EXECUTIVE BOOK REPORT 2nd Lt Michael J. Castagna, USMC Alvin Toffler PowerShift: Knowledge. Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. Created Date: 7/26/2011 11:13:19 AM.

The nature of power is changing in the dawn of the Powershift era. The entire power structure that held the entire world is now disintegrating. Violence, wealth and knowledge are the sources of power in today’s powershift. Knowledge is the most versatile source of power.

“The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s worldwide struggle for power in every human institution. The changes are seen from homes to supermarkets, from churches to workplaces, and from Berlin to Washington. “A powershift does not merely transfer power.

It transforms it.”. Since the inception of the Industrial Revolution, big smokestack companies have held a great control on the economy.

But today, a shift of power from smokestack companies to the retailers and customers is apparently now beginning. Moreover we are also witnessing a change to a “super-symbolic” economy.

In the super-symbolic economy, “wealth creation is increasingly dependent on the exchange of data, information and knowledge.” With these changes, there are now growing conflicts between the “highbrow” or knowledge-base and the “lowbrow” or muscle-base businesses. Furthermore the rise of computers and electronic devices has facilitated the new system of wealth creation in the super-symbolic economy. Moreover, there is an emergence of a new organizational form that challenges the old form based from the Second Wave system. All these changes in the businesses and the economy are connected to the use of violence, wealth and, most importantly, knowledge. In this Third Wave system, “knowledge is the key weapon in the struggles that accompany the emergence of the super-symbolic economy.”. With these profound changes in the businesses and the economy, there are also inevitable changes in the government, media and the espionage industry. Mass democracy is the most significant contribution of the Second Wave industrialism and it implies the existence of the “masses” or homogeneous mass society.

But with the rapid changes, diversity and heterogeneity in the labor force and the economy, mass democracy is under resistance. The economy base on interchangeable labor force has caused the de-massification of the society. As such, people’s needs and demands to the government have diversified and brought the beginning of “mosaic democracy” as it replaces “mass democracy.” Furthermore privatization of some government-owned industries has shifted the power to the private sector.

Large bureaucracy that once has held these industries are now losing its grip and control. On the other hand, media or mass media is also undergoing an overhaul. With de-massification, media is rapidly evolving to a new form to cater its diversified small audience that has disparate demands. And the espionage industry once have been controlled by the government is also transforming. With the fall of the Soviet Union, information and data from spies gain lesser value for the government. Although spies are still important, new form of spies above the sky is paving the way for the control of information and data.

Satellites are revolutionary form of data gathering from the space. Information and data from these satellites have been utilized by global powers to sneak and trace movements within a nation-state for their own ends. Finally the tremendous powershifts in the local and national levels have posed a great impact into the power structure in the global level. Knowledge is the “K-factor” in the global power struggles and a major contributor to the great shifts of power now reshaping our world. Furthermore the speed of exchanges of data, information and knowledge will be the new criterion that will divide the world. They will be divided into the fast and slow countries. In addition, less developed countries (LDC) should plug into the fast economy in order to attain technological advances and close the information and electronic gap which are vital for the new system of wealth creation.

With the Soviet Union’s fall, Japan, Europe and the USA will reshape the global power structure because of their ability to generate, manipulate and control the sources of power especially knowledge in the global level. Lastly, “Global Gladiators” will also shape the global landscape. These are the global corporations, international criminal organizations and religious institutions that are “already sharing de facto power with the nation-states. Tape Deck Heart Download Zip here. ”. Finally, a revolutionary form of education must be undertaken.

Most educational systems in the world are highly centralized and subject to the dictates of a national ministry or department of education which limits innovation and experiment. Furthermore they are still patterned, with slight variation, to the factory system of education in the Second Wave system. As we approach to the Third Wave system, more innovations and experiments in the educational system should take place in order to generate more knowledge to cope with the transforming power structure in every level of human institution. Second, speed, or hyper speed, is desirable in the new system of wealth creation.

The speed of exchange of information is one factor that differentiates the new system from the old one. Speed in business transactions, production and creation of wealth is imperative in the new system. But speed, I believe, poses a great impact in humans and in society in general. The reason is that it undermines the value of leisure. With the changing world, people now always run after time and sometimes forget to pause and rethink the value of traditional ways of having personal and family leisure. Fourth, de-massification of society is the result of less interchangeable labor. The existence of the “masses” is the core essence of mass democracy. Acdsee 17 License Key Download.

But with the emergence of the new economic system, less interchangeable labor, rise of computers, people have become more individualistic. People now seek their own diverse needs and desires. The bonds that connect every individual are also fast disintegrating. This could be one reason for the increase of individualism and self-centeredness of most people in the advance countries.

