Toffler Alvin. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century

Random House Publishing, 2022. — 640 p. — ISBN 9780593159774, 0593159772.Alvin Toffler’s «Future Shock» and «The Third Wave» are among the most influential books of our time. Now, in Powershift, he brings to a climax the ideas set forth in his previous works to offer a stunning vision of the future that will change your life. In «Powershift», Toffler argues that while headlines focus on shifts of power at the global level, equally significant shifts are taking place in the everyday world we all inhabit—the world of supermarkets and hospitals, banks and business offices, television and telephones, politics and personal life. The very nature of power is changing under our eyes. Powershift maps the «info-wars» of tomorrow and outlines a new system of wealth creation based on individualism, innovation, and information. As old political antagonisms fade, Toffler identifies where the next, far more important world division will arise—not between East and West or North and South, but between the «fast» and the «slow». In «Powershift», Alvin Toffler has formulated the deepest, most comprehensive synthesis yet written about the civilization of the twenty-first century. It is one of the most important books you will ever read.A personal preface.
The new meaning of power.
The powershift era.
The End of Empire.
God-in-a-White-Coat.
Bombarded by the Future.
The Making of a Shabby Gentility.
Muscle, money, and mind.
High-Quality Power.
One Million Inferences.
Facts, Lies, and Truth.
The Democratic Difference.
Life in the super-symbolic economy.
Beyond the age of Glitz.
The Business Commandos.
Dale Carnegie and Attila the Hun.
The Consultant’s Hidden Mission.
Force: the Yakuza component.
Blood and Snow-Money.
On Zeks and Goons.
A Monopoly of Force.
The Hidden Gun.
The Trajectory of Power.
Wealth: Morgan, Milken…and after.
The X-Shaped Desk.
Milken versus Morgan.
Opening the Gates.
The Counterattack.
Tampons and Car Rentals.
The Post-Wall Street Era.
The Zigzag of Power.
The Looming Fight for Global Control.
Knowledge: a wealth of symbols.
Inside the Skull.
An Epitaph for Paper.
Designer Currencies and Para-Money.
Power Failures.
21st-Century Money.
Material-ismo!
The New Meaning of Joblessness.
The Spectrum of Mind-Work.
Lowbrows versus Highbrows.
Lowbrow Ideology.
Highbrow Ideology.
The ultimate substitute.
The Alchemy of Information.
Knowledge versus Capital.
The information wars.
The checkout battle.
Behind the Shoot-outs.
The Scent of Miss America.
The «Push-Money» Ploy.
Beyond the Supermarket.
The Double Payment.
The Intelligent Supermarket.
A Threat to the «Shoguns.»
Extra-intelligence.
Bach, Beethoven, and Wang.
The Telephone Fad.
Secrets and Secret-aries.
Electronic Highways.
The Self-Aware Network.
Messing with the Message.
Net power.
The Search for Denim.
The Bingo-ed Wholesaler.
Real Estate and Rails.
Mobilizing for Electronic War.
The Customer Loop.
Business Blitzkrieg.
The Rise of Info-Monopolies?
The widening war.
The Half-Trillion-Dollar Stake.
Strategic Standards.
The Main Bout.
Computer Democracy.
The Paradox of Norms.
The Beer and Sausage Minuet.
The executive thought police.
Levels of Combat.
The Two-Party Campaign.
Strategic Retreat.
The Giant Brain Era.
The Ethics of Information.
The Paradox Bomb.
Total information war.
Rusty Tracks and Hotel Love-Sounds.
INs and OUTs.
Wholistic Espionage.
A 75-Cent Error.
Power in the flex-firm.
The cubbyhole crash.
The Bureaucracy-Busters.
An Infinity of Cubbyholes.
Power versus Reason.
«Camelephants» and Hot Potatoes.
Choked Channels.
Free-Flow Knowledge.
Knowledge Is Power Is Knowledge.
The flex-firm.
The End of the Cookie-Cut Company.
The De-colonization of Business.
Dancing on Tables.
Fam-Firms of the Future.
Tribal chiefs and corporate commissars.
The Pulsating Organization.
