Alvin Toffler was a journalist before he was a futurist, and these skills are shown to bravura effect in the opening pages of Future Shock. The rhetorical phrases rattle off the page. He starts from the very beginning as he means to continue. “Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.” It is “a roaring current”, one which is “so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots” (p.11). The concept of “future shock”, which Toffler had invented in a magazine article five years earlier, “is no longer a distantly potential danger, but a real sickness from which increasingly large numbers already suffer.”

Compared to other futures books of the time, the rhythms of the prose are like hearing the early passages of The Rites of Spring for the first time.

Drawn into jeopardy

Toffler sets out his argument with similar vigour in the opening chapters of Future Shock. One of the reasons for the book’s success is that its narrative strategy follows the classic Hollywood “three act” structure. We are drawn into jeopardy; the world of that jeopardy is made visible as we venture into it; and then, finally, we find ways of escaping it. Everyone, these days, remembers the jeopardy itself (the idea of future shock), but less of the detail of that world, and almost nothing of the remedies that might help us escape—meaning the institutions and innovations that might help us to manage our “adaptive range” in response to the shock.

One of the reasons for this is that the early sections on the idea of “future shock” are by far the most compellingly written:

“Millions of ordinary psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.” (p.18)

“Western societies for the past 300 years have been caught up in a firestorm of change. This storm, far from abating, now appears to be gathering force.” (p.18)

“[There is] a racing rate of change that makes reality seem, sometimes, like a kaleidoscope run wild.” (p.19)

“Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future… [It] is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated change in society.” (pp.19-20)

Rhetorical tropes

All of this can get breathless after a while, and the rush of rhetorical tropes should give the reader pause as they fly by. Toffler deals with this by doubling down. “Is all this exaggerated?”, he asks. “I think not” (p.21). Of course not. The proposition is then reinforced with quotes from a line of distinguished academics who, in their different ways, assert that change is speeding up. This last is one of the oldest claims in cultural history, going back at least to the Romans, and Toffler elides the ground for us by switching repeatedly between the 300-year space of modernity and the immediate generational experience of the 1960s and the 1970s.

There is a simple enough case to be made that there was a social and economic acceleration from the 18th century onwards. Energy consumption increased, the rate of innovation (technological and social) increased, population started to grow. But when you try to make a more specific case within this broad timeframe, there are difficulties. By many objective measures, as Hirst and Thompson [^1] noted, the experience of change in the late 19th century was more profound than that of the second half of the 20th. Equally, Robert Gordon [^2] argues persuasively that the innovations of the first part of the 20th century (from the car to the washing machine) were far more transformational than those of the ICT revolution in the later part.

Toffler has to elide some of this as well. “How do we know that change is accelerating? There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change” (p.28). He answers his own question on the next page, after a whole list of caveats that ought to give the careful reader at least a moment of reflection:

“Even with all these qualifications however, there is widespread agreement, reaching from historians and archeologists all across the spectrum to scientists, sociologists, economists and psychologists, that many social processes are speeding up—strikingly, even spectacularly.” (p.29).

The whole story, in other words, becomes self-referential to the point of circularity.

Only the name

The poet Edward Thomas once wrote, famously, of a being in a train at a railway halt of which he remembered “only the name”. Future Shock has, similarly, left behind only the name, swirled around with an affect about the speed and restlessness of change. The affect of the book has replayed itself, endlessly, in corporate keynotes about the future, in consultancy pitches, in Silicon Valley product propositions. Change, we hear, is speeding up. We are overloaded by information. We are living in exponential times. And on, and on, and on. We can be fairly certain that almost all of those channelling this idea of “future shock” have never read the book.

No matter, then, that in fact many of the world’s problems are caused by slowing down, rather than speeding up. The rate of population growth has been slowing for almost 30 years; economic growth has been slowing for more than 50 years, and productivity growth for much of that time; even the rate of digital innovation is slowing, in the face of mature and saturated markets and the end of Moore’s ‘law’. Of the big generational drivers of change, only the rate of environmental change is accelerating, catastrophically.

