The Third Industrial Revolution

This posting was originally added on 11 October 2001 to the Transition Town Liverpool blog age at www.transitionliverpool.org/1/post/2011/10/what-transition-could-learn-from-napster.html
I am on the Transition Town Liverpool "core Group". It was my view of Jeremy Rifkin's concepts of a "third industrial revolution. I've polished it up a bit and added it here:

POST BEGINS
It's difficult to disagree that there is a need for some form of “third industrial revolution”

Those of you who know my local economic and regeneration background will know that I’ve long postulated the need for economic localism, and for something I call the “third culture.” To me, the third culture is a place of opportunity that sits between economics and society. Or to put it another way, it acknowledges a gap that exists, which is possibly widening, between economic theory and social impact. Whilst this gap might be dire and frightening, it is also a place of opportunity.

I use the term third culture because it seems to me that it is society that pays when economic concepts or theories, or decisions, fail. Thus, we need something new and something different to re-connect them. This is ironic, as economics is a social science borne from societal needs, which in simple economic terms meant, desire, demand, supply, and transaction. These needs arose long before “money” was invented or before terms like this had names. So how can this have happened? Well, possibly because economics has become an “expert system” and to some extent opinion based, which inevitably includes politics, and decisions which don’t necessarily add to the common good. For example. It’s long been said that if you lock 100 economists in a room and gave them a problem you’d get 101 answers.

Author/Scientist CP Snow talked, some 50 years ago of the “Two Cultures” in that humanity was theoretically (and puzzlingly) split between the sciences and the humanities, in a theory about human attitude. In an era no far removed (in time) from idealists like Marx, Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Oppenheimer, and social commentators like DH Lawrence, Orwell, Huxley, Lucien Freud, etc, Snow was probably right. These people were distant from each other compared to the polymathic nature of the European Enlightenment and Renaissance, when science and art were often the same. Think Leonardo, Christopher Wren, and so on.

These days, the same concept of a parallel “two cultures” is increasingly apparent between economics and society. Despite a range of catchy words and contemporary political ideas in the UK that claim to want to address this, the reality is that politics is mainly driven my markets and privilege, and not society. So you have to ask whether a post-modern political re-dress of societal need in an economic sense can work.

So all of this brings me to conclude that there really is a need for a “third industrial revolution.” And given the pure good of most human beings, with a natural need for people to interact, take actions, and be part of a group as well as retaining the self, we do have the capacity for this.

We also have unprecedented access to information and networks structures, in a new form of digital enlightenment. And whilst you don’t need to be a scientist to extract digital knowledge from the internet (as most people seem to want to do as part of the natural human condition), you do need a certain technical ability

So are we becoming polymaths again? And are we becoming enlightened at a time of intense economic, social, political, and environmental insecurity? I think Yes. And does even the third culture have third dimensions, and indeed other dimensions? I hope so