The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

The first wave was the Neolithic revolution, which most anthropologists agree began around twelve thousand years ago. That was when hunter-gatherers transitioned to agricultural societies that settled in one place and grew their own food. We usually identify this moment as the beginning of civilization. The basic structure of human life—rooted in agriculture as the central human activity, and the sun and human labor as the main sources of energy—endures until the eighteenth century. That is when the second wave, the industrial revolution, begins. This step change in human development comes from mechanization driven by fossil fuels. Suddenly billions of years of stored solar energy was unlocked for our use. Nearly everything we experience about modern life flows from that. And then, after that, beginning sometime in the postwar period (Toffler says the late 1950s) we get the third wave, the epoch in which computing power and information manipulation transforms the socioeconomics of human life on earth.