Supercharged language

It is, therefore, worth briefly unpacking Toffler’s argument to understand the overlapping forms of change that he identifies to justify his “supercharged language” (his term). He makes a number of claims. The first is the growth of cities, which he dates back to 1850. The second is the growth in the consumption of energy, again measured back to 1850. The third is “the acceleration of economic growth”, where Toffler changes the time frame, and concentrates on the post-war boom—from 1948 to 1965. “Today, growth rates of from 5 per cent to 10 per cent per year are not uncommon among the most advanced industrial nations” (p.31), with the implication that the output of goods and services will double every 10-15 years.
One of the problems with this, inasmuch as Future Shock’s assumptions can be teased out, is that Toffler builds a significant argument on the edifice of economic growth. The rate of acceleration of production and consumption, he asserts, leads to “an electric impact on the habits, beliefs, and self-image of millions.” In retrospect, 1970 was almost the last moment at which one could make claims about such growth rates, or their effects., certainly in the richer world.

Transport speeds

The fourth element of the case for “future shock” is about technology. Toffler focuses on transport. Technology: speeds of 100 mph were achieved only with the steam train in the 1880s; by 1938 airplane speeds had reached 400 mph; by the 1960s “rocket planes approached speeds of 4,800 mph, and men in space capsules were circling the earth at 18,000 mph… the line representing progress in the past generation would leap vertically off the page.” (p.33) Even on the basis of what was known at the time of writing, it is possible to observe that this is not comparing like with like. Since then, of course, the 1960s expectations that supersonic travel would become the norm have evaporated, and transport speeds (and notably aviation speeds) have stagnated.

Beyond this, he references the increasing size of the science base, makes an argument about the increasing speed of the diffusion of innovation, and references the way in which knowledge has grown. He uses the acceleration in the production of books as a metric.

The end of modernity

The timing of Future Shock is relevant. We are at the end of a long 250-year wave of modernity [^3] that has been characterized by ceaseless growth and expansion. Curry and Tibbs observe that, “At the beginning of the modern era the entire globe represented the basic geographic space for expansion. Now that modernity is operating at a global level, globalisation proves not to be the next expansion stage for modernity, but its saturation point.” The point at which we became aware of this saturation can be debated, but at a cultural and environmental level Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was, in 1962, certainly a weak signal of change, and by 1972, with the publication of The Limits to Growth, it had become rather more. In this respect, the index of Future Shock is telling. There is no entry for ‘Environment’; ‘Environmental Pollution’ has a handful of references.

Counter-cultural critiques of the limits of capitalism are seen in the writings of the Situationists and intellectuals and the social movements associated with les evenements of ‘68. In particular, the mood about the future changed in the space of a few years. The optimism of the 1960s, characterized by the excitement about space travel, quickly gave way to scepticism about environmental change and energy. One emblem of this is the shift in tone from Kubrick’s 1968 film Space Odyssey to John Carpenter’s low-budget Dark Star in 1974, whose space ship has been crippled by Congressional budget cuts.

In other words, it is significant that the book was published in 1970 and written, therefore, at the end of the 1960s. The timing has a significant influence on how Toffler constructs his argument.

Balancing loops

But there is more here. Stein’s “law” reminds us that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Basic systems thinking suggests that systems have patterns in which reinforcing loops accelerate the dynamics of a system, but balancing loops represent contraints on these dynamics. S-curves or logistics curves, one of the basic building blocks of much futures thinking, show an acceleration in the first part of the S-curve, and then a deceleration in the second part.
Much thinking that writes about exponential change, as Toffler does here without using the word, imagines that the rapid acceleration seen in the second quartile of the S-curve, when growth is at its fastest, is a new normal, rather than a system that is about to start meeting its limits. This is what Toffler does in Future Shock as he jumps between the long S-curves of modernity, and the far shorter one of post-war economic growth.

Used futures, empty futures

Not all futures are equal. Sohail Inayatullah writes in his Six Pillars paper (pdf) of “used futures,” without precisely defining it. It is an image of the future that “is unconsciously borrowed from someone else”, which imitates “what everyone else is doing”. Jose Ramos suggests it is “an image or idea of the future that someone else created in some other context, but to which we are unconsciously holding on to, blinding us to other more authentic and empowering ideas of the future.”

Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007) describe “empty futures”, in which the future is an open space awaiting colonisation:

“Once emptied, the future can be filled with anything, with unlimited interests, desires, projections, values, beliefs, ethical concerns, business ventures, political ambitions…”

The used future may once have been rooted in a theory of change, but has become disconnected over time. The empty future has never been thus connected. Instead, it is just a space in which the present is able to write cheques that the future will have to pay. As Adam and Groves write, “Emptied of content and meaning, the future is simply there, an empty space waiting to be filled with our desire, to be shaped, traded or formed according to rational plans and blueprints.”

