Was 1968 the end of the Industrial Revolution, and the start of the Technological Revolution? For the purpose of this essay, Industrial Revolution shall mean a hands-based society which largely works in factories and whose aspirations are defined by modernity. Similiary for this essay, the Technological Revolution is where people work on machines and in offices and are defined through post-modernist thinking. Defined like this, a profound change happened between 1950 and 1980 in both intellectual thought and how we worked. This essay tries to pin-point an exact year.

The author previous cited 1960 as the offical start of the technological revolution. Real forces had been unlosed by that year, but it was uncomparable to the more dramtic changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For sure, a clear date does not exist for the change between the two, but we can estimate the turning point.

The year 1968 seems like a good year to define the change in, as so much changed in one year. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated. Protests over the Vietnam War continue to grow, people battle out in front of the Democratic National Convention, and cities burn. A reactionary American public chooses Republican Richard Nixon over Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Many things set off these protests and actions, but most importantly are the societal change that is starting to set into place.

However, back tracking of the events of the sixties, that show these changes already happening well before 1968. In the early to mid-1960s, people start complaining louder about government and society as a wholeÑit is just too darn sterile. We build great monuments, yet they leave all have something missing. The SDS's Port Huron Statement is a perfect example of this.

With the Port Huron Statement, upper-middle class college students are rejecting one of the most important principles of the industrial revolution, namely the growth of rationalism. They see an important post-1960s concept, that society does not work rationally; it is rules and red tape pretending to rationalize it and limit freedom. You see this concept repeatedly in post-modernist pop-culture; it often mocks mainstream norms and rationality.

This concept would seem to set in motion other social movements that start to show up in the 1960s, and really pick up speed in the 1970s. This decade shows we can not just throw money and the popular science of the day at problems; they are much to complex to rationalize this way. First it was the environmentalists who suggested societies' rationality and demand for progress hurt the environment, later it was libertarians who believed big government was oppressing the masses.

The Reagan revolution is particularly interesting in analyzing a post-industrial society. Tax and spend was quite unpopular, to say the least, by the 1980s. People started to see Weber's disadvantages of an over bueraucratic society, with all of it's inspectors and useless regulations that created fraud and waste.