Interesting, but I wonder if a lot of your critique would be resolved by looking at other meanings of the word, "shock." You seem to limit yourself to something being "shocking," whereas I've always interpreted "Future Shock" to be more akin to "being in shock," which aligns quite well with the numbness you decry. A state of shock is triggered by events too sudden and overwhelming to process: a car accident, a bomb going off, a sudden death of a loved one. I think a good bit of our numbness is due to being oversaturated with immediate news from all over the world (no need to wait for Walter Cronkite to tell it "the way it is" at 6pm), assurances of impending doom (melting ice caps, extinction of pollinators, aquifers running dry, lunatics and fools being elected). We are in a state of future shock because too much is going too wrong too quickly, leading many of us to wonder if there's any future at all.
This is a rare case where I mostly don't agree with Ted. The psychological reactions to shock are precisely those he describes: numbness, denial, anger, physical symptoms, inability to express emotions, etc. The amount of information (let alone garbage-y data) is growing exponentially, and so is the speed at which big innovations are coming. Computers in the 50s, PCs in the 80s, Web in the 90s, AI now - the gaps between big changes are shrinking, as the book "Scale" by Geoffrey West shows convincingly. The need to narrow one's horizons, go "comfortably numb", etc., aren't happening on their own. So I wouldn't argue for "more change" as much as for better change, "centered on the areas of greatest numbness and disconnectedness," as Ted put it.
"..people don’t think about much of anything at all, because technology turns them into passive receptors."
Hence my comment on your recent post about a conversation with a bot. The cat killed curiosity. The word for this age is simulacra. We deal all the time with copies of copies of what was once real.
Pop pundits come and go. I remember Future Shock and I think I read it. Along with Chariots of the Gods, The Hidden Pursuaders, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. You too are a child of the universe and Donovan.
Most of it is down to the painful obligation to churn out product but it always has a ring of truth, sufficient to make me go out and buy the book. And literally everybody is talking about it.
Discernment is the product of a liberal education. I mean that in the sense that Cardinal Newman meant a liberal education. Without being taught how to learn we are truly farked.
A much older, and yet much more prescient, anticipation of 21st-century culture is 1909's "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster (yes, really). See more at:
And all I do is write old fashioned sonnets. Can't see that catching on, yet still I write. I put my neck out there ten years ago and ran for sheriff. All I got out of that was rage from the political establishment, but I did my bit. As we all age out and die the world be taken over by, what? Ford help us.
I think one of the elements of “future shock” that literally no one talks about is the overwhelming cost of living, particularly in the United States, and partly how it impacts young people, the Boomers’ grandkids. That really IS Future Shock, which to me is a fraudulent and useless book written by someone who was lucky enough to parlay a cheap humanities degree (remember those days?) into a book that somehow captured his generation’s imagination despite having absolutely no subject matter expert qualifications.
You mentioned young people not even wanting to get a driver’s license, which is what triggered my comment here. Zoomers don’t want a drivers license because it’s the gateway to horrendous personal expense for an object that pollutes the earth and bleeds your wallet dry whenever something breaks. It has nothing to do with Instagram or screen slavery. It has to do with debt slavery in a society in which they can’t even afford an apartment. Toffler’s Boomer audience collectively made those arrangements to benefit themselves and caused the United States to become a profoundly classist and unequal society. Too bad Toffler wasn’t smart enough to see THAT coming.
Between Ted and Maureen Dowd today.... and my 15 year old son watching the end of the Celtics game on his phone rather than joining me....I feel stressed.
Umm kind of. Good and timely topic. I studied that book in a philosophy class back when. It got the conversation started and though I agree there’s a numbness and malaise afoot, culture is downstream of tech, hence we’re reading and commenting on your piece. And, ready or not, here comes AI. Shock or not, Alvin struck a nerve, which could be described as “shocking”.
"The real forces of change in that era were the sexual revolution, liberation from censorship, the rise of alternative lifestyles, vocal protests, and the overturning of inherited values of all sorts."
But the sexual revolution was enabled by birth control, allowing women to engage in casual sex for the first time in human history without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. How much of "liberation from censorship" is due to modern mass media such as television, newspapers and now the web/internet?