In summary, then, an empty future is one that never had a theory of change attached to it, while a used future is one whose theory of change has been found to be wanting when it makes contact with the changing world that it is attempting to describe.

Theories of change

While ideas of theories of change are taught in the handful of futures schools we have worldwide, they are scarce in the literature. One exception is work done by Wendy Schultz and Richard Lum on the future of education, in which each scenario was underpinned by a different theory of change.
One of the reasons that this matters is that assertions about futures outcomes are not generally falsifiable, which is why futurists also say that “there are no futures facts” [^4]. Without facts, there is no falsifiability. This may, as it happens, be a narrow view of what we can know about the future, and one which is epistemologically contestable, but that discussion is beyond the limits of this article.

The point is that futures projections based on a clear theory of change are falsifiable. We are able to observe events unfolding and assess whether a theory of change that has been proposed to explain them has less or more explanatory power as a result.

Skating across the surface

Adam and Groves make a similar point about futures when they contrast empty futures with contextual or embedded futures. Such embedded futures require us “to recognise connections and implications, to appreciate things in their continuity and emergence, to know the future as embodied in things and events, embedded in processes and as carrying forth the deeds of the past.”
In contrast, Future Shock skates across the surfaces of the world that it describes, piling up anecdote and data, playing fast and loose with timescales. This may be the reason for its success; the single idea about “future shock” morphs endlessly, shape-shifting as we go through the book. Does it have a theory of change? Arguably, it is that everything is accelerating, and that this will then have deep and drastic social consequences. Even as he was writing, much of this was contestable. Future Shock has become a strange futures text that turns out to be a used future, blinding us to the actual material futures unfolding in front of us, but also an empty future, used to make claims on the future that profit particular groups and interests in the present.

Maps of the world

Of course, Toffler’s purpose is not merely descriptive. He says that he is describing both the “accelerative thrust” and the issues this causes in terms of the “adaptive range,” which he proposes as a kind of index of human ability to respond, building better social institutions and social routines to do so. There is no reason to disbelieve him. He was a lifelong progressive who had worked in a factory before he became a journalist to better understand that world of work. A long section at the end of the book is full of recommendations for social innovation.

The thing is this: Toffler does care about theory. Quite early in the book, when he is still setting out the stall of Future Shock, he writes:

“In dealing with the future… it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be 100% ‘right’. Theories do not have to be ‘right’ to be enormously useful. Even error has its uses. The maps of the world drawn by the medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so filled with factual error, that they elicit condescending smiles today when almost the entire surface of the earth has been charted. Yet the great explorers could never have discovered the New World without them. …

“We who explore the future are like those ancient map-makers, and it is in this spirit that the concept of future shock and the world theory of the adaptive range are presented here.” (p.15)

Fantastical creatures

In his excitement, he populated his map of the future with all kinds of fantastical creatures, some of whom were never sighted again. Islands were joined together to create whole new continents. Claims were made about the creatures found inland by explorers that were compelling enough to have survived down the decades as myths.

And the map created in Future Shock did turn out to be useful, even to Toffler. His next book, The Third Wave, published exactly a decade later, offered a testable proposition about the future, and specifically about the rise of the service economy. Toffler even seems to acknowledge as much in his introduction to the later book, where he writes: “I concentrate less on acceleration, as such, and more on the destination towards which change is carrying us” (p.17-18). The Third Wave, and its theory of change, have survived 40 years of scrutiny.

The seeds of that book can be found within the pages of Future Shock. The Third Wave is neither an empty future or a used future. Indeed, it still sheds light, even now, on our contemporary crisis of politics and populism.

[^1]: Hirst, P., and Thompson, G., (1996). Globalization in Question. Cambridge, Polity

[^2]: Gordon, R., (2016). The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

[^3]: Albrow, M., (1998), The Global Age. Cambridge, Polity.

[^4]: Bell, W., (2003), Foundations of Futures Studies, Volume 1. Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers (revised edition).

I haven’t had time to blog recently while I have been writing a long article on the history of scenarios. More on that another time. But the recent death of Heidi Toffler, the wife, collaborator and co-author of Alvin Toffler, reminded me that I’d written an article on Future Shock and The Third Wave that I hadn’t shared on the blog.

