At 50, the missteps and omissions of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock have their charms

Toffler had been investigated by the FBI for his Marxist sympathies , so it’s perhaps not surprising that many of his suggestions for combatting future shock involve the creation of government committees whose role it would be to thoroughly assess all new technologies before they were unleashed on society. Another was the establishment of a technology ombudsman “charged with receiving, investigating, and acting on complaints having to do with the irresponsible application of technology.

Despite being a so-called futurist, Toffler saw himself not as any kind of oracle, but as an observer of trends. On that front he got an amazing amount right, especially the big stuff.

Toffler was certain that technology would soon liberate us from the commuter model of driving an hour to work each day, filling the air with “puke” just to spend the entire day on the telephone, which he viewed as a “form of insanity.” No mention of jogging pants. A bit heartbreakingly, he worried about how we would manage to assimilate the vast amounts of new information and science coming our way, which would surely require a near-constant revision of our worldviews. He worried needlessly.

Toffler saw the trend toward transience – in knowledge, relationships, celebrity, where people lived and worked – as a major contributor to future shock. He may have anticipated the internet, but he did not anticipate the way the internet would allow people and things to linger around. Tom Cruise has been an action star since the 80s. The Kardashians continue to command people’s attention for no discernable reason. Millennials obsess over, a 30-year-old sitcom.

... “stop the internet, I want to get off … for a” while is quite true as Toffler popularized, “information overload'.

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