The Big Transition, The Phoenix Great Depression, and The Tumultuous 2020's... MY Big Picture look at the 2020's

"The worst is yet to come."  My photo of a ripped up Shephard Fairey/Obey street art poster, San Fernando Valley, CA, 2020.

The Big Transition 

The Big Transition is my name for the transition phase out of the fading Industrial Age, and into the emerging Information Age.  This is based on the concept of The Third Wave,* by the late futurist Alvin Toffler, in his 1980 book by that name.  He put the beginning of the transition period in 1956.  That was the first year that "white collar' office workers outnumbered "blue collar" factory workers in the United States.  I believe we are still in this transition phase, between these two ages.  We are no longer in the Industrial Age here in the U.S., but we're also not in the true Information Age yet.  

There is a whole lot in Alvin Toffler's book, The Third Wave, it's about 560 pages of incredibly well researched thinking.  The key point I think people today need to understand is that we are in this really long transition phase in between the Industrial Age, and the Information Age.  We haven't completely left the Industrial Age, despite the fact hundreds of factories closed down over the last 40 years.  Many of our political and business leaders still work from an Industrial Age mentality, and so to many businesses and organizations, large and small.  

In the same way, we are not fully in the Information Age.  Sure, we have the phones, which are actually tiny supercomputers and broadcasting studios, that fit in a pocket.  We have a lot of the technology of the emerging Information Age, But we still have a long way to go in creating a world that functions around that technology.  Our society hasn't even come close to fully assimilating the technology we have already, let alone all the technology still to come.  We haven't shifted our world to fit the kinds of lifestyles that all our technology makes possible.  Instead we have a bunch of authoritarian douchebags trying to get Orwellian and use all this tech against us, the 99.9% of the world who just wants to live our lives, make a decent living, and have a little fun along the way.  The people bent on taking over the world do not understand that we are in The Big Transition.  

When I really started thinking about this idea, which I dubbed The Big Transition in my personal writing, it was probably about 2015-2016.  I asked myself if there was any part of the business or cultural world that would not have to make the transition from an Industrial Age business model to an Information Age business model.  I could not come up with any business, industry, or institution that would NOT have to change.  Heck, even Ohio's Amish Country has a website now (and they get more annual visitors than Cedar Point amusement park, believe it or not).  The Amish people are a very creative, hard working, First Wave, agricultural society.  But their tourist board has a website.  That's our world today.  Farmers and craftspeople, who drive horse and buggies in Ohio, have millions of visitors to their region, while Elon Musk is trying to figure out how to colonize Mars.  We live in "interesting times," no doubt about it.

There is a lot in Toffler's book, The Third Wave, but I believe the basic idea that we are in this Big Transition period between the two ages is the key point to know now, to help people understand the world of the 2020's.  

We are now 67 years into the transition into the Information Age.  I think this transition phase will go on until at least 2035 or 2040, until we're in a fairly functional Information Age.  That's an educated guess, judging by the increasing pace of change.  I believe the 2020's will be the "critical mass" phase of this transition, where the greatest amount of change happens.  It appeared the forces were also setting up for a major recession or depression in the 2020's, as well, which I'll explain below.  So, even several years ago, it appeared to me that a financial downturn would come along, and increase the pressure on businesses and other institutions to evolve to meet the world of the 21st century, or go out of business.  I believe this is why our world seems so chaotic right now, because our whole society is in this massive period of transition, and almost no one thinks of it that way.  Just the simple reframing to, "Oh we're in the big, long, chaotic transition period, the world is supposed to seem crazy," can help make sense of it all.  Having a context where the world makes sense, relieves some stress, at least for me.

Why have I been writing about this recession and this period of change for over five years now?  Because The Big Transition, and this series of recessions, will be life changing for every American, and it will be world changing.  When 2030 dawns, it will be on a world much different than what we know right now. 

The Big Transition- Visually explained 

My Pinterest board, see the long term transition of advertising, phones, video cameras, personal computers, music devices, malls, and factories, from Industrial Age to Information Age, all in photos.  Go to the very bottom of the Pinterest page and then slowly scroll up.