What is the one thing that enables humans to live _differently_ than their ancestors in the middle ages? It's technological progress. All of the fundamental changes to human society since then are due to that fundamental cause.
The most surprising thing here, to me, is that Future Shock was apparently written in the 60s and released in 1970! I had previously expected it would have been written much more recently, maybe in the 80s, or perhaps less recently, in the 50s. The 70s, to me, are a time I do not associate with much obvious, shocking change.
I very, VERY much disagree about lack of future shock in the current era, at least from my viewpoint. Since 2020, mind-blowing development after mind-blowing development of things that I had previously only read about in fiction has happened, from (not technological or progress, but this is still where it started for me) COVID (I had been reading about it as speculation months before; but it was rather shocking to see it actually happen in real life); to *amazing* VR rivalling the best I have seen in fiction (with social VR metaverses like VRChat, NeosVR, and ChilloutVR, with technology like omnidirectional slidemills and full-body tracking); and most recently Generative AI. And that's not even going to all the things in-development which may appear in the future…
I disagree even further, MUCH further about lack of information overload. Maybe if you only view a very very narrow source of information, sure, but for me, I'm trying to wade through dozens of email newsletters per day, practically unlimited things I want to stay up to date on on Reddit and Discord, a YouTube watch later playlist that is literally thousands of videos long with more appearing every day, and so much more. I get WAY WAY WAAYYYYY more information I want to read and/or watch per 24 hours than I can possibly process in 24 hours. I don't dare pay for anything other than YouTube Premium, as there is already way way too much; paying for anything exclusive would just pile even more information that I don't have enough time to read or watch on top. Video games too: Between my existing bought games, Epic Game Store's weekly free games, and always-free games, I have way way way WAAAYYY too many of those to possibly play too.
Try to keep up with technology development in the cutting-edge field of AI, and the future shock is even more potent, with so many developments to keep track of that it can be a challenge to stay even casually up-to-date on Reddit without spending much too much time per day.
Music changes too. If you only look up the most popular, yes, it is old, but if you diverge from that at all, finding music from algorithms or searches or finding some good stock music used in a video somewhere… There is TONS of music from artists I had never heard of that has come out in the last few years, much of it utterly fantastic, enough so that I would say we are even in a golden age of independent content. One of my favourite styles is to combine epic orchestral with other genres like heavy metal and electronic (Thomas Bergersen often does this to AMAZING effect); another is synthwave, which often sounds 80s, but other times not so. If you actually search it out, there is TONS and TONS of new music. It might not be the most popular due to the nature of people no longer listening to the same things as each other, but it DEFINITELY exists.
I am continually shocked at how anyone can ever be bored in this day and age. There is just way, way too much content in every conceivable medium. I can think of several platforms, where I feel like I could probably read/watch/interact all day 24/7, and still probably would struggle to stay up-to-date. I feel like I need an AI to read and comment on Reddit for me at this point, there's just so much to stay up-to-date on.
Maybe if you are only familiar with the most mainstream of the mainstream and live in an area where you do routinely see things like self-driving cars and food delivery robots on the street, and do not stay up-to-date on technology and futurism at all, or maybe if you are somehow stuck in 2019, things might seem to be in stasis – but if you live in 2023, stay up to date on technology, and are interested in enough subcultures… I think that from a perspective like this, future shock and information overload are much more potent.
When the first television's came out people called them talking lamps / I asked Laurie Anderson on camera a question that I can't remember my question but her answer "Next is the new, new" instead of new, improved etc it is Next / it is said it's not the technology that revolutionizes the world it's how people use it / talking about the culture and culture of apathy - think about the state of education, learning and critical thinking have been replaced by memorization / Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge!" / You're on a roll especially not looking at Future Shock" but our "Shocking Culture" where we accept violence, poverty, fear, suicide, mass murder, drug addiction etc as the numbing norm!
He missed the point because he missed the cause. The answer to our conundrum is easy enough to find...if you can get your head and heart straight first.
