Future Shock

Who remembers this book? Future Shock by Alvin Toffler was published in 1970 and became a world-wide bestseller. My father's copy dates from August 1981 and I read it a few years later, around the time I finished secondary school.

The pocket edition counts 490 pages. The English is well-written. The table of contents is nice to read: it counts many well-chosen subtitles, like "Flamenco in Sweden", "The Paper Wedding Gown" and "The Mournful Movers".

The book is not a utopian description of how the future should be, but  rather a futurist description of how it will be. The title Future Shock refers to an illness: "Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the 'mind' and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf".

Alvin Toffler's vision on economists is still very relevant today: "The year 2000 is closer to us (in 1970!) than the Great Depression, yet the world's economists, traumatised by that historic disaster, remain frozen in the attitudes of the past....If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2025, it would look very much like that of 1970-only more so."

Many family tendencies like gay marriage are already anticipated in this book. Toffler also writes: "Men and women today are often torn in a conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children."

Concerning politics, Toffler writes: "We are rushing toward a fateful breakdown of the entire system of political representation. If legislatures are to survive at all, they will need new links with their constituencies, new ties with tomorrow."

The odd thing is that this book doesn't mention mobile phones and internet. In those days, the fax was the emerging communication technology! Nevertheless, Alvin Toffler imagines a machine called OLIVER, read the extract below and compare with our Internet.

We can conclude that most of today's general tendencies were already emerging long ago, longer ago than we tend to believe today. On the other hand, the specific technical developments and especially the order in which they spread over the world, seemed much harder to predict.