5 Thoughts from Future Shock
Written in 1970, this future-facing manifesto was able to see the root behind today's issues better than modern critics. Here's why you should read it.
We have all heard how technology is contributing to the turbulence of our time. While increasingly marvelous tools make some aspects of our lives incredibly easy, we are experiencing some collective side effects. We live fast-paced lives with little stability. We are inundated by faulty and malignant information. We are experiencing rising rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression. If we are to manage the effects of this progress, then our understanding of what is happening to us has to evolve.
I’ve been looking for thinkers that could contextualize this moment and the late Alvin Toffler’s name came up. Future Shock is one man’s attempt at contextualizing the double-edged sword of technological progress. Toffler defines “future shock” as a condition involving psychological stress and personal disorientation that is brought about by the rapid rate of technological and social change in society. If this sounds familiar to you, just wait.
"Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it."
Toffler certainly has his fans, and he has been given some credit by those who remember the novel, yet it has mostly faded to history. We should revisit this book because it attempted to define a shocking amount of the social and cultural issues that we grapple with today under a single umbrella while trying to propose some mitigation techniques that could be useful to us. For no matter how smart we are, or how adaptable we think we may be, future shock can manifest in various ways. We’ve seen it often with ourselves, our loved ones and certainly with random people on social media.
As a disclaimer, there are certainly a few chapters that don’t age well from a politically correct sense, but in true Nuance Node fashion I want to surface some core takeaways that have stuck with me. I hope you’ll find these as interesting as I do, as I think the book is well worth your time in 2024.
Transience is the new norm
The death of permanence is a key theme in Toffler’s thought process on future shock, partly because he grew up in a world where permanence was the status quo. He started in a world where someone would live, work and die in a small radius, to one where travel and migration was commonplace for middle class people. Products also lasted a lot longer in Toffler’s youth compared to how disposable objects have become today. Based on that and more, he predicted the transition to a society more based on transience.
"We face a rising flood of throwaway items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship."
Transience is not just about our fading relationship to objects, but how these changes would go on to shatter many aspects of a stable life that people relied on. Some examples of transience that we are all familiar with:
Frequent instances of people moving from where they are born to new cities due to work and other opportunities, including the rise of digital nomads
More volatile swings in the stock market, leading to increasing amounts of recessions, layoffs and job switching
Boom and bust experiences with cultural trends and fads that constantly shift around us
The kaleidoscopic explosion of various devoted subcultures and lifestyles
Software and products that are constantly improving and adapting, faster than many can keep up with
All of these can be summed up by a rising level of transience in our lives. It is a key component of the overwhelming instances of future shock that many people are dealing with today.
Industrialism vs. Super-industrialism
Toffler’s worldview is based on the transition of our economy to one that is more specialized and knowledge-based, something he dubbed to be super-industrialism. The internet was not yet invented, but it would go on to enable the type of economy he envisioned, at least in the majority of the west. It was his view that this new economy would create new lifestyles and migration patterns, radically shifting how our society operates.
By moving from an agricultural and factory based economy to a knowledge based one, super-industrialism has largely taken shape today. The workers in this group, understood more often today as the professional-managerial class, do indeed make up an increasing percentage of the middle class. They live interesting lifestyles. They either live in cultural hubs or as remote workers, and their lifestyle would easily be described as utopian if you were to ask someone from the early 20th century.
Imagine explaining to an early steel worker how today’s middle class technology worker doesn’t even need to commute to work? This growing section of the economy can do their tasks virtually and on their own time, all while having time to pick their kids up from school or order dinner to their doorstop on their smartphone. Oh, and they have more benefits than ever, such as paid family leave, unlimited PTO and subsidized gym memberships. Toffler saw large parts of this shift, and predicted that it would be a radical change for society. Spurred on by COVID, super-industrialism is in full swing, and we can’t know how far it goes from here.
Using Culture Shock as a lens for understanding Future Shock
When we sit down in a well-populated cafe and find everyone looking down at a screen, it can be disorienting. The same can be said of working all day in front of a screen, or having that screen be your only connection to a loved one. In many ways it’s similar to the feeling of getting off a ship in a foreign country, experiencing the unfamiliar hustle and bustle of a city port. We all know the latter as Culture Shock, but we have failed to coalesce around similar language for the former. How much easier would it be if we could just say to our friend that we are struggling with a case of future shock?
"Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future."
We can explore the linguistic opportunity further. The term “culture shock” has helped countless people accept and adapt to being in strange places or among unfamiliar people. Simply by connecting their experience to a term that could be shared and understood by others, we have progressed our understanding of the world and each other. If we ever meet aliens, we will do so based on an understanding of culture shock, and that will equip us to deal with them more thoughtfully. At least I hope so.
