Between the lunch and dinner shifts I would be allowed a break from my dish washing duties at the Kittansett Club in Marion, Massachusetts. This was during the summer of 1973. If the weather was sunny, but with a light breeze, I would often choose to sit among the boulders, which were closely packed together where the end of Butler Point meets Buzzards Bay. For many of these days I carried with me a worn paperback book with a bright blue cover entitled Future Shock.
I was among the many readers and neophyte futurists to gobble up that book, starting when it was published in 1970. Although I was three years late to the party, by then I knew about the scope and flavor of the book’s buzz. It attracted me. And the book did not disappoint.
Alvin Toffler set out to highlight the importance of change among populations, cultures, and individuals. In particular, change that is ever more accelerated, novel, widespread, and challenging. Toffler was a futurist, professor, correspondent, and businessman. During the mid-1960s he and his wife Heidi detected that technology was hastening cultural change worldwide. This led to five years of research, resulting in the book Future Shock, which has sold many millions of copies, has been translated into numerous languages, and is still in print fifty years later.
Even as a kid, I found the notion of The Future to be fascinating. My mother may have unwittingly been a part of the reason why. Having grown up, if you could call it that, in wartime Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s, she always had a special admiration for things “modern” once she became a young mother and U.S. citizen in 1950s America. Later on she became a big fan of the NASA space program, the Mercury 7 astronauts, the Saturn 5 launches, the capsule retrievals in the ocean, and so on. I shared with her a love for that slice of American lore.
On my own, I loved science fiction when I was young. Those black & white after-school space movies channels 6, 10, and 13 out of Albany used to broadcast (along with the monster movies of course) were fun and imaginative. History also held an long time allure, so it wasn’t a big leap to shift my attention from the past to the future. How people lived and how they will live still remain appealing topics. Hence, my revisitation of Future Shock.
However, aside from a recreational interest in futurism, there is also my curiosity about Toffler’s prescience. We live today in what was his future. Given his forecasting was generally in the twenty to fifty-year range and now that we’ve passed the fifty-year mark I have found intriguing the idea of assessing his outlook. Alvin Toffler, who passed away in 2016, continues to have a reputation as an exceptional futurist. So, presumably he had an astute ability to both evaluate the etiology of profound changes and envision how they would eventually be expressed by individuals and societies.
Change forms the foundation of futurism. Change also brings out of people revealing aspects about how they process life. It seems as if change is more feared than welcomed. A lot of folks like things just the way they are and actively shun change. Of course, there are exclusions as with some individuals thriving continuous novelty while others live with life stories that scream for something better. Nonetheless, these types of people appear to be exceptions to the rule. By way of observation, most folks remain rooted after their hard-fought scramble to establish stability and security in their status quo.
Change management, or lack thereof, can be seen as a personality or social trait. Some leverage the possibilities and opportunities inherent in change, while others are more reactive and resistant. Large-scale change in and of itself is neutral. How it is perceived and engaged determines if it is to be handled as an asset or as a liability.
The question often asked is, does change represent an improvement or a setback? Clearly then, this challenge of people adapting to or defying change has huge implications for how societies either progress or stagnate. So, another impetus for reviewing Future Shock is to discern if Toffler provided us with an astute warning fifty years ago which perhaps went unheeded. If so, were we left by Toffler with a useful methodology for these times that deserves another look?
Therefore, an analysis of the premise, contention, and predictability of Future Shock will disclose the validity of Toffler’s fifty-year-old thesis. Of particular interest is the soundness of futurism as a worthy forewarning mechanism for societies to follow and also how the book may lend some insight into the possibly flawed conventional wisdom concerning opposition to change.
Alvin Toffler wanted to get America’s attention in a big way. After all, one doesn’t insert the word “shock” into the description of their central argument and include it in their book’s title unless the intent is to jolt and startle. To that end, Toffler was successful as noted above. However, beyond selling a lot of books and presumably making substantial money, he was convinced humankind had reached a profound threshold by the mid-twentieth century that called for a bellowing admonition. The world as it was known in the mid to late 1960s was undergoing accelerated change, impacting not just that time, but more alarmingly ushering in an uncertain and potentially fraught and dangerous future. A cautionary portrayal of what was being faced by the American public, and by extension the so-called ‘First World’ population of his time, set the dark tone of this book. This is not a light and breezy read. Sure, he pointed out positivity and wise judgment being exhibited by some people capable of meeting the future when and where he saw it, but in general he seemed to see ordinary citizens and their leaders as totally unqualified to withstand, never mind benefit from, the onslaught of rapid technical and social transformation that had been unleashed.
