Millions of years ago, our ancestors emerged from the ocean and adapted to life on dry land. Alvin Toffler, a leading futurist of the late 20th century, thinks it’s time for us to turn around and head back underwater. Toffler’s book Future Shock, first published in 1970, is about what happens to people when external circumstances change too quickly and we can’t adapt fast enough to catch up; future shock, analogous to culture shock, is his term for the resulting malady. With dramatic flair, Toffler draws a comparison between the modern world and that previous era of rapid change:
“…the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suh, of the University of Wisconsin, “We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man’s predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures… Those who can adapt will; those who can’t will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish – washed up on the shores.”
So how can we keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by the trauma of rapid adaptation? Well, Toffler proposes it’s time for us to go back into the ocean. Metaphorically – Toffler advocates slowing the rate of change in society and reversing it in some cases – but also literally:
“’Within fifty years,’ says Dr. F. N. Spiess, head of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, ‘man will move onto and into the sea – occupying it and exploiting it as an integral part of his use of this planet for recreation, minerals, food… and, as populations grow, for actual living space.’”
Welcome to Future Shock. This book is full of extreme visions of the near future – if we’re not living underwater, we’ll probably be in a space colony regulating the weather with giant mirrors, or maybe just on land in a commune with our genetically-engineered cyborg brothers and sisters. But for all its far-fetched scenarios, I found this book realistic and insightful in its discussion of the psychological impact that rapid change can have, and the strategies we might use to mitigate that impact.
The thesis of Future Shock is that a lot of things in the world are changing faster than they ever have before, and that’s going to be hard for people to deal with. Toffler waits until about halfway through his ~500-page book to lay this argument out explicitly, but I’m going to put this up front because I think it’s really more of an introduction to the structure of the book:
“The Super-Industrial Revolution will liberate men from many of the barbarisms that grew out of the restrictive, relatively choiceless family patterns of the past and present. It will offer to each a degree of freedom hitherto unknown. But it will exact a steep price for that freedom.
As we hurtle into tomorrow, millions of ordinary men and women will face emotion-packed options so unfamiliar, so untested, that past experience will offer little clue to wisdom. In their family ties, as in all other aspects of their lives, they will be compelled to cope not merely with transience, but with the added problem of novelty as well.”
“In such an environment, fast-changing and unfamiliar, we shall be forced, as we wend our way through life, to make our personal choices from a diverse array of options. … it is the final convergence of these three factors – transience, novelty, and diversity – that sets the stage for the historic crisis of adaptation that is the subject of this book: future shock.”
Toffler is pro-technology, both for its power to improve quality of life and for the new personal freedoms it opens up. However, he also foresees the super-industrial revolution introducing many new psychological stressors. He breaks these down into three major categories: transience, novelty, and diversity. After discussing each, he pulls them together to explain how they lead to the physical condition of future shock. Finally, he discusses a number of strategies that humanity can employ in order to cope and lessen the impact of future shock.
The basis for Toffler’s argument is that today (in 1970), things are changing fast. And it’s not just that things are changing – the rate of change is also increasing, leading to exponential development in many areas. To illustrate this, he takes us from the beginning of human history to the present and hammers his point home with eight hundred specific examples of rapid change. A few of the most striking:
“In 1850 only four cities on the face of the earth had a population of 1,000,000 or more. By 1900 the number had increased to nineteen. But by 1960 there were 141, and today world urban population is rocketing upward at a rate of 6.5 percent per year.”
“[quoting atomic scientist Dr. Homi Bhabha – Q is the energy equivalent of burning 33,000 million tons of coal] ‘In the eighteen and one half centuries after Christ, the total energy consumed averaged less than one half Q per century. But by 1850, the rate had risen to one Q per century. Today, the rate is about ten Q per century.’ This means, roughly speaking, that half of all the energy consumed by man in the past 2,000 years has been consumed in the last one hundred.”
