's works were mostly dated after the mid 2000's, but predicted the consumer as producer (pro-sumer) culture we live in today and Revolutionary Wealth described how we would make a living with services like Patreon and GoFundMe in such a society.

   I recommend everyone read The Third Wave. It provides great historical context for the present machinations of society, the media, and the political machine controlling the masses. Powershift discuss the shift of power to the masses and is also good if you like the idea of the death of the establishment.

   Other people that come to mind are Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, and Ray Kurzweil.

   Show morethread
2. alanwattsMay 2016
   For anyone interested in this shift in power, check out futurist Alvin Toffler's Powershift.

   His thesis is that the pinnacle of power throughout time as technology has evolved has shifted from brute strength, to money in the industrial age, and now finally to information in the post-industrial age which we live in now.

   http://www.amazon.com/Powershift-Knowledge-Wealth-Violence-C...

   thread
3. markgohoDec 2024
   the greatest Futurist of our time was Alfred Toffler cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

   His books, Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980), and Powershift (1990) represent peak prediction literature based on a philosophy that since 1950 we've entered the Third Wave (first wave being neolithic => agriculture, second being agriculture => industrial, third wave being industrial => post-industrial)

   If you read this article and got interested in this kind of thing, check out Toffler. Nearly everything he predicted has come true (minus us mostly living in underwater dwellings, which in his defense, hasn't come true YET).

   Show morethread
4. banadsJun 2020
   It's silly to think money is literally the only form of power and persuasion.

   As Alvin Toffler wrote in Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, and as evidenced by GOOG and FB, information and attention are the new money.

   >Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.

   Those statistics dont factor in the absurd amount of attention liberal media paid to Trump throughout the election. His antics, and the attention it garners among their target market, are great for their bottom line

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powershift_(book)

   Show morethread
5. JakeAlSep 2018
   Toffler made predictions about culture and society, not tech. He "predictions" were about about the impact of tech on the systems of society and culture as dictated by the major waves of tech evolution since the dawn of man. The Third Wave outlines the waves of history, Future Shock is about the friction of assimilating to rapidly changing tech and culture, Powershift is about the shift in power from a top down system to a producer-consumer system due to decentralization and Revolutionary Wealth is about the revolution where new business and economic models emerge such as patreon, bitcoin and the Gig economy. I recommend all of these books as they outline a framework for understanding the nature of the technological imperative.
   Show morethread
6. JakeAlJul 2018
   I just want to recommend people read the Alvin Toffler quadrilogy as he described decades ago the changes that would take place due to technology.

   In The Third Wave he provides a historical context and background for the evolution of technology and it's impact on society; In Future Shock he talks about the growing pains as technology enables the individual to do things the group (government, education, business) could only do before; In Powershift he discusses the shift in power from those at the top to the individual; In Revolutionary Wealth he discusses the new producer-consumer business models.

   If you look at social media and businesses such as YouTube, Kickstarter and Patreon they are the future, and traditional businesses can only survive by embracing and capitalizing on their value to these new models, or by clinging to the old models as they die off which means Disney buying up as much content as possible as distribution costs drop and channels approach infinity. They are trying to lock up as much popular content as they can for the built in audience and brand because they are a goliath that can't compete with an army of Davids.

   This has all happened before, all you have to do is look at the history of print, live performances, radio, television, cable, even web portals. It's a predictable cycle of growth and consolidation with an existing system as it spawns new systems independent of but predicated upon the systems that came before it. Marshall McLuhan spoke a lot about such things as well as Neil Postman.

   Show morethread