Adaptation is a crucial ability. When applied to organisms it depicts the vital steps necessary for survival and continuation of the species. Biologically, adaptation is seen as both behavioral and physical. How organisms interact with their environments in terms of decisive actions and optimal body structure determines if they will endure or face extinction. Regarding modern humans, adaptation is largely a consequence of how intellect is utilized. People operate such that the handling of constraints and possibilities offered by their environment resolve whether they will thrive or founder. Mental acuity and creativity become indispensable in facing basic problems integral to human existence.
Indeed, whole cultures are incessantly challenged to adapt to dynamic and difficult conditions. In 2005, Jared Diamond wrote a compelling book called Collapse, in which he delved into the disintegration of several cultures throughout history that had failed to adapt to changing social and ecological circumstances. Cultural failure has happened before. And it seems imprudent, if not fatuous, to think it won’t happen again.
How we as humans adapt or not when faced with rapidly changing social and physical environments is the premise of Future Shock. The book’s purpose is to shepherd us through the turmoil of accelerated change by suggesting coping mechanisms, alternative attitudes, and reframed perspectives. The urgency Toffler saw was one of people needing to develop, if not command, their capacity to manage the rate of change washing over their individual circumstances and their affiliate society. Not doing so would shackle civilization to “adaptational breakdown” or “disease of change”, also known as future shock.
Unquestioningly, Toffler pointed to the proliferation of technology as the catalyst for hastened change. This is not to say he was a Luddite and opposed to technological advances. He was far from such a position. Rather, he saw technology as irritating the vulnerable space between externally derived change and human responses to it. Technology is innately new, different, innovative, and strange all at once. At the individual level and eventually at the social level, technology insists on adoption or rejection by the market. It was clear by the 1960s, if not sooner, that the tempo of novel technology introductions was quickening. An inflection point had been reached.
New technologies come with both direction and pace. Presumably they are established to solve a problem or add an improvement to what has gone on before. Fine. Enhancements and efficiencies should be welcomed. However, if the preponderance of technologies is such that the ‘old ways’ are continually being questioned and contested there can result disequilibrium and resistance. Therefore, to assess in isolation the justification, substance, and value of technology and the change it brings is shortsighted. The velocity of change must also be considered when determining if a new practice or process alteration should be judged as either a welcomed benefit or a shunned liability. Toffler took this perspective. He didn’t question the essence or merits of technological change nearly as much as the propagation rate of such change.
When I decided to re-engage Future Shock I found myself yearning to see if Toffler’s predictions for the future had been accurate or overly speculative or wildly missing the mark. My porous 50-year old memory assumed Toffler must have made predictions of the future like the old-fashioned world fairs used to do. I certainly remembered this was a book about the future, so prophecy must have been a big part of it. Turns out, I was somewhat mistaken. My recent re-reading of the book made clear early on that this was not meant to be a crystal ball in book form. Whereas, Toffler did engage in speculation about social and scientific trends and the yet-to-be-realized practices associated with them he expected his readers to know his conjectures were best guesses based on available quantifiable and qualitative information, flavored with a dash of imagination. Toffler decidedly stated, “No serious futurist deals in predictions.”
That said, I evaluate where Toffler was generally on and where he was generally off with regards to his main thesis. Has future shock been the severe affliction he thought it could be? If so, where is the evidence of future shock in our current time and if none is to be found, why not? Did the cultural, social, business, education, and technological trends he suggested as possible materialize or not? Did humankind ever learn the skills of adaption to control rapid technological change? Are we still individually or societally in danger of the negative effects of future shock? Can the future be utilized to improve the present time similar to the way study of the past has been found to be helpful? These are the kinds of questions I seek to answer.
Rereading a book you remember being enjoyable and impactful fifty years later is fun. (Maybe I should consider picking up again Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I remember really loving that one.) My overall impression this time around is that Future Shock attempted a bold and valid assertion. It also was impeccably researched. I get why it was groundbreaking and in many ways it still holds up. In general, Toffler was justified in popularizing the notion that technological change was gaining momentum with such unrestrained speed that the population could be at risk for psychological and sociological disruption. Replacing tradition with transience was an untested phenomenon.
