Future Shock - Alvin Toffler - ****

Future Shock: Notes

Chapter 9

Symbolic Leaders - Orrin Klapp


No man's model of reality is a purely personal product. . . The degree of accuracy in his model to some extent reflects the general level of knowledge in society. As more refined and accurate knowledge enters into society, new concepts and ways of thinking render older ideas and worldviews obsolete.

We create and use up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable.
-- Retention, for me, is a product of practicality.
-- Constant immersion in a gamer's set of transitory universes, each possessing its own physics, laws, and quirks, has streamlined my ability to glean insight from disposable knowledge.

For several centuries, music has been getting faster.

"In 1954, when I started work on the Dictionary of American Slang, I would not consider a word for inclusion unless I could find three uses of the word over a five-year period. Today such a criterion would be impossible. Language, like art, is increasingly becoming a fad proposition."

-- They wrote a section on Art, but since I dislike modern art I didn't read it.

-- There's a section in here regarding the mental model - the process through which people comprehend and classify information. In it, the book talks about the mental model as being organized into many highly complex image-structures, which receive new information and sort it by subject matter. Reminds me of a conversation I had with Athena explaining how I made decisions and processed information: my comprehension of my own mental processes was identical to this, in spirit.

Change, roaring through society, widens the gap between what we believe and what really is, between existing images and the reality they are supposed to reflect. When this gap is only moderate, we cope more or less rationally with change: we can react sanely to new conditions. When this gap grows too wide, however, we find ourselves increasingly unable to cope. We respond inappropriately. We become ineffectual, withdraw, or simply panic. At the final extreme, when the gap grows too wide, we suffer psychosis - or even death.
-- I've seen this.

By speeding up change in the outer world, we compel the individual to relearn his environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of "the-way-things-are". We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships.


Chapter 10

Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organization nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashioned bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary expansion of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which man's basic material wants have been satisfied.

One of the curious facts about production . . . is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological "extras" to the consumer. . . A cassic example is the case of the auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs and dials to the control panel or dashboard, even when these have seemingly no significance. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product.

Reversed: the failure of the eggless cake mix.

British Overseas Airways corporation announced a plan to provide unmarried American male passengers with "scientifically chosen" blind dates in London. Moreover, a party would be arranged to which "several additional Londoners of both sexes of varying ages" would be invited so that the traveler, who would also be given a tour, would under no circumstances be alone. This program was abruptly called off when the government-owned airline came under Parliamentary criticism.


Chapter 11:

A developmental biologist has grown "multi-mice" - baby mice which have more than one set of parents. Embryos are taken from two pregnant mice, put in a dish and grown until they form into a single mass, then implanted into a third mouse. The ensuing baby has the genetic characteristics of both sets of parents.


Robert Rimmer: The Harrad Experiment, Proposition 31

Industrialism demanded masses of workers ready and able to move off the land in pursuit of jobs, and to move again whenever necessary. Thus the extended family gradually shed its excess weight and the so-called "nuclear" family emerged - a stripped-down, portable family unit consisting only of parents and a small set of children.

The orthodox format [of marriage] presupposes that two young people will "find" one another and marry. It presupposes that the two will fulfill certain psychological needs in one another, and that the two personalities will develop over the years, more or less in tandem, so that they continue to fulfill each other's needs. It further presupposes that this process will last "until death do us part."
These expectations are built deeply into our culture. It is no longer respectable, as it once was, to marry for anything but love. Love has changed from a peripheral concern of the family into its primary justification.

To expect a marriage to last indefinitely under modern conditions is to expect a lot. To ask love to last indefinitely is to expect even more. Transience and novelty are both in league against it.
-- And so, I seek one who takes comfort in the familiar, one who consciously seeks the sense of security only familiar traditions convey.


