The Big Answer

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The book is about global forces restructuring our future. This futurist made the serious error of taking established and well-validated social theory and confounding, diluting, distorting and contaminating it with terminology clashes that can have no productive result, but can only muddle both theories and minds alike. Feather says that the Third Wave ought to be divided into 3rd-Wave: services, 4th-Wave: information, 5th-Wave: leisure and 6th-Wave: outer space. This seems misguided in the extreme, seeming to represent a schoolyard boast at the level of: “I’ve got more waves than you do,” made to the Tofflers. He needs to evolve qualitatively better social and futurist theory, not compete at the quantitative level with the acknowledged master futurist scholar and synthesist of our times.

The electronic cottage

He concurs with the Tofflers’ electronic cottage concept (already a thriving reality, so a thoroughly safe acknowledgement to make), and applauds the fact that the Chinese movers and shakers have all read the Tofflers’ The Third Wave. But when he states that he has no doubt that Gorbachev will achieve the goal of boosting Soviet economic output by the year 2000 so they’re standing on the threshold of the information age, he reveals his weak predictive skills (the book was written in 1989, just before the U.S.S.R. imploded). He ends the book with overused, optimistic cliches and quotes from Shakespeare and J.F.K.

However—some people never learn: Ukraine PM: Putin Wants To Rebuild Soviet Union—Ukraine's interim prime minister said in an interview that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants nothing less than the restoration of the Soviet Union. (Sigh . . . )