The vital role of the futurist
The futurists of old can easily be perceived as a wacky bunch. They may have wrongly predicted flying cars or humankind’s ability to live underwater, but they had a tendency to think in ways that we should appreciate. It’s not what they got wrong that we should focus on, but what they got right and why. For example, Toffler predicted things such as:
The rise of the experience economy that follows a surge in cheap, commoditized goods
The concept of decision paralysis in a technological world, dubbed by him as “overchoice”
Rising levels of stress and anxiety due to productivity improvements and high pace of living
The increasing cases of information overload, and its negative effects on humans who can’t adapt to the addictive power at our fingertips
The best part about seeing those predictions today is realizing that Toffler made them over 50 years ago. It’s comforting to know that at least some of this crazy world was predicted, for it smooths out our collective frame of reference. If we have been on this path since 1970 in a way that Toffler predicted, then we are on a path today that will surely lead us toward 2070. It is still true that few people can see that path today, but there are likely a few like Toffler who can, and that’s reassuring.
These types of thinkers clearly march to the beat of their own drum, a trait I’ve grown to appreciate as the world increasingly descends into political bipolarity. Both ends of that horseshoe peddle on the idea that the world is ending if we don’t radically change the path that we are on. The futurist can be equal parts optimist and pessimist, rather than someone looking to radically change society’s path.
Can a non-political manifesto reach wide audiences anymore?
The worst part about enjoying this book so much is seeing how little it has been recommended, despite a culture that is increasingly questioning technology’s role in society. Perhaps we need to do a bit more scholarship to find people like Toffler who saw some of today’s problems coming.
The term manifesto brings to mind something else. Can a newly written manifesto ever achieve critical mass in the way Future Shock did in 1970? It was clearly a success at the time, selling 5 million copies and spawning multiple followups, inspiring artists and businesspeople alike. Looking back on it today, I’m sure he’d be disappointed to see that none of his predictions or terminology really caught on in the mainstream technology discourse of the 2020s. That said, I’m sure his followers are out there, if I just scour the web enough. I’d like to meet a few of them.
I live in a city where it’s hard to take a walk to the coffee shop in a hip neighborhood without seeing Marxist rhetoric and I can’t check the news without seeing Capitalist doctrines made manifest. And I don’t mean to harp on these worldviews. In fact, I think Adam Smith and Karl Marx were futurists in their own time. They envisioned a better world, and parts of their vision came true just as it did for Toffler. But by being so prescriptive and oversimplifying the world into one grand ideology, those manifestos have had an exceedingly large impact on the world. They’ve become religious texts in many ways.
In contrast, I think Future Shock can be read by someone on the left or on the right today without much protest from either. And maybe that’s why anyone born after 1980 hasn’t heard of it. You could argue that Toffler should have gone full ideologue so his followers could advocate for his teachings in similar ways to how capitalist or communist texts have done. Like reasonable arguments online or a newsletter focused on nuance, the political flexibility of his manifesto may have been Toffler’s cultural undoing.
It is a bold thought to believe that whatever politics we found tantalizing in the industrial age would not last forever, so he was by no means completely neutral. Toffler simply implies that the battle between capitalism and communism wouldn’t last forever, and instead new possibilities would have to emerge. For according to him, we are now in an era of super industrialism and the same rules that inspired people of the gilded age no longer apply.
Based on where I sit today, I would have to say that he has a point. These two ideologies have had their moments in the sun, and created untold examples of both positive and negative outcomes. But unless we are thrown back in time, we must figure out what makes sense for the next 100 years, not the last 100 years. Labor is different. Government is different. Capital is different. The capabilities of a single human are radically different, for better and for worse. These questions, and many more, can’t be answered by those who reference books from hundreds of years ago, and they can’t be answered by Toffler either. He seems to recognize this better than most manifesto authors, or their increasingly rabid followers.
I’ve increasingly perceived the played-out ideologies of today as becoming a means to an end. For cynics, they are a tool for power. For idealists, they are a tool to achieve utopia. As a normal person, you have the impossible task of recognizing the cynic or the idealist for who they are, rather than being blinded by the virtues espoused by their text of choice. Either way, these ideologies are corrupted by human nature from the starting line. Isn’t it more interesting to take the path that Toffler did? For those ideological arguments were still raging in his time, and instead he looked forward. Maybe we should do more of the same.
As you can see I had a lot to say about this book. It’s provided a great start to 2024 as I try to focus on deeper ideas to keep the noisy world of news at bay. Let me know if I convinced you to check it out.