The Phoenix Great Depression

The Phoenix Great Depression is my name for the long period of economic turbulence that I saw coming in the 2020's.  I first used the term "The Phoenix Recession" in October, 2019, in this blog post.  I had already written about the major recession I saw coming, in August 2019, in this blog post, "The Beginner's Guide to the Next Great Recession," as well as other posts.  I knew no one was ready to hear the word "depression" yet.  At that time, the business media was saying that there might be a minor recession in 2020.  For the reasons I'll explain in the next post, by about 2017 or or 2018, I believed we would head into a very long period of economic turmoil in the 2020's.  It appeared to me that this era of economic turmoil would at least feel like a great depression to most people.  It may or may not actually be termed a great depression years from now, when history of this era is actually written.  It will be quite a while before anyone can make that call.  

I believe The Phoenix Great Depression began with the Repo Market Crisis in September of 2019, and we have had, and will continue to have, a turbulent economic climate, that will last until at least 2027 or 2028.  There will be ups and downs during those years, but it will be continually turbulent and hard to figure out the whole way through.  With all of the change coming, because of  The Big Transition, I think it will be at least that long before we get some kind of economic normalcy again.  

I'm writing this in late July 2023, and I believe the much hyped and anticipated 2023 recession is really the "second recessionary wave" of this depression.  The first wave of the depression was in the spring of 2020.  That recession (technically a depression, with a greater than 10% GDP drop, -32%) was amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic, but it would have happened anyhow.  Because of the $5 to $6 trillion of new money created to bail everyone out of that mess, the depths of the recession, the weeding out of outdated businesses, and bad investments, never fully played out.  

Business, various levels of government, and us individuals, have all been buoyed up by all that new money since, and it has completely warped the financial world.  Now, in 2023, we're paying the price for all that money printing, first with rising asset prices, then all around high inflation, and now with high interest rates to fight the inflation, leading us into a major recession that has probably already begun (as I write this in late July, 2023). 

Chairman Jay Powell at The Fed  said yesterday (7/26/2023) that there won't even be a recession.  That's the latest Fed talking assumption, and now business media P.R. and spin doctoring.  For me, that makes a major recession a sure bet now.  This is the same guy who said inflation was "transitory" for a year.  

I think this "recession," this second recessionary wave of The Phoenix Great Depression, will be the deepest one in the 2020's.   It will make the Great Recession of 2007-2009 look tiny by comparison.  There's much more debt at every level of the system, and the numbers are much bigger in pretty much every category you look at.  In addition, much of the world is in, or heading towards, a recession, even China.  

This is a worldwide economic downturn.  This second recession has been completely hyped up, for about a year now, partly because there are so many voices now talking about business, investing, and the economy.  We didn't have YouTube, Twitter, and other social media, at any significant level, in 2008.  Now everyone can give their opinion.  A huge lesson of this decade will be for individuals to figure out who to trust, and who not to, with so much information, misinformation, and disinformation enveloping us.  Trusting the wrong people will cost millions of people their cars and trucks, their retirement savings, possibly their homes, and much more, in the years ahead.  

I also believe we will see another, smaller recession, around 2027-2028.  The Great Depression of the 1930's was actually three recessions, back to back to back, if you look at the stock index or the GDP charts.  I think the 2020's will play out in a similar way economically, except with far more technology and social chaos involved this time around.  When I first wrote these ideas down, mostly in 2019-2020, this great depression idea seemed ridiculous.  It seems a lot less ridiculous now, but there's still a lot to play out.

The "phoenix" part of the The Phoenix Great Depression refers to the mythical creature, not the city in Arizona.  It appears to me that this major economic chaos will force dozens of whole industries and institutions to switch to new business or organizational models, or die off. And this is in spite of huge bailouts that have been propping up many zombie corporations for 14 years now.  

All of the businesses and institutions, like our political parties and system (in crisis now), our banking system (in crisis now), our college and K-12 education system (crisis just beginning), and plenty of other industries, will have to make the transition to a 21st century, Information Age model.  This decade will be a "death and rebirth" period for huge parts of our society.  That is a very messy, chaotic, and often painful process.  So The Phoenix Great Depression is an extended period of economic turbulence that will force death and rebirth levels of change on many parts of society that haven't made the transition from the old, Industrial Age models, into new Information Age models of operation.  

The Tumultuous 2020's 

The Tumultuous 2020's is the name I gave to this whole decade, when I was writing my 20 chapter "book/blog thing" Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now.  That online project began when I woke up about 4 am one morning, in a parking lot in Studio City, California, where I slept as a homeless man.  At the time, I had a whole bunch of disjointed ideas in my head about the future, and where society was headed, particularly in the decade of the 2020's.  

