{"id":82457,"date":"2023-05-31T03:00:54","date_gmt":"2023-05-31T07:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=82457"},"modified":"2023-05-30T17:19:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T21:19:44","slug":"alvin-toffler-may-have-been-utterly-wrong-in-future-shock-but-i-suspect-his-huge-royalty-cheques-helped-soften-the-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/05\/31\/alvin-toffler-may-have-been-utterly-wrong-in-future-shock-but-i-suspect-his-huge-royalty-cheques-helped-soften-the-pain\/","title":{"rendered":"Alvin Toffler may have been utterly wrong in Future Shock<\/em>, but I suspect his huge royalty cheques helped soften the pain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ted Gioia<\/a> on the huge bestseller by Alvin Toffler that got its predictions backwards<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted the future. It was a disturbing forecast, and everybody paid attention.<\/p>\n

People saw his book Future Shock<\/em> everywhere. I was just a freshman in high school, but even I bought a copy (the purple version). And clearly I wasn’t alone \u2014 Clark Drugstore in my hometown had them piled high in the front of the store.<\/p>\n

The book sold at least six million copies and maybe a lot more (Toffler’s website claims 15 million). It was reviewed, translated, and discussed endlessly. Future Shock<\/em> turned Toffler \u2014 previously a freelance writer with an English degree from NYU \u2014 into a tech guru applauded by a devoted global audience.<\/p>\n

Toffler showed up on the couch next to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show<\/em>. Other talk show hosts (Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, etc.) invited him to their couches too. CBS featured Toffler alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Buckminster Fuller as trusted guides to the future. Playboy<\/em> magazine gave him a thousand dollar award just for being so smart.<\/p>\n

Toffler parlayed this pop culture stardom into a wide range of follow-up projects and businesses, from consulting to professorships. When he died in 2016, at age 87, obituaries praised Alvin Toffler as “the most influential futurist of the 20th century”.<\/p>\n

But did he deserve this notoriety and praise?<\/p>\n

Future Shock<\/em> is a 500 page book, but the premise is simple: Things are changing too damn fast.<\/p>\n

Toffler opens an early chapter by telling the story of Ricky Gallant, a youngster in Eastern Canada who died of old age at just eleven. He was only a kid, but already suffered from “senility, hardened arteries, baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin. In effect, Ricky was an old man when he died.”<\/p>\n

Toffler didn’t actually say that this was going to happen to all of us. But I’m sure more than a few readers of Future Shock ran to the mirror, trying to assess the tech-driven damage in their own faces.<\/p>\n

“The future invades our lives”, he claims on page one. Our bodies and minds can’t cope with this. Future shock is a “real sickness”, he insists. “It is the disease of change.”<\/p>\n

As if to prove this, Toffler’s publisher released the paperback edition of Future Shock<\/em> with six different covers \u2014 each one a different color. The concept was brilliant. Not only did Future Shock<\/em> say that things were constantly changing, but every time you saw somebody reading it, the book itself had changed<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you really believed Future Shock<\/em> was a disease, why would you aggravate it with a stunt like this? But nobody asked questions like that. Maybe they were too busy looking in the mirror for “baldness, slack, and wrinkled skin”.<\/p>\n

Toffler worried about all kinds of change, but technological<\/em> change was the main focus of his musings. When the New York Times<\/em> reviewed his book, it announced in the opening sentence that “Technology is both hero and villain of Future Shock<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

During his brief stint at Fortune<\/em> magazine, Toffler often wrote about tech, and warned about “information overload”. The implication was that human beings are a kind of data storage medium \u2014 and they’re running out of disk space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ted Gioia on the huge bestseller by Alvin Toffler that got its predictions backwards: Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler predicted the future. It was a disturbing forecast, and everybody paid attention. People saw his book Future Shock everywhere. I was just a freshman in high school, but even I bought a copy (the purple version). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,15,13],"tags":[263,686,174,477,139,42,101],"class_list":["post-82457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-technology","category-usa","tag-1970s","tag-futurism","tag-innovation","tag-magazines","tag-psychology","tag-sociology","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-lrX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82457"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82460,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82457\/revisions\/82460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}