Finally the USA still holds the lead of any of the three great capitalist centers in the world. Undoubtedly she still has the monopolistic-like tendency on the power triad in the global scale. As such, the USA will still remain as the traditional “hegemon” as it was before.

This is one paradox of the powershift that with the advances in technology, de-massification of society and emergence of a new economic system, the shift of power in the global level has not gone away from the USA. The world is not having a “true” powershift when still one has the control of the power triad in the global level. Powershift provides us with a new look and understanding of the nature of power.

It raises some important changes that have taken or will take place in the 21 st century. These important changes are the use of knowledge as the highest quality of power; capital is becoming “super-symbolic”; workers become less interchangeable; the pervasiveness of freedom of expression; and as the new system begins, a revolutionary form of education is taking its course.

These changes, however, are paralleled with consequences that would also affect every human society. There is now the revival of religious power; individualism permeates society; cyber fraud will be usual and rampant; less appreciation on traditional values especially leisure; and still the dominance of USA in the global level are some of the consequences that every one of us must face in the 21 st century. In this Powershift era, the control of the of the power triad especially knowledge poses a great impact to humankind in the 21 st century. As we shift to the new economic system, power will also shift and be transformed in the process. The control of knowledge will be the crucial basis of power struggles in the local and global level. Hence, anyone who can generate, manipulate and control knowledge, and other power resources, will take a lead and reign supreme in the course of history in the 21 st century. Powershift is a significant work by Alvin Toffler.

It gives us a picture of the changes in the nature of power in the 21 st century. However the book is still devoid of perfection and needs further improvements. The reader recommends that Toffler must view the world in a less America-centric. Although biases are sometimes important, he must also look the developments that are happening in some parts of the world. Then, the reader recommends that other resources of power should be included not only the power triad.

Although he mentioned culture as an aspect of knowledge, culture still plays an important role in the analysis of power. Lastly, the reader recommends that the book must be updated. Many changes have done since the publication of the book. So it is essential to include such changes which affect the nature of power in the 21 st century.

More than twenty years ago, in 1990, writer and futurist Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928–June 27, 2016), whom you might recall as the author of the, penned () — a visionary lens on how social, political, and economic power structures are changing at the dawn of the information age, presaging many of today’s cultural paradigms and touching on other timely topics like,, and. In Chapter 2, titled “Muscle, Money, and Mind,” Toffler lays the foundation of his core argument — the idea that knowledge is becoming the key currency of a new super-symbolic economy, leaving behind the materiality of the industrial age: Knowledge itself turns out to be not only the source of the highest-quality power, but also the most important ingredient of force and wealth. Put differently, knowledge has gone from being an adjunct of money power and muscle power, to being their very essence. It is, in fact, the ultimate amplifier. This is the key to the powershift that lies ahead, and it explains why the battle for control of knowledge and the means of communication is heating up all over the world.

But it isn’t until Chapter 8, titled “The Ultimate Substitute,” that Toffler’s vision truly shines as he offers an elegant definition of the knowledge economy and the dramatic shifts in social currency that we’re only just beginning to see reach a tipping point today: All economic systems sit upon a ‘knowledge base.’ [] At rare moments in history the advance of knowledge has smashed through old barriers. The most important of these breakthroughs has been the invention of new tools for thinking and communication, like the ideogram the alphabet the zero and in our century, the computer. [] Today we are living through one of those exclamation points in history when the entire structure of human knowledge is once again trembling with change as old barriers fall. We are not just accumulating more ‘facts’ — whatever they may be.

Just as we are now restructuring companies and whole economies, we are totally reorganizing the production and distribution of knowledge and the symbols used to communicate it. What does this mean? It means that we are creating new networks of knowledge linking concepts to one another in startling ways building up amazing hierarchies of inference spawning new theories, hypotheses, and images, based on novel assumptions, new languages, codes, and logics. Businesses, governments, and individuals are collecting and storing more sheer data than any previous generation in history (creating a massive, confusing gold mine for tomorrow’s historians.) But more important, we are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge. Not all this new knowledge is factual or even explicit.

Much knowledge, as the term is used here, is unspoken, consisting of assumptions piled atop assumptions, of fragmentary models, of unnoticed analogies, and it includes not simply logical and seemingly unemotional information data, but values, the products of passion and emotion, not to mention imagination and intuition. It is today’s gigantic upheaval in the knowledge base of society — not computer hype or mere financial manipulation — that explains the rise of a super-symbolic economy. Follows (1970) and (1980).