"Dystopia" was my way of writing those ideas out, and trying to organize and make sense of them.  I woke that morning with the initial idea to watch the trailers from the best dystopian future movies of the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's.  I wanted to see the different visions of the future those writers and directors had, and compare those predicted futures with the real world of 2019.  What did they get right?  What did they get wrong?  I would begin there, see what that taught me, and then start writing out my thoughts of where we were actually heading in the 2020's. 

It turned out that the 1962-63 TV cartoon, The Jetsons, predicted more actual real world technology today (personal computers, Facetime telescreen communication, smart watches which were much like cell phones, dog treadmills, filters on social media, personal "drone" vehicles, etc.) than any of the TV shows or movies of the mid 20th century.  I also found out that the classic 1982 movie Blade Runner was actually set in Los Angeles in November of 2019, exactly where and when I was starting this project. That was a weird coincidence, or bit of synchronicity, depending on at how you look at it. 

I began writing the rough ideas of "Dystopia" in late October of 2019.  I built the blog on December 21, 2019, and filled in the chapters, one by one, between then and early June, 2020.  So I began the project before Covid-19 was even on the radar, and wrote into the early stages of the pandemic lockdowns.  The 2020's, from my perspective then, looked like they would be a really crazy decade , with a major recession or great depression, the continuing massive change of The Big Transition, and with a level of change beyond any decade in memory.  I dubbed them The Tumultuous 2020's in the subtitle to the "Dystopia" book/blog.  When the pandemic hit U.S. shores in 2020, things quickly got a lot crazier than even I was expecting, and it's been a wild ride since, as we all know.  Unfortunately, I see a lot more change to come.  If nothing else, I got the "tumultuous" part right.  We'll see about the rest.  

The Big Transition, The Phoenix Great Depression, and The Tumultuous 2020's are my names for different aspects of what I see happening in this decade.  It will include multiple recessions or a great depression, in the economic world.  We will see many businesses, industries, and institutions going through a death and rebirth phase, some coming out in a functional, Information Age model, and others dying off entirely.  

All of this will cause much more chaos than we've seen already.  I don't see full on doom and gloom, or an apocalyptic future, like some of the far out religious people do.  I see a really chaotic period, as we figure out how to build a society that fits the technology and social norms that are now part of our world.  Then things will calm down, eventually.  I also see this chaotic period as a time of great opportunities to make new ideas happen, whether creative, businesses, or socially.  

So that's my take on the next several years.  A little depressing at first, but also an era of incredible opportunities to get new ideas off the ground.  Let's make some cool stuff happen!

How did I come to the very unusual conclusions above?  Find out in this blog post below:

"How I came to the conclusion we were due for a great depression in the 2020's"

*not a paid link.

I'm doing a lot of my writing on Substack these days, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

 

What is a futurist?

Here's a 22 minute video of my favorite futurist team, the late Alvin Toffler, and his wife Heidi.  Starting in the late 1950's, they brainstormed as a team about where society was headed, and what the actual future might be like.  Alvin began writing articles, and several books, about the changes that human society was heading towards.  His breakthrough book was Future Shock, published in 1970.  Their biggest concept, I believe, was The Third Wave, published in 1980.  Alvin's last book, Revolutionary Wealth, was published in 2006, and he died in 2016.  Yet much of what he wrote and spoke of continues to play out today, 43 years after The Third Wave, and about 17 years after Revolutionary Wealth was published.  

A futurist, as Alvin Toffler explains in the video above, is a person who spends a lot of time thinking about, and learning and researching the distant future.  They explore what's happening now, and try to figure out who are the people who will build the next aspects of human society, in business and industry, socially, economically, and in our family structures and everyday life.  Futurists often write books, sometimes are inventors, and sometimes consult with major corporations, business leaders, and politicians.

When Alvin and Heidi Toffler first began to explore where the future of human kind was headed, the United States early on in the post World War II boom of the Industrial Age.  After graduating college, where Alvin and Heidi met, they both went to work in factories for several years, to test their theories about how the world works, to get real world experience, and learn about the world of industry, from the bottom up.  In the video above, Alvin says it was the best kind of grad school possible.  This experience ultimately helped him in his goal of becoming a working writer.  Alvin and Heidi Toffler are my favorites, by far, of all the futurists around in the past few decades.  I think they had a more grounded, and well rounded view of where things were headed than anyone else.  

