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I hope, that, unless man quickly learns to control the rate of change in his personal affairs as well as in society at large, we are doomed to a massive adaptational breakdown. In 1965, in an article in Horizon, I coined the term “future shock” to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.
Earnest intellectuals talk bravely about “educating for change” or “preparing people for the future.” But we know virtually nothing about how to do it In the most rapidly changing environment to which man has ever been exposed, we remain pitifully ignorant of how the human animal copes.
By the same token, why do some men hunger, even rage for change, doing all in their power to create it, while others flee from it? I not only found no ready answers to such questions, but discovered that we lack even an adequate theory of adaptation, without which it is extremely unlikely that we will ever find the answers.
the rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.
Indeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a “time skip.” An event that affected only a handful of people at the time of its occurrence in the past can have large-scale consequences today.
It is vital to understand, moreover, that technological innovation does not merely combine and recombine machines and techniques. Important new machines do more than suggest or compel changes in other machines—they suggest novel solutions to social, philosophical, even personal problems. They alter man’s total intellectual environment—the way he thinks and looks at the world.
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. He must search out totally new ways to anchor himself, for all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family, or profession—are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. Before he can do so, however, he must understand in greater detail how the effects of acceleration penetrate his personal life, creep into his behavior and alter the quality of existence. He must, in other words, understand transience.
What makes them different from the rest of mankind? Certainly, they are richer, better educated, more mobile than the majority of the human race. They also live longer. But what specifically marks the people of the future is the fact that they are already caught up in a new, stepped-up pace of life. They “live faster” than the people around them.
At the cost of other things as evidenced by increasing marriage and having children timelines
It will help us understand the concept of transience if we think in terms of the idea of “turnover.” In a grocery store, for example, milk turns over more rapidly than, say, canned asparagus. It is sold and replaced more rapidly. The “through-put” is faster.
Paper clothes are particularly suitable for children. Writes one fashion expert: “Little girls will soon be able to spill ice cream, draw pictures and make cutouts on their clothes while their mothers smile benignly at their creativity.” And for adults who want to express their own creativity, there is even a “paint-yourself-dress”
Or fast fashion...
In the past, permanence was the ideal. Whether engaged in handcrafting a pair of boots or in constructing a cathedral, all man’s creative and productive energies went toward maximizing the durability of the product. Man built to last He had to. As long as the society around him was relatively unchanging each object had clearly defined functions, and economic logic dictated the policy of permanence. Even if they had to be repaired now and then, the boots that cost fifty dollars and lasted ten years were less expensive than those that cost ten dollars and lasted only a year.
The rise of rentalism is a move away from lives based on having and it reflects the increase in doing and being. If the people of the future live faster than the people of the past, they must also be far more flexible.
Just like the 'subscription economy' now...
Backed by mass media promotion and sophisticated marketing, such fads now explode on the scene virtually overnight—and vanish just as quickly.
Nowadays on a whole new level with digital marketing (53 years later!)
This moving of executives from house to house as if they were life-size chessmen on a continent-sized board has led one psychologist to propose facetiously a money-saving system called “The Modular Family.” Under this scheme, the executive not only leaves his house behind, but his family as well. The company then finds him a matching family (personality characteristics carefully selected to duplicate those of the wife and children left behind) at the new site. Some other itinerant executive then “plugs into” the family left behind. No one appears to have taken the idea seriously—yet.
This non-involvement or, at best, limited participation, has been sharply criticized by those who see in it a menace to the traditional ideal of grass-roots democracy. They overlook, however, an important reality: the possibility that those who refuse to involve themselves deeply in community affairs may be showing greater moral responsibility than those who do—and then move away. The movers boost a tax rate—but avoid paying the piper because they are no longer there. They help defeat a school bond issue—and leave the children of others to suffer the consequences. Does it not make more sense,
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“Allegiance to a city or state is even now weaker for many than allegiance to a corporation, a profession, or a voluntary association.” Thus it might be said that commitments are shifting from place-related social structures (city, state, nation or neighborhood) to those (corporation, profession, friendship network) that are themselves mobile, fluid, and, for all practical purposes, place-less.
So long as we do not become involved with the shoe salesman’s problems at home, or his more general hopes, dreams and frustrations, he is, for us, fully interchangeable with any other salesman of equal competence. In effect, we have applied the modular principle to human relationships. We have created the disposable person: Modular Man.
Each man’s trajectory or career line will differ, but certain types of trajectories will recur. When asked “What do you do?” the super-industrial man will label himself not in terms of his present (transient) job, but in terms of his trajectory type, the overall pattern of his work life.
“The most important component of the personalities of successful corporate managers and owners is that, their deep emotional identifications with their families of birth being dissolved, they no longer are closely intermeshed with the past, and, therefore, are capable of relating themselves easily to the present and future. They are people who have literally and spiritually left home…They can relate and disrelate themselves to others easily.”
Of these, a considerable number were non-local, and the fact that wives seemed to list more non-local friends than their husbands suggests that they are less willing than their husbands to slough off a friendship after a move. Men, in short, seem to be more skilled at breaking off relationships than women.
Or women are better at maintaining them... A subtle difference
The kinds of organizations these critics project unthinkingly into the future are precisely those least likely to dominate tomorrow. For we are witnessing not the triumph, but the breakdown of bureaucracy. We are, in fact, witnessing the arrival of a new organizational system that will increasingly challenge, and ultimately supplant bureaucracy. This is the organization of the future. I call it “Ad-hocracy.”