Interesting, but I wonder if a lot of your critique would be resolved by looking at other meanings of the word, "shock." You seem to limit yourself to something being "shocking," whereas I've always interpreted "Future Shock" to be more akin to "being in shock," which aligns quite well with the numbness you decry. A state of shock is triggered by events too sudden and overwhelming to process: a car accident, a bomb going off, a sudden death of a loved one. I think a good bit of our numbness is due to being oversaturated with immediate news from all over the world (no need to wait for Walter Cronkite to tell it "the way it is" at 6pm), assurances of impending doom (melting ice caps, extinction of pollinators, aquifers running dry, lunatics and fools being elected). We are in a state of future shock because too much is going too wrong too quickly, leading many of us to wonder if there's any future at all.
“We are all just prisoners here of our own device.” - Eagles, ‘Hotel California’
This is a rare case where I mostly don't agree with Ted. The psychological reactions to shock are precisely those he describes: numbness, denial, anger, physical symptoms, inability to express emotions, etc. The amount of information (let alone garbage-y data) is growing exponentially, and so is the speed at which big innovations are coming. Computers in the 50s, PCs in the 80s, Web in the 90s, AI now - the gaps between big changes are shrinking, as the book "Scale" by Geoffrey West shows convincingly. The need to narrow one's horizons, go "comfortably numb", etc., aren't happening on their own. So I wouldn't argue for "more change" as much as for better change, "centered on the areas of greatest numbness and disconnectedness," as Ted put it.
"..people don’t think about much of anything at all, because technology turns them into passive receptors."
Hence my comment on your recent post about a conversation with a bot. The cat killed curiosity. The word for this age is simulacra. We deal all the time with copies of copies of what was once real.
Pop pundits come and go. I remember Future Shock and I think I read it. Along with Chariots of the Gods, The Hidden Pursuaders, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Jonathan Livingstone Seagull. You too are a child of the universe and Donovan.
Most of it is down to the painful obligation to churn out product but it always has a ring of truth, sufficient to make me go out and buy the book. And literally everybody is talking about it.
Discernment is the product of a liberal education. I mean that in the sense that Cardinal Newman meant a liberal education. Without being taught how to learn we are truly farked.
A much older, and yet much more prescient, anticipation of 21st-century culture is 1909's "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster (yes, really). See more at:
https://medium.com/p/c9c2da3aa691
And all I do is write old fashioned sonnets. Can't see that catching on, yet still I write. I put my neck out there ten years ago and ran for sheriff. All I got out of that was rage from the political establishment, but I did my bit. As we all age out and die the world be taken over by, what? Ford help us.
I think one of the elements of “future shock” that literally no one talks about is the overwhelming cost of living, particularly in the United States, and partly how it impacts young people, the Boomers’ grandkids. That really IS Future Shock, which to me is a fraudulent and useless book written by someone who was lucky enough to parlay a cheap humanities degree (remember those days?) into a book that somehow captured his generation’s imagination despite having absolutely no subject matter expert qualifications.
You mentioned young people not even wanting to get a driver’s license, which is what triggered my comment here. Zoomers don’t want a drivers license because it’s the gateway to horrendous personal expense for an object that pollutes the earth and bleeds your wallet dry whenever something breaks. It has nothing to do with Instagram or screen slavery. It has to do with debt slavery in a society in which they can’t even afford an apartment. Toffler’s Boomer audience collectively made those arrangements to benefit themselves and caused the United States to become a profoundly classist and unequal society. Too bad Toffler wasn’t smart enough to see THAT coming.
Between Ted and Maureen Dowd today.... and my 15 year old son watching the end of the Celtics game on his phone rather than joining me....I feel stressed.
Umm kind of. Good and timely topic. I studied that book in a philosophy class back when. It got the conversation started and though I agree there’s a numbness and malaise afoot, culture is downstream of tech, hence we’re reading and commenting on your piece. And, ready or not, here comes AI. Shock or not, Alvin struck a nerve, which could be described as “shocking”.
"The real forces of change in that era were the sexual revolution, liberation from censorship, the rise of alternative lifestyles, vocal protests, and the overturning of inherited values of all sorts."
But the sexual revolution was enabled by birth control, allowing women to engage in casual sex for the first time in human history without the fear of an unwanted pregnancy. How much of "liberation from censorship" is due to modern mass media such as television, newspapers and now the web/internet?