Alvin Toffler’s deserved reputation as a futurist hinged principally on two vastly influential books: Future Shock [FS], published in 1970, and The Third Wave [TW], published exactly a decade later. In the introduction to The Third Wave he described the pair as “complementary parts of a much larger whole.” But in the same section he also seems to undercut this assessment:

“While Future Shock called for certain changes to be made, it emphasized the personal and social costs of change. The Third Wave, while taking note of the difficulties of adaptation, emphasizes the equally important costs of not changing certain things rapidly enough. … In this book the lens is reversed. I concentrate less on acceleration, as such, and more on the destination towards which change is carrying us.” [TW, pp17–18]

Returning to these two books after his death, I’m not completely persuaded by his distinction. In 2016, Future Shock reads more like a “used future,” while The Third Wave, in contrast, seems both prescient and to underpin much of the current thinking about the social, economic and political transitions of the 21st century.

In this article, I’m going to outline what I mean by this by looking at the context and content of the two books.

Used futures

When I say that Future Shock represents a used future, it is because it represents a future that still exists in people’s imaginations, but not in a way that helps us deal with the range of futures now on offer. As Sohail Inayatullah writes in his “Six Pillars” paper, “Is your image of the future, your desired future, yours or is it unconsciously borrowed from someone else?”

The used future that is in Future Shock is tremendously influential. We hear it every time a keynote speaker tells us that change is speeding up, or when they talk about “information overload,” a term from another writer that Toffler popularised, or when they tell stories of the coming impact of exponential change (the book talks about acceleration: “exponential” came into play from Moore’s ‘Law’.

Roaring currents of change

The tone is set from the very first page, when he writes about “the roaring current of change, a current so powerful today that it overturns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots.” [FS, p11] Or, a few pages later, “the acceleration of change does not merely buffet industries or nations. It is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives.” [FS, p19]

With hindsight, we know that Future Shock was written at a particular historic juncture. It was almost the last gasp of the long period of rapid economic growth that had come out of the post-war boom, at least in the richer world; the oil shock was still a few years into the future.

The unrepeatable boom

When you look at the evidence of acceleration he collates, much of it is economic evidence of change caused by this long boom, of the type of change you get in a world of 4–5% economic growth. We also know, reading Robert Gordon’s recent book The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that in the United States (and in Europe, which Gordon doesn’t write about) that the growth rates in that period from around 1950 to 1970 were both unprecedented and unrepeated. Gordon believes they are also unrepeatable.

At the same time, the long cultural shift to post-materialist values that was sparked by the 1960s was visible but at an early stage (the Stonewall riots likely happened while he was at work on the book), and some of the more impressionistic evidence of emerging issues comes from this side of the story.

The point is that these two currents of change are treated in Future Shock as if they are the same thing. The economic change had reached terminal velocity, and was about to go into reverse; the cultural change was about to accelerate. Toffler’s facility as a journalist — both books are very readable — weaves them together as one story. This may well have been how they seemed at the time, but with hindsight we can tease them apart.

Hindsight also allows us to note that one of the lessons of Future Shock is that scientists are routinely over-optimistic about the speed at which their work becomes normalised into everyday social institutions and behaviours.

Underwater colonies

Toffler was not alone in anticipating large scale underwater colonies (which would be in everyday use by 2020 [FS, pp174–75]). Human cloning, expected in a timescale of “zero to fifteen years,” is behind schedule. Some of the marketing initiatives he alights on as evidence of change seem likely to have been short-lived. I’m not sure, for example, how long TWA persisted with internal US flights themed by a range of national cultures and cuisines. There are cautionary tales here for every futurist.

That said, some of the themes in Future Shock are exactly right, even when the detail is awry: the rise of experience, for example, or the “ad-hocracy”, or informal organisation [FS, p120]. And it was a brave author in 1970 who projected homosexual marriage and adoption [FS, pp227–228].

The Third Wave, published in 1980, offers a more coherent story about how the future might unfold. The First Wave was the millennia of agricultural civilisations, and the Second the age of industry, described in the book as “a flash flood in history — a brief three centuries.” [TW, p127]. Toffler argued that this second age was all but over.

“[T]his book flows from the assumption that we are the final generation of an old civilization and the first generation of a new one,” he writes as he discusses “the conflict” “between the dying Second Wave civilization and the emergent Third Wave civilization that is thundering in to take its place.” [TTW, p26]

The trend that was the genesis of this model was a decisive change in US employment patterns. In the decade after 1955, white collar and service workers in the United States outnumbered blue collar workers for the first time, with other countries following quickly on its heels [TW, p28]. If this seems to have its roots in the work of the sociologist Daniel Bell, the model itself has a Marxist flavour, driven by shifts in the economic base, even if the motor of change here is not class conflict.

