Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the world may not stand idly by as the world’s favored few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of mankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could defer the arrival of experientialism, could maintain a more conventional economy for a time by maximizing traditional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign aid programs.

Such a pause might give us time to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity.

Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We don’t let “just anyone” perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. Even the lowest ranking civil servant is required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without regard for mental or moral qualification, to try his or her hand at raising young human beings, so long as these humans are biological offspring. Despite the increasing complexity of the task, parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

As homosexuality becomes more socially acceptable, we may even begin to find families based on homosexual “marriages” with the partners adopting children. Whether these children would be of the same or opposite sex remains to be seen. But the rapidity with which homosexuality is winning respectability in the techno-societies distinctly points in this direction.

And it happened! Accurate prediction for 1970...

It is possible to demonstrate that, even in a relatively stagnant society, the mathematical odds are heavily stacked against any couple achieving this ideal of parallel growth. The odds for success positively plummet, however, when the rate of change in society accelerates, as it now is doing. In a fast-moving society, in which many things change, not once, but repeatedly, in which the husband moves up and down a variety of economic and social scales, in which the family is again and again torn loose from home and community, in which individuals move further from their parents, further from the religion of origin, and further from traditional values, it is almost miraculous if two people develop at anything like comparable rates.

Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

American innovation, the supermarket. Like gas stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike whether they are in Milan or Milwaukee. By wiping out thousands of little “mom and pop” stores they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment Yet the array of goods they offer the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.

Computers, for example, make it easier for a large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computer-assisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom.

Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student’s own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via computerized information retrieval systems, with his own tapes and video units, his own language laboratory and his own electronically equipped study carrel, he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.

The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead—aggressively pushed, no doubt, by major corporations like IBM, RCA, and Xerox.

Lol if only Xerox didn't fumble the future to Apple and Microsoft...

Meanwhile, hand-held cameras and new video-tape equipment are similarly revolutionizing the ground rules of cinema. New technology has put camera and film into the hands of thousands of students and amateurs, and the underground movie—crude, colorful, perverse, highly individualized and localized—is flourishing even more than the underground press.

Culminating today with the selfie

When technical breakthroughs alter the economics of television by providing more channels and lowering costs of production, we can anticipate that that medium, too, will begin to fragment its output and cater to, rather than counter, the increasing diversity of the consuming public. Such breakthroughs are, in fact, closer than the horizon. The invention of electronic video recording, the spread of cable television, the possibility of broadcasting direct from satellite to cable systems, all point to vast increases in program variety. For it should now be clear that tendencies toward uniformity represent only one stage in the development of any technology. A dialectical process is at work, and we are on the edge of a long leap toward unparalleled cultural diversity.

The day is already in sight when books, magazines, newspapers, films and other media will, like the Mustang, be offered to the consumer on a design-it-your-self basis.

AI: Dalle2 ChatGPT etc

It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc., etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization—away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art mass produced education and “mass” culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices—and our freedom—exponentially.

(So marked are these distinctions that they often interfere with interpersonal relationships. Says a woman scientist: “My husband is a microbiologist and I am a theoretical physicist, and sometimes I wonder if we mutually exist.”)

It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock.

In the United States and Japan, among servicemen and civilians, among pregnant women and the families of leukemia victims, among college athletes and retirees, the same striking pattern was present: those with high life change scores were more likely than their fellows to be ill in the following year. For the first time, it was possible to show in dramatic form that the rate of change in a person’s life—his pace of life—is closely tied to the state of his health.

Dubious conclusion... All correlation and not causation. It's no surprise that health problems are correlated with lots of change because folks in such situations often have harder lives due to poverty, illness, etc Future Shock esque change is a different kind form of change and thus you can't extrapolate (new cultures, new tech, etc)

Dr. Gerjuoy argues that we should provide temporary organizations—“situational groups”—for people who happen to be passing through similar life transitions at the same time. Such situational groups should be established, Gerjuoy contends, “for families caught in the upheaval of relocation, for men and women about to be divorced, for people about to lose a parent or a spouse, for those about to gain a child, for men preparing to switch to a new occupation, for families that have just moved into a community, for those about to marry off their last child, for those facing imminent retirement—for anyone, in other words, who faces an important life change. “Membership in the group would, of course, be temporary—just long enough to help the person with the transitional difficulties. Some groups might meet for a few months, others might not do more than hold a single meeting.” By bringing together people who are sharing, or are about to share, a common adaptive experience, he argues, we help equip them to cope with it.