What is the one thing that enables humans to live _differently_ than their ancestors in the middle ages? It's technological progress. All of the fundamental changes to human society since then are due to that fundamental cause.
The most surprising thing here, to me, is that Future Shock was apparently written in the 60s and released in 1970! I had previously expected it would have been written much more recently, maybe in the 80s, or perhaps less recently, in the 50s. The 70s, to me, are a time I do not associate with much obvious, shocking change.
I very, VERY much disagree about lack of future shock in the current era, at least from my viewpoint. Since 2020, mind-blowing development after mind-blowing development of things that I had previously only read about in fiction has happened, from (not technological or progress, but this is still where it started for me) COVID (I had been reading about it as speculation months before; but it was rather shocking to see it actually happen in real life); to *amazing* VR rivalling the best I have seen in fiction (with social VR metaverses like VRChat, NeosVR, and ChilloutVR, with technology like omnidirectional slidemills and full-body tracking); and most recently Generative AI. And that's not even going to all the things in-development which may appear in the future…
I disagree even further, MUCH further about lack of information overload. Maybe if you only view a very very narrow source of information, sure, but for me, I'm trying to wade through dozens of email newsletters per day, practically unlimited things I want to stay up to date on on Reddit and Discord, a YouTube watch later playlist that is literally thousands of videos long with more appearing every day, and so much more. I get WAY WAY WAAYYYYY more information I want to read and/or watch per 24 hours than I can possibly process in 24 hours. I don't dare pay for anything other than YouTube Premium, as there is already way way too much; paying for anything exclusive would just pile even more information that I don't have enough time to read or watch on top. Video games too: Between my existing bought games, Epic Game Store's weekly free games, and always-free games, I have way way way WAAAYYY too many of those to possibly play too.
Try to keep up with technology development in the cutting-edge field of AI, and the future shock is even more potent, with so many developments to keep track of that it can be a challenge to stay even casually up-to-date on Reddit without spending much too much time per day.
Music changes too. If you only look up the most popular, yes, it is old, but if you diverge from that at all, finding music from algorithms or searches or finding some good stock music used in a video somewhere… There is TONS of music from artists I had never heard of that has come out in the last few years, much of it utterly fantastic, enough so that I would say we are even in a golden age of independent content. One of my favourite styles is to combine epic orchestral with other genres like heavy metal and electronic (Thomas Bergersen often does this to AMAZING effect); another is synthwave, which often sounds 80s, but other times not so. If you actually search it out, there is TONS and TONS of new music. It might not be the most popular due to the nature of people no longer listening to the same things as each other, but it DEFINITELY exists.
I am continually shocked at how anyone can ever be bored in this day and age. There is just way, way too much content in every conceivable medium. I can think of several platforms, where I feel like I could probably read/watch/interact all day 24/7, and still probably would struggle to stay up-to-date. I feel like I need an AI to read and comment on Reddit for me at this point, there's just so much to stay up-to-date on.
Maybe if you are only familiar with the most mainstream of the mainstream and live in an area where you do routinely see things like self-driving cars and food delivery robots on the street, and do not stay up-to-date on technology and futurism at all, or maybe if you are somehow stuck in 2019, things might seem to be in stasis – but if you live in 2023, stay up to date on technology, and are interested in enough subcultures… I think that from a perspective like this, future shock and information overload are much more potent.
Neil Postman was the prescient one.
When the first television's came out people called them talking lamps / I asked Laurie Anderson on camera a question that I can't remember my question but her answer "Next is the new, new" instead of new, improved etc it is Next / it is said it's not the technology that revolutionizes the world it's how people use it / talking about the culture and culture of apathy - think about the state of education, learning and critical thinking have been replaced by memorization / Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge!" / You're on a roll especially not looking at Future Shock" but our "Shocking Culture" where we accept violence, poverty, fear, suicide, mass murder, drug addiction etc as the numbing norm!
He missed the point because he missed the cause. The answer to our conundrum is easy enough to find...if you can get your head and heart straight first.
A profound and timely analysis!
Spot on, once again Ted! Instead of Future Shock, we are being fed Future Yawn... GIF help us!