“In 6000 B.C. the fastest transportation available to man over long distances was the camel caravan, averaging eight miles per hour. It was not until about 1600 B.C. when the chariot was invented that the maximum speed was raised to roughly twenty miles per hour. … nearly 3,500 years later, when the first mail coach began operating in England in 1784, it averaged a mere ten mph. The first steam locomotive, introduced in 1825, could muster a top speed of only thirteen mph… it was probably not until the 1880’s that man, with the help of a more advanced steam locomotive, managed to reach a speed of 100 mph. It took the human race millions of years to attain that record.
It took only fifty-eight years, however, to quadruple the limit, so that by 1938 airborne man was cracking the 400-mph line. …And by the 1960s rocket planes approached speeds of 4000 mph, and men in space capsules were circling the earth at 18,000 mph.”
The same pattern applies to the rate at which new books are published, new elements are added to the periodic table, and new English words are coined; everything is not only changing fast, but changing faster and faster.
After covering the past, Toffler talks about the present, where rapid change is causing people to experience unprecedented amounts of transience. Toffler is very thorough, and again he supports this point by presenting eight hundred specific examples. These are broken down into five categories: things, places, relationships, ideas, and organizations. Regarding things – many objects that used to be semi-permanent are now disposable or recyclable, from clothes to toys to furniture. Where our grandparents might have hung onto a treasured fountain pen for years, we get a new ballpoint every couple of weeks. Places: people move around a lot more than they used to, leaving their hometowns behind for school, for work, or just for fun. All that movement causes more transience in relationships, as in each new city people start over to some extent with new neighbors, friends, and coworkers. Transience in ideas means that we’re bombarded with new information all the time, since fads, slang, popular art, and cultural opinion evolve faster than they used to. Finally, organizations – modern businesses restructure more often since traditional bureaucracy is too clunky to keep up with today’s fast-changing goals. All these categories are intertwined and build on each other: more restructuring at work means less permanence in relationships with coworkers; more geographical relocation means you’re probably not hanging onto your parents’ solid oak dining table.
Though this part of the book sometimes reads like a laundry list of every possible source of change and impermanence in the modern world, I thought it was effective in painting a vivid picture of the present and how it differs from every other era in human history.
Next up is the future, which is necessarily a little more speculative. Toffler’s vision of tomorrow cites studies and quotes from experts in various fields, but is also based just as much on his own imagination and intuition. It’s interesting to read these predictions fifty years after Toffler wrote them; some are pretty far off, but surprisingly, others aren’t.
First, his wrong predictions, which fall into a couple of categories. One category is based on the increasing transience he discussed in the last chapter, extended linearly into a future where everything is mega-transient. For example, building on a 70’s fad of “paper dresses”, Toffler predicts that soon, all clothes will be made of paper: single-use and disposable. In fact, permanent possessions won’t really be a thing at all. Everything that’s not disposable will be rented rather than owned: cars, furniture, even houseplants. Future architecture will be disposable too: all buildings will be modular, able to be reconfigured or moved to new locations as needed. These things didn’t happen, or not to the degree Toffler predicted, but you can see how he got here.
Then there’s a second, more bizarre set of wrong predictions. This is where we get into the discussion of humans moving into the ocean – and lest you find that idea a little far-fetched:
“…it is sobering to note that Dr. Walter L. Robb, a scientist at General Electric, has already kept a hamster alive under water by enclosing it in a box that is, in effect, an artificial gill – a synthetic membrane that extracts air from the surrounding water while keeping the water out. … Without the gill, the animal would have suffocated. With it, it was able to breathe underwater.”