This emphasis on the future, says Gerjuoy, is critical. Unlike some group therapy sessions, the meetings of situational groups should not be devoted to hashing over the past, or to griping about it, or to soul-searching self-revelation, but to discussing personal objectives, and to planning practical strategies for future use in the new life situation.

Similarly it has been suggested that the problems of rural populations suddenly shifted to urban centers might be sharply reduced if something like this half-way house principle were employed to ease their entry into the new way of life. What cities need, according to this theory, are reception facilities where newcomers live for a time under conditions half-way between those of the rural society they are leaving behind and the urban society they are seeking to penetrate. If instead of treating city-bound migrants with contempt and leaving them to find their own way, they were first acclimatized, they would adapt far more successfully.

We must create a “Council of the Future” in every school and community: Teams of men and women devoted to probing the future in the interests of the present By projecting “assumed futures,” by defining coherent educational responses to them, by opening these alternatives to active public debate, such councils—similar in some ways to the “prognostic cells” advocated by Robert Jungk of the Technische Hochschule in Berlin—could have a powerful impact on education.

Super-industrial education must therefore make provision for life-long education on a plug-in/plug-out basis. If learning is to be stretched over a lifetime, there is reduced justification for forcing kids to attend school full time. For many young people, part-time schooling and part-time work at low-skill, paid and unpaid community service tasks will prove more satisfying and educational.

These revolutionary review groups must not, however, set out to design a single all-purpose, permanent new curriculum. Instead, they must invent sets of temporary curricula—along with procedures for evaluation and renovation as time goes by. There must be a systematic way to make curricular changes without necessarily triggering bloody intramural conflict each time.

Metacurriculum

The mental processing of advance data about any subject presumably cuts down on the amount of processing and the reaction time during the actual period of adaptation. It was Freud, I believe, who said: “Thought is action in rehearsal.”

the habit of anticipation. This conditioned ability to look ahead plays a key role in adaptation. Indeed, one of the hidden clues to successful coping may well lie in the individual’s sense of the future. The people among us who keep up with change, who manage to adapt well, seem to have a richer, better developed sense of what lies ahead than those who cope poorly. Anticipating the future has become a habit with them. The chess player who anticipates the moves of his opponent, the executive who thinks in long range terms, the student who takes a quick glance at the table of contents before starting to read page one, all seem to fare better.

People vary widely in the amount of thought they devote to the future, as distinct from past and present. Some invest far more resources than others in projecting themselves forward—imagining, analyzing and evaluating future possibilities and probabilities. They also vary in how far they tend to project Some habitually think in terms of the “deep future.” Others penetrate only into the “shallow future.” We have, therefore, at least two dimensions of “futureness”—how much and how far. There is evidence that among normal teenagers maturation is accompanied by what sociologist Stephen L. Klineberg of Princeton describes as “an increasing concern with distant future events.”

We offer our children courses in history; why not also courses in “Future,” courses in which the possibilities and probabilities of the future are systematically explored, exactly as we now explore the social system of the Romans or the rise of the feudal manor?

But students should not only read. Various games have been designed to educate young people and adults about future possibilities and probabilities.

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate. We risk thermopollution of the oceans themselves, overheating them, destroying immeasurable quantities of marine life, perhaps even melting the polar icecaps. On land we concentrate such large masses of population in such small urban-technological islands, that we threaten to use up the air’s oxygen faster than it can be replaced, conjuring up the possibility of new Saharas where the cities are now. Through such disruptions of the natural ecology, we may literally, in the words of biologist Barry Commoner, be “destroying this planet as a suitable place for human habitation.”

As the effects of irresponsibly applied technology become more grimly evident, a political backlash mounts.

It has.

The incipient worldwide movement for control of technology, however, must not be permitted to fall into the hands of irresponsible technophobes, nihilists and Rousseauian romantics. For the power of the technological drive is too great to be stopped by Luddite paroxysms. Worse yet, reckless attempts to halt technology will produce results quite as destructive as reckless attempts to advance it.

It is hardly reassuring to learn that when the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued its massive report on science in the United States, one of its authors, a former premier of Belgium, confessed: “We came to the conclusion that we were looking for something…which was not there: a science policy.”