Futurists are not psychic mediums or visionaries, which have always existed in human society, from tribal shamans to the visionaries in many different societies, like the oracles at Delphi in ancient Greece.  Futurists, as a group, are not the visionary novelists like H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and all science fiction, and other writers who have written what they thought may happen in some distant future.  Some of these writers, in today's world, may be seen as, or see themselves as, futurists, as well as novelists.  These writers, and the TV and film directors portraying the future in the past 100 years, have had a huge effect on exploring what might happen, and often what we hope won't happen, in the years and decades ahead.  

I'm also not talking about the Futurist art movement of the early 1900's, unfortunately tied closely to Mussolini and fascism, which I didn't know existed, until I started looking up futurists on YouTube.

All of these, in their era, had some effect on getting people to think about innovation, dream of possibilities that could happen in future years, and put expectations of "the future" into most of our heads.  

The futurists I'm writing about, like the Tofflers above, are people who seem to have taken on this title in the late 1950's and 1960's, when new technologies like television, the early mainframe computers, early robots, and the first moves into space, were beginning to actually happen.  These futurists were intellectuals and writers who looked at technology, and began to spend a lot more time thinking about the what would be possible in a few decades, and what kind of world we actually wanted to create.  

In the 1960's, as the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (Russia) took off, humans began to make jumps in technology that seemed outlandish only a decade or two earlier.  I was born in the middle of the 1960's, and remember watching the later Apollo missions, where we landed men on the moon, as a little kid.  My dad was a draftsman then, working on a secret super sonic airplane project, the SST.  There was a sense, just in general, that all kinds of wonderful and work saving devices would be invented in the coming years, and we would live in a much better, much more modern world later in our lives.  

At the same time, the year 2000, the dawn of a new millennium, was a convenient benchmark to look forward to.  What will the 21st century look like?  That was a common thought at that time.  Many of us 1970's kids, and a lot of adults, thought we actually would have practical flying cars, and be able to take vacations in space, by "that far off year 2000."  

The futurists spawned in that era made it their job to seek out the technological changes, and sociological changes that would lead us into "the future."  These futurists wrote books, or gave lectures, on the possibilities they saw as all these new technologies came into practical use. 

Along with the late Alvin Toffler, here are a few of them:

Buckminster Fuller- Futurist thinker, inventor, and author

Ray Kurzweil- Futurist thinker and inventor

Michio Kaku- Futurist thinker and scientist

Watts Wacker- Futurist, author, and consultant to major corporations

Sheryl Connelly- Actual working futurist for Ford Motor Company

These people range from really far "out there," to pretty down to Earth.  There are many others as well.  I, too, am a futurist thinker.  The job of a futurist is not to predict exactly how the world will look on a certain day in the future.  The job of futurists is to look at the trends happening, the technology being invented, and the possibilities we might face.  Futurists also look for the potential problems that may have a catastrophic effect, the "black swan" events that no one else sees coming.  

The Covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example.  It turned into a train wreck for society as a whole, and three years later, most of us average people, are still dealing with its after effects.  Why didn't someone warn us that a pandemic like that would happen?  Bill Gates, aa well as some scientists, did try to warn people,  years before.  As a whole, we didn't listen.  Which brings us to another continual aspect of futurists, most people, including most political, business, and other social leaders, don't listen to them.  

Like many of these others above, I have my own take on what's happening in our world, and views on where things are going for our society.  I'll go into much more detail in future posts.  In a nutshell, I think the decade of the 2020's will probably be the most chaotic, toughest, and most transformative decade in our lives.  I think millions of people, just here in the U.S., will have to find new, or better, ways to make a living, myself included.  I think the U.S. needs literally MILLIONS of new microbusinesses (1 person business) and small businesses.  Some of those will grow into larger businesses, many won't.  So I'm starting this new blog to dive into what I see happening in our society, the issues we're facing collectively, and most important, look for things that will help people start, run, and grow businesses that fill some need, and make them a good living, in this rapidly changing world.  

I'm a futurist thinker, an avid blogger, and I've made several pretty damn good calls, in advance, on some of the changes that have happened in recent years.  I want this blog to help you find bits and pieces of information, and new ideas, that will make your life better in these chaotic times.  That's what this blog, and everything that springs from it, is all about.  If that sounds interesting, stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.