Ok - I didn’t find the idea of an underwater hamster as sobering as Toffler did. But to him, it’s a basis for the prediction that humanity will soon “conquer the underwater frontier”. A lot of his weirder predictions read this way: a tidbit of real technology or a quote from an expert in a certain field, elaborated by Toffler into sweeping predictions about drastic societal changes. For example, he cites an expert saying that improved weather observation and forecasting will be possible all over the world by the mid-70s, and then uses this to predict that weather control is also probably right around the corner. He’s fuzzy on the details of how this will happen – maybe giant mirrors in space? – but confident that the technology is “lurking in the beyond-knowledge of today”. He cites Dr. E. S. E. Hafez, “an internationally respected biologist”, commenting that within ten to fifteen years it will be possible to implant an embryo in a woman’s uterus, and uses that as a jumping-off point for a speculative discussion of genetic manipulation and artificially engineered babies. There’s not a lot of evidence here and Toffler lets his imagination run away with him a bit:
“We shall also be able to breed babies with super-normal vision or hearing, supernormal ability to detect changes in odor, or supernormal muscular or musical skills. We will be able to create sexual super-athletes, girls with super-mammaries (and perhaps more or less than the standard two).”
Exciting as this may be, there’s more to genetic engineering than super-boobs, and Toffler does touch on scarier possibilities – for example, that the US could get caught up in a “genetic equivalent of the arms race” with the Soviet Union, using genetic engineering to “increase [the] output of geniuses and gifted individuals”. Also, he acknowledges that this technology would raise some moral quandaries:
“Should we strive for a world in which all people share the same skin color? If we want that, we shall no doubt have the technical means for bringing it about. Or should we, instead, work toward even greater diversity than now exists? What happens to the entire concept of race? To standards of physical beauty? To notions of superiority and inferiority?”
It’s not surprising that Toffler got some things about the future wrong. What’s more surprising is what he gets right. His better predictions tended to deal less with specific science and technology and more with intuitions about how transience and technology might impact feelings and behavior. Some of the things that jumped out at me:
· Toffler quotes political scientist Daniel Elazar in saying that the people of the future will be “urban without being permanently attached to any particular city”
· The social activity of the future will revolve around “search behavior – a relentless process of social discovery in which one seeks out new friends to replace those who are either no longer present or no longer share the same interests”
· In the corporate world, there will be a “shift from vertical and hierarchical arrangements to… new, more lateral, communication patterns”. Also, “advanced technology and information systems [will] make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-telecommunication hookups”
· Marriage will be delayed, or people will tend toward a series of committed relationships (Toffler calls these “micro-marriages) instead of one lifelong marriage, and more people will delay childbirth or remain childless
· In reference to media and advertising, “the waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system”
Trying to make friends in a new city after all your college friends ended up in different parts of the country, working remotely for a software company that has a “corporate lattice” and a co-working space with a ping-pong table, living with your significant other while remaining ambivalent about marriage, trying to head off the violent breakers of Euphoria ads and Will Smith memes seeking entry to your nervous system – sounds about right to me.
After transience and novelty, diversity is Toffler’s third supporting pillar for future shock. The main thrust of this chapter is that, while you might think technology would lead to standardization and conformity, it’s actually going to make everything more diverse. Toffler discusses two main reasons why things are going to get less standardized.
First, more advanced technology means it’s easier to produce more different kinds of products:
“’The rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products which characterize our traditional mass production plants are becoming less important’ reports industrial engineer Boris Yavitz. ‘Numerically controlled machines can readily shift from one product model or size to another by a simple change of programs… Short product runs become economically feasible.’ According to Professor Van Court Hare, Jr., of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, ‘Automated equipment… permits the production of a wide variety of products in short runs at almost ‘mass production’ costs.’”
In other words, introducing variations into assembly-line production costs less than it used to. One example of this: Phillip Morris, which offered only one brand of cigarettes until 1954, but then “introduced six new brands and so many options with respect to size, filter, and menthol that the smoker now has a choice among sixteen different variations.” A lot of industries are following a similar pattern: cars, soft drinks, cleaning products, frozen meals, pet food, etc.
But are these examples actually indicative of an increase in any meaningful kind of diversity? Phillip Morris might offer sixteen types of cigarettes, but they’re all Phillip Morris cigarettes. Today, I think this looks like the Coke campaign where every bottle has a different name on it; a thin veneer of “uniqueness” employed as a marketing technique by a massive multinational corporation. You don’t have to dig deep to see there’s more conformity than diversity here.