The Two-faced Organization.
The Checkerboard Organization.
The Commissar Organization.
The Buro-baronial Organization.
The Skunkworks Organization.
The Self-start Team.
A Diversity of Powers.
The Missing Panacea.
The Limits of Control.
The autonomous employee.
Unblocking Minds.
The Feckless Farmer.
The New Chains.
The Electronic Proletariat.
Tomorrow’s Work Regimen.
The Non-interchangeable Person.
Two Imperatives.
The Demand for Access.
The power-mosaic.
From Monoliths to Mosaics.
Meat-Cleaver Management.
The Monopolists Inside.
In the Belly of the Behemoth.
Relational Wealth.
Power in Mosaics.
Beyond the Corporation.
Coda: the new system for wealth creation.
The New Economic Metabolism.
A Hailstorm of Pleas.
Tomorrow’s Wealth.
Powershift politics.
The decisive decades.
Dynasties and Democracies.
Shifting Levels.
Earth Politics.
An Explosion of Ethnics.
Mosaic Democracy.
Pivotal Minorities.
The invisible party.
The Ministry of the 21st Century.
The Global Buzzword.
Stripping for Action.
Disappearance of the Hierarchs.
Secret Teams and Plumbers.
Info-tactics.
Alfalfa Secrets and Guided Leaks.
The Masked Source.
Back-stabbers and Back-Channels.
The Double-Channel Ploy.
On the Receiving End.
Massaging the Message.
In-fighters and Savvy Staffers.
Meta-tactics.
Eskimos and Mind-Workers.
Truth versus Power.
The Kidnapped Finger.
Chernobyl in the Ballot Box.
Gimme a Number!
Data Base Deception.
Phantom People.
A market for spies.
Butterflies and Bombs.
The Kremlin’s Limousines.
The Main Competitors.
Swapping Secrets.
The Looming Giants.
Warplanes and «Watch Lists.»
Line X versus James Bond.
The Coming Eco-Wars.
The Privatization of Spying.
The New Meaning of «Private Eye.»
Contradictions at the Core.
The info-agenda.
A Hunger for Knowing.
Terrorist Bombs and AIDS Victims.
The New Global Feedback.
The Indiana Jones Code.
The image makers.
The Multi-channel Society.
The Arrival of Choice.
The Coming Eurovision.
The Global Sell.
The New Barons.
The Forging of Global Opinion.
Subversive media.
The Nasty Little Man on TV.
Three Media Modes.
Media-fusion.
Valleys of Ignorance.
The Revolutionists’ Media Strategy.
The China Syndrome.
The «screenie» generation.
The Slave Golfer.
A Decadent Luxury.
More Than Compassion.
Electronic Activism.
The Information Divide.
The New Alliance.
Coda: yearnings for a new dark age.
Holy Frenzy.
Eco-theocracy.
The New Xenophobes.
Planetary powershift.
The global «K-factor».
Pyramids and Moonshots.
Hand-me-down Economics.
The fast and the slow.
Coming Home.
Strategic Real Estate.
Beyond Raw Materials.
Expensive Cheap Labor.
Hyper-speeds.
Electronic Gaps and Dynamic Minorities.
Socialism’s collision with the future.
The Breaking Point.
The Pre-cybernetic Machine.
The Property Paradox.
How Many “Left-handed” Screws?
The Dustbin of History.
The power of balance.
The Democratization of Death.
The Ocean of Capital.
The New Architecture of Knowledge.
The One-Legged Soviet.
Triads: Tokyo…Berlin…Washington.
The Japanese Gun.
The Economic Godzilla.
The Juku Race.
The New Ost-Strategie.
Europe’s Morning After.
From Leftism to Semiology.
The Wounded Giant.
The Declining Twins.
The Woody Allen Impact.
A Choice of Partners.
The global gladiators.
The Resurrection of Religion.
The Empire of Cocaine.
The Dispersed «Oppressor.»
The Corporate Condottieri.
The U.N.-Plus.
New-Style Global Organizations.
Coda: freedom, order, and chance.
Assumptions.
Acknowledgments.
Bibliography.
Notes.