Was there anyone in the mid to late 20th century who actually did predict, to a reasonable degree, the world we now live in? Yes, actually there was. The the husband and wife futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler saw, and forecast, many of the major trends that led to our world today.
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
More important, they thought those trends through, and wrote about them in several books. Alvin Toffler forecast a great deal of the more important trends that actually shaped the world we find ourselves in today. With his first major book, Future Shock, published in 1970, Toffler saw the wave of new technologies, primarily computer based, that were going to sweep through society and radically change our everyday lives. He forecast that most of us would have trouble dealing with the rapid change coming, and whole swathes of people would simply be left behind in the wake of the new technology.
Alvin and Heidi saw a world coming that would happen much faster, a speeding up of everyday life. They surmised, quite correctly, that the world created by so much new technology entering our lives would come as a shock to many people. Their analogy was the culture shock caused by traveling to different country, where life and social cues seemed strange, and hard to understand at first. They dubbed this idea "future shock," where the pace of change would overwhelm people, shocking them with its unfamiliarity. The Tofflers were right on the money with the main idea of Future Shock. A decade later, they went deeper into the idea of technology reshaping society with their 1980 book, The Third Wave, which I will talk about in coming chapters.
"Essentially it (Future Shock)
said, that because of technology, change would be so dramatic in
society, that we would all find it difficult to keep up... There would
be ruptures in society as a result, as some groups were left behind,
whilst others struggled."
-Ray Hammond, another futurist, quoted in the clip above, about Toffler's work
Today's political polarization, at its core, is based on people's reactions to technology, and to future shock. The Republican party "hitched its wagon," in 2016 presidential cycle, to New York real estate billionaire, reality TV star, and blatant racist, Donald Trump. Trump came out of the woodwork, a populist candidate from the Right, and drew a huge following, a following no traditional Republican candidate could match. Those millions of people who blindly follow Donald Trump are now called Trump's Base. Trump's Base is made up, almost exclusively, of the people who have been left behind by the onslaught of new technologies.
As "Red State America" has collapsed economically over the last 30 to 40 years, as most of rural and small town industrial America continues to die on the vine, tens of millions of people simply refuse to learn the new skills, and develop the personality traits needed, to function in the fast-changing, hyper connected, tech enabled world of the 21st century. Those people, laid off from the factories and mines that closed down 20 years ago, unable adapt the new ideas needed to restart local economies, and very often living off of government checks by scamming Social Security Disability, saw hope in the silver tongued billionaire from New York. They put their faith in the guy who said it was OK to hate immigrants, anybody with brown skin, and especially Hillary Clinton.
As I write this chapter, on Christmas Eve 2019, Donald Trump has been impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Republicans, who have now given up any pretense of respect for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, are struggling to kill the impeachment effort, backed by the vast majority of everyday Americans. It's going to be an ugly fight in 2020. But the pendulum of power and larger social trends, is swinging away from the political Right. The inmates took over the asylum for a while, and the crackdown is beginning to happen, order from those who still believe in America's underlying principles is slowly being restored.
We are where we are in today's world, polarized and unstable, in most every way, because so few American leaders took the work of of the Tofflers, and other forward looking people, and the large scale, underlying trends they reported, seriously. If a lot more of the political and business leaders of the 1970's and 1980's had taken Alvin and Hiedi Toffler's work seriously, this country would be in a much different place today. The focus of the majority of business and political leaders on the short term, the next quarter, the next year, has led to our current tumultuous, and largely preventable, chaos.
Here's the 1972 documentary Future Shock, based on the Toffler's 1970 book. It's important to remember just how long ago this was made. To put it in a Generation X context, this documentary came out a year before Bruce Lee's classic Enter the Dragon, and two years before Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump attempt. That was a long, long time ago, when the world was a much different place. The Industrial Age was going strong then, and everyone "knew" it always would be.
Here is my personal favorite interview with Alvin Toffler, from 1980, when his second book, The Third Wave, was coming out. This is one of the most brilliant interviews anywhere. Period. Now 39 years old, recorded four years before the Apple Macintosh was released, the "personal computer for everybody," that completely changed society, this interview predicts a huge amount of what's happened since. Even more important, most of Toffler's thinking is still relevant today, even if his particular examples now seem very dated. Nearly 40 years on, three years after Alvin Toffler's death in 2016, his words still have much to teach. This is a recorded interview, distributed on cassettes,with no video, in effect, it's a "podcast" from 1980.
Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording since I originally wrote these posts in 2019-2020, except for these links at the bottom. I even left in the original typos I missed. "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we've lived through 3 1/2 years of chaos. You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:
No comments:
Post a Comment