There’s another reason, though, why Toffler thinks things are going to get less standardized in the super-industrial era: individuals will have greater freedom to choose their own life paths. Whereas in pre-industrial societies, the individual was expected to conform:
“The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man… is precisely that he has nowhere else to go. His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components. It is what sociologists call ‘undifferentiated’.
Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies, splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies – schools, corporations, government bureaus, churches, armies – each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized sub-units. The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeo riders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.”
Expectations won’t be as rigid in the super-industrial era. A hundred years ago, a young man might have been expected to take over the family business, marry and start a family nearby, and be present to take care of his parents as they grew older. Today, he might have more freedom to pursue a career as a doctor or a data scientist, an artist or a van-life influencer, living in New York or California or anywhere in between. Toffler mostly sees this as a positive thing, “liberating” individuals from the burden of “crushing conformity”.
However, this drastic diversification of society comes with some challenges, mostly that it takes time and energy to decide what to do, whether you’re choosing a career or a brand of toothpaste. Total freedom is exhausting:
“To survive, the individual must… search out totally new ways to anchor himself, for all the old roots – religion, nation, community, family, or profession – are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.”
Toffler proposes that individuals will anchor themselves by associating with specific “subcults”; the initial decision about which subcult to join will give the person a “life style model” that will help simplify all their other decisions. For example, if I identify as part of the “surfer” subcult, that guides my decisions about how to dress, what products to buy, where to live, how to wear my hair, etc.
One caveat – freedom of choice means people can choose to change their minds, so they might choose to change subcults sometimes, shifting their identity in the process. This is a dangerous possibility, since the person’s life style rests on their identification with the subcult; when it changes, how do they know exactly who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing? But Toffler sees this as a problem you can solve if you put in the work. In fact, with typical optimism, he casts it as an opportunity for transcendent self-actualization:
“For the individual who comes equipped with [self-mastery and high intelligence], and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structure, for the person who finds the ‘right’ life pace, the ‘right’ sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.”
This brings us to the crux of the book, where Toffler explains what exactly will happen to us when we enter a state of future shock. The primary basis for this discussion is a study that correlates participants’ health with a “life change score”. Dr. Thomas H. Holmes and Richard Rahe, researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine, created a metric called the Life-Change Units Scale to quantify how much change a person is experiencing. The Life-Change Units Scale consists of a list of possible life changes, ranging from taking a vacation to going through a divorce; each life change is weighted by the impact it’s likely to have on a person’s life. Then they carried out their experiment, with dramatic results. In Toffler’s words:
“Holmes, Rahe, and other researchers compiled the “life change scores” of literally thousands of individuals and began the laborious task of comparing these with the medical histories of these same individuals. Never before had there been a way to correlate change and health. Never before had there been such detailed data on patterns of change in individual lives. And seldom were the results of an experiment less ambiguous. In the United States and Japan, among servicemen and civilians, among pregnant women and the families of leukemia victims, among college athletes and retirees, the same striking pattern was present: those with high life change scores were more likely than their fellows to be ill in the following year. For the first time, it was possible to show in dramatic form that the rate of change in a person’s life – his pace of life – is closely tied to the state of his health.”
The rest of the evidence in this section comes from the same life-change score study being carried out on different groups: the study is repeated in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, and on a group of sailors and naval officers during a voyage at sea. “In every case”, says Toffler, “the correlation between life change and illness has held”.
What explains the correlation? Toffler proposes a mechanism to help explain how life changes might lead to illness. When animals are exposed to unfamiliar stimuli, it triggers a reaction called the “orientation response” (OR) that kicks a lot of systems in the body into higher gear – increased blood flow, heart rate, pupil dilation, etc. The OR isn’t reserved for especially stressful situations; it happens hundreds of times every day. However, exposure to an unusual number of novel situations causes the OR to activate even more than the normal amount, which triggers the more dramatic “adaptive reaction” – similar to the OR, but it lasts longer and involves hormones rather than just the nervous system. Basically, this is stress, and stress has all kinds of downstream effects on the body.
