The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

Dear Jim--

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It was a pleasure to get your e-mail about Daniel Bell's book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Like you, I was put off by Bell's prose, which hasn't aged well. But I'll avoid dwelling on that for now, and skip right to your request--an explanation of what Daniel Bell means by the post-industrial society. Then we can get into what relevance this book may have in 1999.

According to Bell, the post-industrial society has several distinct characteristics. Since we live in an Age of Information, I'll "bullet point" them for easier retrieval:

• A shift from manufacturing to services.
• The "centrality of the new science-based industries."
• The rise of new technical elites and the advent of new principles of stratification.
• A changeover from a "goods-producing" society to an "information or knowledge" society.
• A change in abstraction from "empiricism or trial-and-error tinkering" to theory and the codification of theoretical knowledge "for directing innovation and the formulation of policy."
• A change in reality from "nature" (during agrarian times) and "technics" during the Industrial Revolution, to reality existing as "the social world" ... "Society itself becomes a web of consciousness, a form of imagination to be realized as a social construction."

That about sums it up.

So why read this book now? Well, I'm reading it because Judith Shulevitz, my editor at Slate, asked me to. My reasons aside, why should anyone else read this book? I can't say I recommend it. Heading to the beach with Bell may lead to sudden extended bouts of deep sleep that, if you're not wearing SPF 30, can cause second-degree burns on exposed skin. This book should be kept indoors, and used primarily as a sleep aid.

What's most interesting about Bell's book in 1999 is its time-capsule quality--extended sections on Marxism, the use of science to develop atomic bombs, and multiple pages on the arrival of affirmative action in American society--and how totally dated these arguments now seem. Bell's world, circa 1973, was one where Marxism seemed important, the U.S.S.R. appeared powerful, and "group" politics was poised to tear American democracy apart with tribalism (women's rights, black power, hippies, labor, etc.). His vision of a post-industrial society is one where science and scientists--because they're the ultimate knowledge workers--rise to prominence:

That's a telling section, both stylistically (pretty dense) and theoretically--Bell believes in the "helmsman" model of directing society. For Bell, the post-industrial society is one where science, scientists, and the scientific method become the dominant model. Science and scientists through their work have the capacity to steer society. It's similar to Norbert Weiner's thinking (the originator of the term "cybernetics" from the Greek word for "helmsman"), which postulated that society would be increasingly governed by "feedback," allowing elites to steer better. Bell's post-industrial society is one where Big Government, Big Corporations, and Big Thinkers, do Big Things. It's Top Down. And looking back at the 1980s and 1990s, we see how very off that thinking became.

This, after all, is the era of 27-year-old billionaires, of "bottom up," "chaos theory," "complexity theory," the Internet, Nasdaq, "viral marketing," "tribal marketing," niches, fragmentation, heterogeneous globalization, the "hive mind," the "noosphere," and so on. The U.S.S.R.? What was that? The "atom bomb"?--by that I take it you mean those crusty ICBMs somewhere in Nebraska--what about smallpox, Biohazard 4, subway sarin, and anthrax? The consumer-centric "long boom" of the 1990s seems utterly distant from the dry post-industrial world Bell describes, full of references to Weber, Rousseau, Locke, and Lenin. Of course, you can't fault someone for failing to predict or describe the future, but you can compare Bell to authors who had a far better sense of it. Most important, circa 1970s, would be Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave) and Stewart Brand (who wrote a crucial article for Rolling Stone in 1970 about how the real legacy of the hippie cultural revolution was the computer hacker).

Authors like Brand and Toffler understood the rise of what today we call "libertarianism," with its cross-pollination between cultural trends ("do-it-yourself" rock and roll, homebuilding, computer building, etc., symbolized by the Whole Earth Catalog, the Sex Pistols, and the Apple II) and economic trends (the rise of the entrepreneur as hero, the "brand of me," and ever-lowering barriers to the flow of capital from market to market). Go back and read their work, from around the same time as Bell's, and you have a totally different response: At least these authors' arguments fall somewhere on the map of 1999 (and neither of them seem to pay much heed to the U.S.S.R.).

Bell's inability to see a world beyond the context of military and economic Big Stuff is what dates this book most of all. Big, centralized models are out. Network externalities are in. Which leaves the question--what part of Bell's post-industrial society has come to pass? Any Big Thoughts on this, Jim?

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