Deep in the mainstream

The picture he constructs of the business world in The Third Wave, following the economic logic, looks familiar to us 35 years on, even if, as with Future Shock, neither sea nor space are yet homes of prooduction. He describes a world of the end of mass production, fragmenting media, intelligent environments, the death of the secretary (“white-collar proletarians”), and the arrival of remote working. At a corporate level, transaction speeds increase while the mass society of the 20th century breaks apart, something that also extends to family models, which becomes more diverse. There’s more, about politics and the need for new types of political institutions (he doesn’t put it like this, but a new base needs a different superstructure).

This new world is framed by what Toffler describes as “a pentagon of pressures”: from the biosphere, from the “socio-sphere” (a shorthand for new types of accountability), a new “info-sphere,” in which far more information needs to be exchanged between organisations, the “power-sphere” (meaning increasing complexity of government) and finally “moral pressure.” As a result of this, public “[b]ehaviour once accepted as normal is suddenly interpreted as corrupt, immoral or scandalous.” [TW, p248]

As a set of futures ideas, those in The Third Wave have also found their way deep into the mainstream, for example every time someone mentions “the knowledge economy” or “the learning society”.

Toffler concludes that the coming struggle “is between those who try to prop up and preserve industrial society and those who are ready to advance beyond it.” [TTW, p446] This struggle has perhaps gone on for longer than he expected; the expansion of Second Wave industrial society to the world’s poorer economies is something of a blindspot. At the same time, as Dani Rodrik notes, China and India are already experiencing “premature de-industrialisation.”

All models are wrong

All models are wrong, but some are useful, and they are useful to the extent that they have explanatory power. Despite Toffler’s claims, there are two competing models at play in Future Shock and The Third Wave, and perhaps we should not be surprised that the second one, developed in the decade following the first, has greater explanatory power.

But Future Shock had an effect in another way. As Stephen McGrail notes in his review of Imagined Futures, economic actors compete by constructing future narratives.

The narratives built on Future Shock have been those used by Silicon Valley and their associated venture capitalists to justify practices that have the effect of making them richer at the expense of the rest of society. These stories, which are a smokescreen for monopoly, are about change creating constant disruption. Used futures, it turns out, have performative power even after they lose their explanatory value. Toffler, a lifelong radical, might have been disappointed.

A version of this article was first published in Compass, the newsletter of the Association of Professional Futurists, in October 2016.

I’m presenting on Britain’s fault-lines at an event organised on the theme of ‘FragmentNation’ by Kantar, my employer, this week. This is an extended version of the article I wrote for the event booklet.

The main dividing lines in British society have been clearly outlined in successive elections. The Brexit referendum in 2016 and the General Election in 2017 laid down the markers: younger vs older, core cities vs towns, country, and the rest; and to some extent, more educated vs less educated (this last one may involve some double counting because of the rapid expansion in university education over the last three decades.)

These, of course, are largely English numbers, because England represents such a large part of the whole. Scotland is also different, culturally, socially, and politically. (And, also, Welsh-speaking Wales.) In contrast, ethnic groups are less distinctive in this mix, partly because of their over-representation in the core cities.

Clockwise from left: The Brexit election map, showing strength of vote and population density (yellow is remain); analysis of the effect of education and age on voting decision. Sources: map, Chris Green, Oxford University;  statistical analysis of education and age, The Stats Guy.

Even with such nuances, however, the story is almost too simple, and put like this, it takes us to simplistic places. Some commentators, such as Robert Peston in his book WTF, have jumped to the conclusion that British politics has become identity politics, with all the volatility that this would suggest. He is not the only one.

I argue here that, instead, these fault-lines originate in real and deep differences that have emerged in Britain over decades rather than in the few years since the financial crisis. Three long-run changes have combined:

• The rise of the globalised and financialised economy;
• The restructuring of advanced economies around services; and
• A long-run shift in values.

To the extent that technology is a relevant part of this story, it is as an enabler, both for economic change and as a transmission vehicle for new values, and as an accelerator, creating new forms of social exchange.

Different values

It is the shift in values that commentators see first when they try to put the pieces together. We are in the middle of a long shift in our dominant social values, from “modern” values to “post-materialist” values, to borrow the language of the social researcher Ronald Inglehart. Modern values are about hierarchy, authority, and conformity; they capture accurately the social and economic world of much of the 20th century. From a consumer perspective, the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” could have been invented as a slogan for the moderns.