So the future is going to stress us out – what do we do? Before getting into solutions, Toffler gives us a disclaimer that he’s just riffing about what might work: “Moving swiftly into uncharted social territory, we have no time-tried techniques, no blueprints. We must, therefore, experiment with a wide range of change-regulating measures, inventing and discarding them as we go along.” In other words, he’s going to throw some things at the wall and see what sticks.
His ideas break down into three categories: social, educational, and political. The social strategies are focused on softening the stress caused by transience, and are mostly things that already exist: talk therapy, crisis counselors, halfway houses to help with life transitions. Toffler also suggests monitoring your own stress level and knowing when to give yourself a break, making sure to build some stability into your own life, and incorporating ritual (holidays, anniversaries etc.) to maintain a sense of structure. Agreed; these are all good and healthy things to do.
A lot of his education strategies feel common-sense as well. We don’t know exactly what the future will be like, but we know kids will probably have to adapt to a lot of changes in their lifetime, so we should make sure to ground them not just in factual knowledge but in adaptive skills like how to learn, how to form new friendships, and how to think ahead and set goals. Oh, and we should probably get them ready to live underwater too:
“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."
But also we should teach them what it might be like to live in space, or in communities with different types of family structures. At a high level, kids should be taught some essential skills that will help them adapt to change throughout their lives, and should also be introduced to a range of different situations so they’re used to dealing with novelty. This also sounds like a good plan.
The political strategy is where Toffler places the most emphasis, because politics is where we have the opportunity not just to cope with change, but to potentially decrease the amount of change. Right now, the super-industrial revolution is a runaway train; our technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, but without a clear agenda. Or rather, the agenda is usually “econocentric”, and is often driven by short-sighted goals or a desire for personal gain. This means that the technology we end up with doesn’t necessarily end up improving society; we develop new products and technologies that increase the amount of transience people have to deal with, without considering whether those technologies are worth the cost of the psychic strain of rapid change.
Toffler proposes “social futurism” as an alternative to the econocentric agenda. Instead of being steered by economic considerations, new technology should be driven by social goals. This would involve an overseer or governing body that would determine whether a given product or piece of technology would have a positive social impact. The evaluation of social impact could take place after the fact:
“One step in the right direction would be to create a technological ombudsman – a public agency charged with receiving, investigating, and acting on complaints having to do with the irresponsible application of technology.”
But on the other hand, “simply investigating and apportioning responsibility… is hardly sufficient.” Really effective social futurism would also involve an authority that could evaluate proposed technologies before they’re released to the public and figure out whether they’re going to be helpful or harmful. Toffler acknowledges the difficulty of figuring out if a technology is going to be a social “good” or not; in contrast to established “economic indicators” that help us evaluate the health of the economy:
“We have no such measure, no set of comparable “social indicators” to tell us whether the society, as distinct from the economy, is also healthy. We have no measures of the “quality of life”. We have no systematic indices to tell us whether men are more or less alienated from one another; whether education is more effective; whether art, music, and literature are flourishing; whether civility, generosity or kindness are increasing.”
Well, we do have some measures of the quality of life (did they not measure that in the 70s?), but it’s true that it’s not easy to figure out whether any given technological innovation is going to be “good” for “society”. But Toffler asserts that we have no choice but to try. He proposes some metrics we might be able to use, mostly involving rates of change – maybe a “transience index” to measure the amount of turnover people are experiencing, or “indices of novelty… how many of the articles in the home of the average working-class family are actually ‘new’ in function or appearance; how many are traditional?” Then once we establish a set of metrics, we can use them to effect policy via a governing body:
“To connect the super-industrial social intelligence system with the decisional centers of society, we must institutionalize a concern for the quality of life. Thus Bertram Gross and others in the social indicators movement have proposed the creation of a Council of Social Advisers to the President. Such a Council, as they see it, would be modeled after the already existing Council of Economic Advisers and would perform parallel functions in the social field. The new agency would monitor key social indicators in precisely the way the CEA keeps its eye on economic indices, and interpret changes to the President.”
