The electronic cottage: how technology causes family breakdown

Alvin Toffler, whose prophetic book Future Shock (1970) primed sociologists and politicians for radical change to society as a result of technological advances, was in a position ten years later to show how much of his vision was being realised.

In The Third Wave: the Revolution that will Change Our Lives (1980) he described how the industrial economy was sinking and taking the family structure down with it.

In the First Wave of human organisation (the agricultural revolution) three or more generations lived together as a family unit. The Second Wave (the industrial revolution) created the nuclear family, and Toffler saw that the coming Third Wave would undermine and eventually destroy this living arrangement. Conservative-minded readers might want to shoot the messenger, but undoubtedly Toffler was right on how conventional families would disintegrate.

At the school gates today, there are single mothers, gay and lesbian parents, older relatives and various arrangements under child custody orders, and in some areas a stable home of mum and dad bringing up children is the exception rather than the rule.

In a time of exploding change – with personal lives being torn apart, the existing social order crumbling, and a fantastic new way of life emerging on the horizon – asking the very largest of questions about our future is not merely a matter of intellectual curiosity. It is a matter of survival.

Just as industry is being outmoded by the ‘technosphere’, the nuclear family would be replaced in the ‘sociosphere’ of the Third Wave. In his chapter ‘Families of the Future’, Toffler decried political leaders (at the time, Jimmy Carter) for pledging to restore family values. He criticised the tendency to place fault in individual people or to blame rock music, pornography or feminism for family breakdown. The only way to save the idealised family would be to reverse technological progress.

The Third Wave was already happening, Toffler observed: millions of Americans living alone, single parents, a steadily rising population of divorcees, cohabiting (rather than married) couples, households with children of different parents, and homosexual relationships. In this ‘maze of kinship arrangements’, no single form would dominate. Toffler predicted homosexual couples raising children and speculated on the possibility of cloning.

Describing the ‘electronic cottage’, Toffler correctly anticipated working from home on computers, although his illustration was influenced by heterosexual norms and the manufacturing economy:
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We might find both husband and wife taking turns at monitoring a complex manufacturing process on the console screen, four hours on, four hours off.

Foreseeing dramatic change to working lives, Toffler argued that technology was the determinant of how people live together (or apart). Indeed, ‘the very definition of love would be transformed’.

Communes, popular in the 1960s and 70s, mostly failed, but Toffler predicted the rise of extended families evolving in the electronic economy.

Networks of expanded families could supply some needed business or social service. Internally, they might or might not share sex across marriage lines. They might or might not be heterosexual. They might be childless or childful.

Politicians should embrace change rather than row against the tide, Toffler opined.

The decision to live outside a nuclear family framework should be made easier not harder.

Conservative commentators warn of civilisational collapse, but Toffler was optimistic that people would adapt and willingly participate in the creation of a new civilisation. Klaus Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’ was simply building on the blueprint for a new society envisaged by the shocking futurist.

Niall McCrae is a social commentator and an officer iof the Workers of England trade union. He was previously a senior lecturer in mental health at King’s College London. His books include The Moon and Madness (2012), Echoes from the Corridors (with Peter Nolan, 2016), Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (with Robert Oulds, 2020) and Green in Tooth and Claw: the Misanthropic Mission of Climate Alarm (2024).  He writes regularly for The Light newspaper.

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