What's Behind L.A. Riots? Futurists See a Link to Computers

By BOB SIPCHEN

June 18, 1992 12 AM PT

As futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler can’t help but notice the thick cloud of dust billowing from the endless blather about the Los Angeles riots.

President Bush, they suggest, dug around in the rhetorical archives and came out mouthing Nixon’s moldy law-and-order spiels.

“From his opponents,” the Tofflers write, “came a string of cliches about poverty, unemployment, racism and urban hopelessness.”

But in the June World Monitor, the Tofflers point the finger at a new culprit: the computer.

April’s upheaval, they write, “is more than a protest against police brutality or a symptom of age-old ills. It reflects (1) a dangerous new kind of racism and (2) a new, far more intractable kind of unemployment--both with implications that reach beyond the United States.”

These problems spring from a new and rapidly spreading system of wealth creation--what Toffler has termed the “third wave”--that is already wiping out the old “second wave” industrial economy.

Industrial efficiency demanded a homogenized “mass society” in which immigrants were assimilated and put to work. But Americans largely excluded African-Americans from the melting pot ideal.

Many African-Americans were relegated to “the last reserve of the labor force.”

Now that’s changing, and the impoverished and poorly educated underclass here and around the world is quickly being left even farther behind.

The day before the riots, the Los Angeles Times published its list of California’s top 100 companies, the Tofflers point out. Second Wave smokestack industries “were conspicuously absent from the list.”

“The key companies in the economy inhabited by Rodney King and by the ghetto young people who rushed into the streets to loot and burn are in fields like pharmaceuticals . . . computer software . . . semiconductors . . . medical imaging . . . telecommunications. . . .”

And this economy, the Tofflers say, “is simply closed to larger and larger numbers of unskilled workers, irrespective of pigmentation.”

That said, this country’s abandonment of education begins to seem even more short-sighted and possibly suicidal.

The Tofflers also have some intriguing ideas about bringing classrooms up to speed. “Maybe corporations have to adopt 11-year-olds and serve as para-parents, working with the real parents where possible and actually teaching and training the children for Third Wave work in their own organizations,” they write.

Meanwhile, “having failed to prepare for the Third Wave economy that futurists and others foresaw as early as the beginning of the 1960s, today’s politicians stoop to demagogy.”

Footnote: The July/August Mother Jones arrives with its “Back Page” turned over to a young San Francisco rioter who showed up at the magazine’s offices to turn in the one item he had looted.

For most of the article, the young man rambles semi-coherently, making no more sense than the politicians and so-called leaders addressing the riots. But when he says of the rioters, “the country sacrificed these people,” he’s almost making the Tofflers’ point.

“I grew up in South-Central L.A., two miles from the epicenter. I moved to San Francisco because I didn’t want to be in the gangs. I called my mother, and she asked if I got a TV. Everyone went for TVs down there. Up here, I went for a computer. I’ve been trying to get a computer for two years. Nowadays, if you don’t have one, you can’t compete. You can just end up in the streets, and I don’t want that to happen to me.”

REQUIRED READING

* Long before Murphy Brown began undermining moral values, television mocked the traditional family with a long line of single . . . fathers. So says this week’s TV Guide. Examples? “Bachelor Father,” “Nanny and the Professor,” “The Farmer’s Daughter,” “My Three Sons,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” “Gidget,” “My Little Margie,” “Daktari,” “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Full House,” “Davis Rules,” “Blossom,” “Empty Nest” and “Drexell’s Class.”

* Government and private trappers killed about 425,000 coyotes in the United States last year. About 160 of those were trapped, shot or poisoned in the city of Los Angeles in response to 700 complaints.

Back in 1960, 100 people complained, and 35 coyotes were killed. One coyote researcher thinks that the indiscriminate slaughter of coyotes over the last 30 years has backfired. As David Quammen writes in his “Natural Acts” column in the June Outside, with the older, dominant animals killed, younger animals’ reproduction is accelerated. And the survivors are smarter than ever--thus more skilled at killing lambs in Montana and eating poodles in Topanga.

* Survival of the fittest might not apply to just animal species, either. In the spring ’92 issue of Caltech’s Engineering and Science, professor John Hopfield suggests that computers might be shoving their way into the evolutionary struggle.

The issue is dedicated to discussions of “a sustainable future.” This magazine naturally tends to equate a self-sufficient planet with technological advance. But Hopfield has some concerns.

“The evolution of animals has really been the story of the evolution of information processing systems,” he writes. “The animals that function best are those that can most effectively use information about the present to predict what might happen in the future.”

In 25 years, computers will be “smarter”’ than humans, he predicts. So it’s not just the undereducated underclass that should be worrying about chronic joblessness. Computers, he says, will also do superior medical diagnosis, argue legal theory and drive trucks.

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

The Advocate, “the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine,” got its latest face-lift just in time. No sooner does the slicked up version hit the stands when along comes a brand-new and already slick competitor--OUT.

The quarterly OUT looks a lot like the new Advocate. But it’s take on gay life is quieter, a bit less political and less overtly sexual. The premiere issue is uniformly well-crafted, featuring profiles, photo-features and an article on the dangers of the popular street drug, ecstasy.

(Charter subscriptions of three issues: $11.95, 594 Broadway, New York, NY, 10012-9766, (800) 876-1199.)