Monitoring these social indices over time would help the governing body develop a sense of which technologies are socially desirable, and steer society toward those.
Are we as future shocked as Toffler thought we would be?
In a lot of ways, the answer is no. Part of this relates back to his predictions that didn’t come true – no weather control or designer baby factories, no undersea cities or genetically-engineered music prodigies. Even some of the more mundane things didn’t change as fast as Toffler thought they might; for example, in the transience section, he brings up some current hand gestures that he thinks will soon be obsolete, but even these have survived the intervening fifty years: “the hand moving across the neck to suggest a throat-slitting”, the peace sign, the middle finger. In a lot of ways, life today still looks more like life in the 70s than Toffler imagined it would; Zoom meetings aside, the life I’m living isn’t that different from my parents’ lives, and wouldn’t be unrecognizable to my grandparents.
In other ways, life does look like Toffler imagined: frequent geographical relocation and an ongoing effort to make new friends, remote work and serial monogamy without marriage. Personally, as a millennial on my third city, fifth job, and tenth apartment in the last ten years, I feel like I should be a prime candidate for future shock – and yet, none of those factors feel that overwhelming. What struck more of a chord for me was the discussion in the diversity section about how to live life, where Toffler predicted that to cope with having so much freedom of choice, people would adopt a “life style” associated with a “subcult”. Again, he was optimistic that for smart people who put in the effort, establishing a guiding morality this way would be a winnable game:
“For the individual who comes equipped with [self-mastery and high intelligence], and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structure, for the person who finds the ‘right’ life pace, the ‘right’ sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.”
But I think this is a much heavier lift that Toffler gives it credit for; if I’m future shocked, 90% of it is in terms of coping with freedom of choice. What Toffler thought we might get from subcults and life style models is a whole code of ethics, something to take the place of “the old roots – religion, nation, community, family, or profession”. In general, an association with a “subcult” doesn’t go deep enough to accomplish the task. Most of the subcults he talks about are centered around aesthetics or enjoyment of a hobby – the “West Side intellectual”, the “motorcyclist” - which can change over time. But even if these associations endure, a strong commitment to a club or hobby (or, say, an online rationalist community) doesn’t really provide what’s lacking.
This absence of underlying direction is more disorienting than a simple change of jobs or move to a new city. My grandparents knew what they were supposed to do – go to school, get married, buy a house, have a career, raise children. They didn’t agonize over whether they should do those things; they knew they should do them. I and my peers spend a lot of time deliberating about those choices, and others. We certainly have more freedom, but often we have no certainty about what we’re supposed to be doing. Of course, it’s a privilege to have options, but it can be paralyzing at the same time.
This future shock in terms of decision-making also takes the wind out of Toffler’s political strategy. He imagined a committee acting as society’s conscience, pushing technology in a direction that would lead to socially “good” outcomes. I don’t think he foresaw how difficult it would be, though, for us to define “good” and to set goals – even on a personal level, let alone a societal one.
Future Shock is a big, ambitious book; it takes us from the beginning of life on earth into the distant future, covering art and technology, family life and politics, amphibious hamsters and sexual super-athletes. For its size and scope, though, the book is surprisingly readable and engaging throughout. Toffler is a good storyteller and incredibly thorough in building an argument, always bringing in plenty of evidence from both sides; even where I disagreed with his conclusions, I felt like I learned from the discussion. If nothing else, it’s fun to see what a futurist in the 70s thought 2020 would look like; we may not be there yet, but I’m sure Toffler would remain optimistic that we’re going to figure it out.