Toffler revealed how increased knowledge was clearly fueling change, but not visibly informing people about how to adapt to it. Evidence was presented demonstrating how abundant novelty, innovation, and change can result in individual and group instability. Anecdote after anecdote illustrating defiance of change among the wider public was also shown. The easily perceived mismatch between our capacity to intentionally merge rapid revolution with able adaptation must have seemed very conspicuous to Toffler and surely shouted for a clarion call such as Future Shock. He had a well-founded and authoritative reason to write this book. He also was not only quite prescient at times, but prudent in his counsel.
From the start, Toffler was correct to question our addiction to permanence. It is completely understandable, if not poetic, to revere traditions, customs, cultural mores, and tried and true methods passed down to us from generation to generation. There is comfort in connecting with the past and embracing time-honored conventions. Ambiguity, and with it stress, are diminished. We can be more at ease. Nonetheless, an over-reliance or excessive dependence on permanence leaves us ill prepared for a truism about our existences. Life is always subject to change. There is no such thing as the completely static life. Desperate or habitual clinging to constancy will eventually lead to disappointment, anxiety, and pain.
This reality is strongly reinforced by the Indian religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, where we see the concept of impermanence addressed so prominently. In short, these philosophical traditions state that attachment to people, things, and ideas is a fool’s errand, because they will all change or cease thereby leaving suffering in their wake. To reverse this pattern, which is carried out person by person and generation after generation, it is necessary to relinquish a craving for permanence. Toffler recognized we were set up for future shock, if for no other reason than because we ordinarily cling to changelessness. We are not primed to cope with the degree of change showering over us.
Toffler adeptly zeroed in on the causes for mass psychological distress and unease. Intensifying conditions without historical precedence were mushrooming mid-century at such a robust rate, questions about where it was all heading were naturally going to arise. A child in 1903 could have heard about the Wright brothers pioneering success in aviation and lived to an old age that witnessed astronauts walking on the Moon. This same child might have traveled to a rural school on horseback and driven a Corvette during their retirement sixty years later. Progress was revered and in many ways welcomed given the expansion of labor-saving improvements and fresh entertaining distractions suddenly made available. Nevertheless, mixed into this seductive lifestyle-shifting were disconcerting signs indicating all may not be well in the brave new world of modern America.
The exacerbation of transience, novelty, and diversity lay at the root of the personal and social torment most concerning Toffler. Even if we see these three trends as potentially positive, which of course they can be, there can still occur such a fast-paced proliferation of these developments that they are essentially rendered encumbrances. Coping mechanisms are required to manage the intensity and consequences of elevated levels of transience, novelty, and diversity. And it is just these management safeguards which are missing from wide swaths of the American and western populations.
Toffler succeeded in not only communicating the origins of future shock, but also the manifestations of unmanaged stress and relentless overstimulation. Future shock is displayed both psychologically and physically. Adaptation, or lack of it, was researched yielding studies and cases revealing physiological degradation and illness of individuals overexposed to change. Furthermore, he detailed the existence of an “orientation response”, denoting how people mentally adapt to external alterations. Our brains construct stores of previously assimilated information and use these impressions to reference and rate the quality and characteristics of new stimuli. Applying our orientation response requires mental and physical energy, not unlike being repeatedly startled. Repetitions of this reaction can leave one feeling stressed, similar to too much triggering of our ‘flight or fight response’. Symptoms can range from anxiety, apathy, and difficulty making decisions to uncertainty about what long lasting values to adopt.
In 2016, Robert Gordon of Northwestern University wrote a landmark book asserting that American economic and living standards underwent remarkable progress during what he described as the “Special Century”, 1870-1970. The Rise and Fall of American Growth enumerated how modernizing transformations in transportation, the home, food, apparel, retail, healthcare, and employment not only propelled economic growth, but vastly boosted the well-being of American society. Given our retrospective perch we can now see how Toffler’s viewpoint came from the end of that bullish stretch. To him it very well may have seemed there was no end in sight of more and more life-changing transitions.
I know what you might be thinking. But wait, the technology that would lead to the personal computer was just getting started. In the 1960s the guys at Fairchild Semiconductor in California, like Gordon Moore, were starting to make the claim that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit were now doubling every two years (Moore’s Law). Vast game-changing transfigurations were just around the corner. How can you say the Special Century was ending when the information revolution was getting ready to explode? As Robert Gordon points out, the splash of technology over the past 50 years, while impressive and compelling has not vaulted us into the level of elemental change or economic growth wrought by the life-fulfilling innovations evident during the Special Century. Toffler, on the other hand, had his recent past as his reference point and it showed a progression of radical changes of the type highlighted by Gordon. It made every sense to think the nascent but burgeoning technology sector would lead to a continuation of critical changes.