Chapter 12

Today, there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adapt standardized styles of life.
-- At one point, the Minister of Education in France could tell you what textbook was being studied, at what time, by primary and secondary school students across the country. This is still true to some extent.
-- Good writers extrapolate wars from street fights, battlefields from skirmishes, or so the quote's paraphrased.

Philip Morris sold a single brand of cigarettes for twenty-one years. It has introduced six new brands and so many options with respect to size, filter and menthol that the smoker now has a vhoice among sixteen different variations. This fact would be trivial, would be trivial, were it not duplicated in virtually every major product field.

It's only primitive technology that imposes standardization. Automation, by contrast, frees the path to endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity.
Rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products, which characterize our typical mass production plants, are becoming less important. 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 feasable.
-- Calvin's dad flipping out when confronted with the different varieties of peanut butter.
-- Something like this for Sprawl: goods are mass-produced and homogenized in the beginning?


The finding that pre-automation technology yields standardization, while advanced technology permits diversity, is borne out by the supermarket. Like gas stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike. By wiping out thousands of little "mom and pop" stores they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Yet the array of goods they offer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. At the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.
The reason for this contrast is simple: Food and food packaging technology is far more advanced than construction techniques. Indeed, construction has scarcely reached the level of mass production; it remains, in large measure, a pre-industrial craft. Strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions, the industry's rate of technological advance is far below that of other industries. The more advanced the technology, the cheaper it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication, gas stations, airports, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mold. Uniformity will give way to diversity.


Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not
accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected.
One basic complaint of the student is that he is not treated as an individual, that he is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. The difference is that while industry is highly
responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants.


The 80,000 physicians and dentists who receive Time each week get a somewhat different magazine than that received by teachers whose edition, in turn, is different from that sent to college students.


Chapter 12:

The sense of belonging, of being part of a social cell larger than ourselves (yet small enough to be comprehensible) is often so rewarding that we feel deeply drawn, sometimes even against our own better judgment, to the values, attitudes and most-favored life style of the group.
However, we pay for the benefits we receive. For once we psychologically affiliate with a subcult, it begins to exert pressures on us. We find that it pays to "go along" with the group. It rewards us with warmth, friendship and approval when we conform to its life style model. But it punishes us ruthlessly with ridicule, ostracism or other tactics when we deviate from it.


The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern. She studies one after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decides to create a dress based on it. Next she begins to collect the necessary materials—cloth, thread, piping, buttons, etc. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props. He lets his hair grow. He buys art nouveau posters and a paperback of Guevara's writings. He learns to discuss Marcuse and Frantz Fanon. He picks up a particular jargon, using words like "relevance" and "establishment."
None of this means that his political actions are insignificant, or that his opinions are unjust or foolish. He may (or may not) be accurate in his views of society. Yet the particular way in which he chooses to express them is inescapably part of his search for personal style.


By zeroing in on a particular life style we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration. The fellow who opts for the Motorcyclist Model need no longer concern himself with the hundreds of types of gloves available to him on the open market, but which violate the spirit of his style. He need only choose among the far smaller repertoire of glove types that fit within the limits set by his model. And what is said of gloves is equally applicable to his ideas and social relationships as well.

To be "between styles" or "between subcults" is a life-crisis, and the people of the future spend more time in this condition, searching for styles, than do the people of the past or present. Altering his identity as he goes, super-industrial man traces a private trajectory through a world of colliding subcults. This is the social mobility of the future: not simply movement from one economic class to another, but from one tribal grouping to another. Restless movement from subcult to ephemeral subcult describes the arc of his life.

It is ironic that the people who complain most loudly that people cannot "relate" to one another, or cannot "communicate" with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: "The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification."


Self-indulgent despair is a highly salable literary commodity today. Yet despair is not merely a refuge for irresponsibility; it is unjustified. Most of the problems besieging us stem not from implacable natural forces but from man-made processes that are at least potentially subject to our control.


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"Web 2.0 is the philosophy that creating content is for faggots so let your users do it for you." Hassan "Acetone" Mikal