In contrast, post-materialists value autonomy, creativity and self-expression. These values are often associated with Millennials (22-39 years old, in 2018) and are also seen in the older Generation X (40-54 in 2018). They were seen for the first time in The Beat Generation of the 1950s; the early adopters were the “soixante-huitard” student protesters, seen notably in their values and slogans. These values have steadily gained social traction with each succeeding generation; they are the values of the emerging experience economy.

Although measuring adherence to sets of social values is not an exact science, in western Europe and north America these two different and competing sets of values are now split more or less evenly—but the post-materialists are in the ascendant and the moderns are dying off. This may, of itself, be an explanation for our current political volatility, since such 50/50 values splits in society are always dangerous times.

Global Britain

The second fault-line is around globalisation, financialisation, and de-regulation, associated largely with the economic reforms of successive Conservative governments from 1979 to 1992, and mostly therefore with the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher. There is a huge literature on this, but for our purposes it is the effects that are important: a restructuring of the British economy away from manufacturing and towards services, especially financial services; a significant upwards shift in asset prices, especially house prices, and a one-off jump in levels of inequality that has not been reversed; an opening up of the British economy and society; and a further concentration of the wealth and influence of London.

One effect was to reward existing asset holders, especially house-owners, a cornerstone of Thatcher’s political strategy. But, as Stein’s Law tells us, something that can’t go on for ever won’t go on for ever; rewarding one generation comes with a cost for the next generation.

There’s a further element to this part of the story. Without going too far into the nuances of Conservative politics, all of this represented good news for the element of the party that believed in economic liberalism, and bad news for those who were socially conservative. As Frances O’Grady wrote after Thatcher’s death,

Thatcher’s social instincts were always nostalgic conservative… [But she] helped create the amoral yuppiedom of 80s excess and an explosion of cultural resistance.

This same conflict played out again in the Brexit vote, but the balance of the politics was reversed.

Margaret Thatcher walks the site of the former Head Wrightson engineering works at Thornaby, Middlesbrough, in 1987. (Image: Teeside Archive). Middlesbrough voted 65.5% Leave in the Brexit referendum.

The new service economy

The third faultline is around the rise of the service economy. Again, this was prefigured forty years ago. Daniel Bell wrote The Coming of Post Industrial Society in 1973; Alvin Toffler wrote The Third Wave in 1980. In the UK (as in the US and France) services now represent around 80% of the economy. This matters for several reasons, but the most important one is that it has created a new type of relationship in the workplace; identity politics is rooted in a new type of social class.

The rise of services is as important as the decline of manufacturing, for three reasons. The first is that it is harder to find productivity gains in the services sector, so wage growth is flattened. Successive cohorts of young people are earning less money as they come into the workforce than the previous cohort. The second is that—drawing on the work of Enrico Moretti on the US economy–density, proximity and knowledge seems to be critical in creating value from services. (In other words, almost everything that has been written about the internet and the death of geography is wrong).  The cities that win are typically larger, and have better universities. The third is that an important part of the value that a services worker brings to work is their own knowledge and personality, as Scott Lash and John Urry argued in their book Economies of Signs and Space. Business value walks out of the door whenever workers leave work.

The critical point is that this is as true for retail workers and baristas as it is for software programmers and advertising creatives, as Mike Judge reminded us in a memorable couple of sequences in his film Office Space. Employers end up paying for something they have little control over. One reading of the so-called “gig economy” is that it is an attempt by business owners to use technology to manage this problem away. The series of legal cases about the status of such workers (Uber,  Pimlico Plumbers) is a sign of the conflicts over this.  

The landscape of FragmentNation

The combination of these three deep shifts has created the landscape of the FragmentNation. The core cities are increasingly different from everywhere else; London is floating away on its own. The wave of globalisation has had polarising effects because it has produced mirror image effects across generations.

For older generations, it has improved their wealth, while undermining the social values they cherish. For the younger generation, it has reinforced the more open values of the post-materialists but wrecked their economic prospects. One political outcome: for the first time in well over a century, neither of the main political parties represents the business class or the traditional financial sector in the UK.

For brands, this is a complex world to navigate, but in a polarised world, they have to choose. One result has been the rise of strong corporate statements of purpose, of a kind that would have been unthinkable when I was a financial journalist in the 1980s. This makes business sense, because cities are both more aligned with post-materialist values, and they are also where the money is.