Man will encounter plenty of difficulty in adapting to this new style organization. But instead of being trapped in some unchanging, personality-smashing niche, man will find himself liberated, a stranger in a new free-form world of kinetic organizations. In this alien landscape, his position will be constantly changing, fluid, and varied. And his organizational ties, like his ties with things, places and people, will turn over at a frenetic and ever-accelerating rate.
For the individual within these organizations, change creates a wholly new climate and a new set of problems. The turnover of organizational designs means that the individual’s relationship to any one structure (with its implied set of obligations and rewards) is truncated, shortened in time. With each change, he must reorient himself. Today the average individual is frequently reassigned, shuffled about from one sub-structure to another. But even if he remains in the same department, he often finds that the department, itself, has been shifted on some fast-changing table of organization, so
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“In just a few years,” says Business Week, “the project manager has become commonplace.”
“You no longer have the strict allegiance to hierarchy. You may have five or six different levels of the hierarchy represented in one meeting. You try to forget about salary level and hierarchy, and organize to get the fob done.”
Because of the high rate of movement back and forth from one transient team to another, he continues, “There will…be a reduced commitment to work groups…While skills in human interaction will become more important, due to the growing needs for collaboration in complex tasks, there will be a concomitant reduction in group cohesiveness…People will have to learn to develop quick and intense relationships on the job, and learn to bear the loss of more enduring work relationships.”
The new spirit in these transient organizations is closer to that of the entrepreneur than the organization man.
Very prescient for 1970
Thus we find the emergence of a new kind of organization man—a man who, despite his many affiliations, remains basically uncommitted to any organization. He is willing to employ his skills and creative energies to solve problems with equipment provided by the organization, and within temporary groups established by it But he does so only so long as the problems interest him. He is committed to his own career, his own self-fulfillment.
Sounds great
Where the organization man was subservient to the organization, Associative Man is almost insouciant toward it Where the organization man was immobilized by concern for economic security, Associative Man increasingly takes it for granted. Where the organization man was fearful of risk, Associative Man welcomes it (knowing that in an affluent and fast-changing society even failure is transient). Where the organization man was hierarchy-conscious, seeking status and prestige within the organization, Associative Man seeks it without. Where the organization man filled a predetermined slot,
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In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity.
How prescient for 1970...
Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the minds of millions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them “in person.” They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have “in-person” relationships. We form relationships with these “vicarious people,” just as we do with friends, neighbors and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is
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We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to “try on” various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through of vicarious people cannot but contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style.
This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect, according to Klapp, of making leadership “more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace…A country like the United States has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does.” What we are observing, says Klapp, is a “rapid turnover of
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“At the rate at which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the world will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the world will have been learned since the time he was born.”
In the United States today the median time spent by adults reading newspapers is fifty-two minutes per day.
No way that's still true... in 2023 compared to 1970 (including digital newspaper)
Nothing, indeed, is quite so purposive as advertising, and today the average American adult is assaulted by a minimum of 560 advertising messages each day. Of the 560 to which he is exposed, however, he only notices seventy-six.
This was 1970, in 2020 estimates were four to ten.. thousand
Thus we see the widespread and increasing use of symbolism for compacting information.
He probably never saw emojis coming in 1970...
“In 1954,” says Flexner, “when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang,
OG Urban Dictionary
If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-industrial society will never “feel at home” in it Like the voyager who takes up residence in an alien country, only to find, once adjusted, that he must move on to another, and yet another, we shall come to feel like “strangers in a strange land.”
The super-industrial revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Moreover, despite the pessimistic prophecies of the straight-line thinkers, super-industrialism will not restrict man, will not crush him into bleak and painful uniformity. In contrast, it will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight. It will be vividly colorful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom.
By the year 2000, if the pressure for food continues to intensify, biologists will be growing microorganisms for use as animal feed and, eventually, human food.
This kinda happened with things like beyond meat
has publicly suggested, on the basis of his own astonishing work on reproduction, that within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as though it had been conceived in her own body.
We're there and things are fine
Recently they enjoyed a collective laugh at the expense of one of the leading critics of the robot-builders, a former RAND Corporation computer specialist named Hubert L. Dreyfus. Arguing that computers would never be able to match human intelligence, Dreyfus wrote a lengthy paper heaping vitriolic scorn on those who disagreed with him. Among other things, he declared, “No chess program can play even amateur chess.” In context, he appeared to be saying that none ever would. Less than two years later, a graduate student at MIT, Richard Greenblatt, wrote a chess-playing computer program,
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Lol
Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest that manufacturing will soon be outstripped by service activity in all the industrial nations—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. What the economists, however, have not done, is to ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what?
It is this shift that will lead to the next forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” For the key to the post-service economy lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture.
Spot on for 1970!
launched a labor-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favor of mixes that require extra labor—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powdered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powdered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit.
“The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware.
Like noise in electric cars
One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, danger, sexual titillation or other pleasure without risk to his real life or reputation.
VR/AR...
The diversity of novel experiences arrayed before the consumer will be the work of experience-designers, who will be drawn from the ranks of the most creative people in the society. The working motto of this profession will be: “If you can’t serve it up real, find a vicarious substitute. If you’re good, the customer will never know the difference!” This implied blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society with serious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the “psyche-service industries” and “psych-corps.” Great globe-girdling
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Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders.
R/wsb