This lack of, well, future orientation may be in part the reason for some of Toffler’s overzealous prognostications. To begin with, Toffler seems to have overstated people’s inability to cope with the future. We have largely succeeded thus far to avoid mass psycho-biological paralysis. Future shock has not been as egregious of a “disease” as he thought possible. History has marched on these past fifty years and by and large we have weathered the storm of invention and disruption thrown at us. If anything, the eruption of technological change has made us more resilient and versatile. This is not to say there have been no instances of people confounded by technological changes to the degree they have felt frustrated or even debilitated, but overall the scale of psycho-emotional catastrophe imagined by Toffler is of a tamer magnitude than he thought likely.
Toffler also relied a lot on an ‘intentional community’ model when offering change management suggestions. For example, his idea of streamlining the family as an efficient and simplified mobile collection of two parents with similar careers and few children. If this arrangement were to become too restrictive to the all-business couple there could be “professional parents” whose job it would be to do the child rearing. Presumably the breadwinners were to schedule regular meetings to check in on their kids. Another case in point involves “preadaption”. To avoid the anxiety of frequent transitions to new locations, jobs, schools, etc. families could engage with a structured orientation, featuring simulations and remote meetings with key players from the new city. It is not evident practices like these have flourished.
There are many such instances in which Toffler proposed engineered and calibrated changes for people and communities as an alternative to experiencing abrupt upheavals in any number of areas of life. Whether these arrangements were to be centrally controlled by government or some other entity or whether they were to sprout organically among well-meaning citizens is rarely clarified. Regardless, after awhile these recommendations start sounding too contrived and unrealistic. Also of note, people are not as willing to be managed as Toffler seemed to think they were. As Toffler made clear, futurists are not in the prediction game, as counter-intuitive as that may sound. It’s good he clarified as much, because his forecasts make for a mixed bag as best.
When reviewing the changes of the past fifty years much has indeed been driven by technological advances. However, technology alone has not been the sole catalyst. Rather applied science has functioned in tandem with other significant influences. A principal trend impacted by technology and a source of great change was the resurgence of neoliberalism as the prevailing economic model of the U.S. during this time. Although neoliberalism is often associated with free-market capitalism it also promotes elements that have dominated the past fifty years such as globalization and free trade. Our ability to extend interactions and integrations across the globe via information technologies has come to define our current turbulent times.
In fact, remote connections among people affect not just international economic and cultural relations, but national and local ones as well. Social media has so ensnared the interests of so many that the generation and dissemination of information, both factual and not, is directly transforming our politics and dealings with one another. Privacy as well is becoming a quaint virtue of the past. We are all being rendered to data points as public and private institutions ascribe to Big Data serviceability models. So yes, technology is a phenomenon common to the consequential changes of the past half-century, but technology’s impact is most felt in its capacity to influence the dynamics of governmental, economic, and cultural trends.
If Future Shock were to be written today my guess is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would play a major role. Just as Toffler was warranted in writing a cautionary tome in the 1960s when it was apparent the world was changing in unique ways, the 2020s can also be seen as on the precipice of an uncertain future. Like the technologies of the ’60s, which were billed as developments and improvements over what had been, AI is promising to introduce greater efficiencies of functional systems, problem solving and production processes, increased leisure time, and on and on. And again, as in the ’60s, this new fangled technology of AI ushers in ethical questions of appropriateness, risks, and unanticipated consequences.
We study history to better inform ourselves about the present. By not repeating mistakes from the past we can improve the quality of the current moment. Futurism also attempts to influence ongoing time, but instead of delving into recorded history to do so futurism identifies possible upcoming scenarios based on an analysis of existing trends, signals, and patterns with available pertinent data. Perhaps the best way to avoid future shock and a lack of adaptation is by undertaking a systemic process of strengthening preparedness. To actively prepare for change may be the best way to adapt. A good offense makes the best defense. Toffler’s work in this regard still makes sense today.
In conclusion, the morale of this story is that from some point in the last two centuries the future ceased to materialize as an unchanging and reoccurring episode as it had been throughout much of human history. Futures will forever more be uncertain. Therefore, for each new generation futures are now to be seen as planned, structured, and envisaged to determine if they will turn out to be either good or bad. The challenge of intentionally addressing and if possible shaping the future with all of its potential and jeopardy is owed to our descendants. The Anthropocene is upon us. We are God’s agents on earth. There is no time for future shock to impede us. Yes, let’s seize each and every day in our present time, but also leave a future worthy of enthusiastic grasping by our children and their children.