Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

The TWA passenger may now choose a jet on which the food, the music, the magazines, the movies, and the stewardess’ miniskirt are all French. He may choose a “Roman” flight on which the girls wear togas. He may opt for a “Manhattan Penthouse” flight Or he may select the “Olde English” flight on which the girls are called “serving wenches” and the decor supposedly suggests that of an English pub.

As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things.

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. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the “sexoticism” of an eighteenth-century Japanese geisha house, and the like.

Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs—a date with a lovely and willing lady if he wins, perhaps a day in solitary confinement if he loses. As the stakes rise, more imaginative payoffs and punishments will be designed.

A loser may have to serve (by voluntary pre-agreement) as a “slave” to a winner for several days. A winner may be rewarded by ten free minutes of electronic pleasure-probing of his brain. A player may risk flogging or its psychological equivalent—participation in a day-long session during which winners are permitted to work off their aggressions and hostilities by sneering, shouting at, reviling, or otherwise attacking the ego of the loser.

High rollers may play to win a free heart or lung transplant at some later date, should it prove to be necessary. Lo...

The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of the new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the sex of one’s baby, or even to “program” its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a “babytorium” and actually purchase embryos—all

the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents.

once childbearing is broken away from its biological base, nothing more than tradition suggests having children at an early age. Why not wait, and buy your embryos later, after your work career is over? Thus childlessness is likely to spread among young and middle-aged couples; sexagenarians who raise infants may be far more common.

when advanced technology and information systems make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-telecommunication hookups, communalism will become feasible for larger numbers.

Young people today already leave home sooner than their counterparts a generation ago. They will probably depart even earlier tomorrow. Masses of youngsters will move off, whether into trial marriage or not, in their mid-teens. Thus we may anticipate that the middle and late thirties will be another important breakpoint in the marital careers of millions.

When a “mother” can compress the process of birth into a brief visit to an embryo emporium, when by transferring embryos from womb to womb we can destroy even the ancient certainty that childbearing took nine months, children will grow up into a world in which the family cycle, once so smooth and sure, will be jerkily arhythmic.

Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track.

Joseph Naughton, a mathematician and computer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested a system that would store a consumer’s profile—data about his occupation and Interests—in a central computer. Machines would then scan newspapers, magazines, video tapes, films and other material, match them against the individual’s interest profile, and instantaneously notify him when something appears that concerns him. The system could be hitched to facsimile machines and TV transmitters that would actually display or print out the material in his own living room.

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.

Yet we are all rodeo riders or hippies in one sense: we, too, search for identity by attaching ourselves to informal cults, tribes or groups of various kinds. And the more numerous the choices, the more difficult the quest.

We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like.

We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults—tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of “beating the system”—a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail,

Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society.

Out of these two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the “acid” subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group—a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.

We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it.

Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formation of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity.

Today we still create our life styles by forming a mosaic of components. But much has changed. Life style is no longer simply a manifestation of class position. Classes themselves are breaking up into smaller units. Economic factors are declining in importance. Thus today it is not so much one’s class base as one’s ties with a subcult that determine the individual’s style of life. The working-class hippie and the hippie who dropped out of Exeter or Eton share a common style of life but no common class.

However, we pay for the benefits we receive. For once we psychologically affiliate with a subcult, it begins to exert pressures on us. We find that it pays to “go along” with the group. It rewards us with warmth, friendship and approval when we conform to its life style model. But it punishes us ruthlessly with ridicule, ostracism or other tactics when we deviate from it.

The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges his preconceptions. We don’t want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs.

Deciding, whether consciously or not, to be “like” William Buckley or Joan Baez, Lionel Trilling or his surfer equivalent, J. J. Moon, rescues us from the need to make millions of minute life-decisions. Once a commitment to a style is made, we are able to rule out many forms of dress and behavior, many ideas and attitudes, as inappropriate to our adopted style.

This is the social mobility of the future: not simply movement from one economic class to another, but from one tribal grouping to another. Restless movement from subcult to ephemeral subcult describes the arc of his life.

As we rush toward super-industrialism, therefore, we find people adopting and discarding life styles at a rate that would have staggered the members of any previous generation. For the life style itself has become a throw-away item.

We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us—the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions—can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock. These forms of social irrationality may well reflect the deterioration of individual decision-making under conditions of environmental overstimulation.

Future shock is the response to overstimulation. It occurs when the individual is forced to operate above his adaptive range.

Information has been defined technically and measured in terms of units called “bits.”*2

The Barry Goldwaters and George Wallaces of the world appeal to his quivering gut through the politics of nostalgia. Police maintained order in the past; hence, to maintain order, we need only supply more police. Authoritarian treatment of children worked in the past; hence, the troubles of the present spring from permissiveness.

The assertion that the world has “gone crazy,” the graffiti slogan that “reality is a crutch,” the interest in hallucinogenic drugs, the enthusiasm for astrology and the occult, the search for truth in sensation, ecstasy and “peak experience,” the swing toward extreme subjectivism, the attacks on science, the snowballing belief that reason has failed man, reflect the everyday experience of masses of ordinary people who find they can no longer cope rationally with change.

A bit is the amount of information needed to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives. The number of bits needed increases by one as the number of such alternatives doubles.

In the technological systems of tomorrow—fast, fluid and self-regulating—machines will deal with the flow of physical materials; men with the flow of information and insight. Machines will increasingly perform the routine tasks; men the intellectual and creative tasks. Machines and men both, instead of being concentrated in gigantic factories and factory cities, will be scattered across the globe, linked together by amazingly sensitive, near-instantaneous communications. Human work will move out of the factory and mass office into the community and the home.

The technology of tomorrow requires not millions of lightly lettered men, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitious jobs, it requires not men who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but men who can make critical judgments, who can weave their way through novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality. It requires men who, in C. P. Snow’s compelling term, “have the future in their bones.”

With the move toward knowledge-based industry and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education system, offering them home instruction instead.

Learning may be maximized through the use of controlled nutrition or drugs to raise IQ, to accelerate reading, or to enhance awareness.

As for curriculum, the Councils of the Future, instead of assuming that every subject taught today is taught for a reason, should begin from the reverse premise: nothing should be included in a required curriculum unless it can be strongly justified in terms of the future. If this means scrapping a substantial part of the formal curriculum, so be it.

This obsolete curriculum, furthermore, imposes standardization on the elementary and secondary schools. Youngsters are given little choice in determining what they wish to learn. Variations from school to school are minimal. The curriculum is nailed into place by the rigid entrance requirements of the colleges, which, in turn, reflect the vocational and social requirements of a vanishing society.

Even now we should be training cadres of young people for life in submarine communities. Part of the next generation may well find itself living under the oceans. We should be taking groups of students out in submarines, teaching them to dive, introducing them to underwater housing materials, power requirements, the perils and promises involved in a human invasion of the oceans.

Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.”

Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation.

Future shock—the disease of change—can be prevented. But it will take drastic social, even political action. No matter how individuals try to pace their lives, no matter what psychic crutches we offer them, no matter how we alter education, the society as a whole will still be caught on a runaway treadmill until we capture control of the accelerative thrust itself.

technological advance is clearly a critical node in the network of causes; indeed, it may be the node that activates the entire net One powerful strategy in the battle to prevent mass future shock, therefore, involves the conscious regulation of technological advance.

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.

This protest against the ravages of irresponsibly used technology could crystallize in pathological form—as a future-phobic fascism with scientists substituting for Jews in the concentration camps. Sick societies need scapegoats.

The horrifying truth is that, so far as much technology is concerned, no one is in charge.