Furthermore, just as an individual can exercise conscious choice among alternative life styles, a society today can consciously choose among alternative cultural styles. This is a new fact in history. In the past, culture emerged without premeditation. Today, for the first time, we can raise the process to awareness. By the application of conscious technological policy—along with other measures—we can contour the culture of tomorrow.

Our choice of technologies, in short, will decisively shape the cultural styles of the future. This is why technological questions can no longer be answered in technological terms alone. They are political questions. Indeed, they affect us more deeply than most of the superficial political issues that occupy us today. This is why we cannot continue to make technological decisions in the old way. We cannot permit them to be made haphazardly, independently of one another. We cannot permit them to be dictated by short-run economic considerations alone. We cannot permit them to be made in a policy vacuum. And we cannot casually delegate responsibility for such decisions to businessmen, scientists, engineers or administrators who are unaware of the profound consequences of their own actions.

We can no longer afford to let such secondary social and cultural effects just “happen.” We must attempt to anticipate them in advance, estimating, to the degree possible, their nature, strength and timing. Where these effects are likely to be seriously damaging, we must also be prepared to block the new technology. It is as simple as that Technology cannot be permitted to rampage through the society.

A corporation today will routinely field test a product to make sure it performs its primary function. The same company will market test the product to ascertain whether it will sell. But, with rare exception, no one post-checks the consumer or the community to determine what the human side effects have been. Survival in the future may depend on our learning to do so.

A key political task of the next decade will be to create this machinery. We must stop being afraid to exert systematic social control over technology. Responsibility for doing so must be shared by public agencies and the corporations and laboratories in which technological innovations are hatched.

But simply investigating and apportioning responsibility after the fact is hardly sufficient We must create an environmental screen to protect ourselves against dangerous intrusions as well as a system of public incentives to encourage technology that is both safe and socially desirable. This means governmental and private machinery for reviewing major technological advances before they are launched upon the public. Corporations might be expected to set up their own “consequence analysis staffs” to study the potential effects of the innovations they sponsor.

We need not a reversion to the irrationalisms of the past, not a passive acceptance of change, not despair or nihilism. We need, instead, a strong new strategy. For reasons that will become clear, I term this strategy “social futurism.” I am convinced that, armed with this strategy, we can arrive at a new level of competence in the management of change. We can invent a form of planning more humane, more far-sighted, and more democratic than any so far in use. In short, we can transcend technocracy.

Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. The management of change is the effort to convert certain possibles into probables, in pursuit of agreed-on preferables. Determining the probable calls for a science of futurism. Delineating the possible calls for an art of futurism. Defining the preferable calls for a politics of futurism.

Even those two brilliant anti-utopias, Brave New World and 1984, now seem oversimple. Both describe societies based on high technology and low complexity: the machines are sophisticated but the social and cultural relationships are fixed and deliberately simplified. Today we need powerful new utopian and anti-utopian concepts that look forward to super-industrialism, rather than backward to simpler societies.

If the humanization of the planner is the first stage in the strategy of social futurism, therefore, the forward extension of our time horizon is the second. To transcend technocracy, we need not only to reach beyond our economic philistinism, but to open our minds to more distant futures, both probable and possible.

Imagine the historic drama, the power and evolutionary impact, if each of the high-technology nations literally set aside the next five years as a period of intense national self-appraisal; if at the end of five years it were to come forward with its own tentative agenda for the future, a program embracing not merely economic targets but, equally important, broad sets of social goals—if each nation, in effect, stated to the world what it wished to accomplish for its people and mankind in general during the remaining quarter century of the millennium. Let us convene in each nation, in each city, in each neighborhood, democratic constituent assemblies charged with social stock-taking, charged with defining and assigning priorities to specific social goals for the remainder of the century.

Most important of all, however, social future assemblies would help shift the culture toward a more super-industrial time-bias. By focusing public attention for once on long-range goals rather than immediate programs alone, by asking people to choose a preferable future from among a range of alternative futures, these assemblies could dramatize the possibilities for humanizing the future—possibilities that all too many have already given up as lost. In so doing, social future assemblies could unleash powerful constructive forces—the forces of conscious evolution.

This book has had change as its protagonist—first as potential villain and then, it would seem, as potential hero.

Had me in the first half!