Future Shock 2023, Part 3

In the 1970 book “Future Shock,” futurist Alvin Toffler outlined a vision of post-industrial society in which rapid technological and social changes outstrip the average human’s ability to cope. More than half a century later, how does this idea hold up and are contemporary humans victims of future shock? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss how it seems to be panning out. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back with part three
in our series on Future Shock, the title and the
subject of a best selling futurology book from more than
fifty years ago. If you haven't heard parts one and
two yet, you should probably go back and listen to
those first. That'll help you understand what we're talking about today.
But I thought we could start with a recap here

(00:38):
at the top. So Future Shock is the name of
a very influential book published in nineteen seventy by an
author named Alvin Toffler, who was known to be a
close collaborator with his wife, Heidi Toffler. So in this
series we've sometimes been speaking of the ideas of the
Tofflers rather than just Alvin, though originally he was credited

(00:59):
as the sole author of the book. And I would
describe the main idea of the book Future Shock as follows. So,
of course, the human technological tool set is always changing
to some degree, but the age beginning in like the
second half of the twentieth century is truly a special
time in history. It's a time when technology is developing

(01:21):
much much faster than ever before. I think there are
a lot of data points you could use to show
that it's not just that it feels this way, but
this is objectively true, Like you could measure the rate
of acceleration of energy consumed around the world, the accelerating
number of patents issued, the productivity in various industries per worker,

(01:44):
the acceleration of time spent on technologically mediated activities, and
so forth. And the authors of this book argue that
these changes are so drastic we should think of the
time beginning in the mid twentieth century as a totally
new technology regime. Maybe the previous regimes began with the

(02:05):
transition from hunter gatherer lifestyle to agriculture, and then after
that the transition to the industrial age through inventions like
the steam engine, and then this would be the third one.
And this new age that we exist in they call
the super Industrial Age, and the acceleration in technological change
that characterizes this age may of course come with lots

(02:27):
of benefits for human life. You can easily point to
medical advances that make life human life longer and help
people live with less illness, and you know, all kinds
of things that are pretty unambiguous positive impacts on human life.
But the Tofflers argue that these changes also come with
a profound cost that we have to understand and prepare for.

(02:52):
And the cost that they focus on in the book
is a mass psychological condition that they call future shock,
and they compare future shock to the pre existing idea
of culture shock, which is the state of anxiety and
psychic distress brought on when somebody is plunged into an
unfamiliar culture where they don't speak the language, they don't

(03:13):
understand the laws or customs, they don't know how to
interact with anything. They say future shock is like that,
but for one's own culture, as it changes rapidly around
us due to the effects of the new science and
the new machines. And they say this new environment will
be characterized primarily by transience, novelty, and diversity. So transience

(03:36):
things situations coming into and out of being faster and faster,
arrangements lasting for shorter periods of time of course, novelty
meaning new things you've never had to deal with before,
and diversity meaning just a lot of different things. To
understand and decide between and choose from. And so the
Topler's right that these changes in technology have profound effects,

(03:59):
not just on the gadgets we deal with, but you know,
they've got these secondary effects that revolutionize our work lives,
our family lives, our minds, and our culture. And that
the accelerating rate of change alters our culture faster than
most people are able to adapt, so we can never
get used to it. We can never grow accustomed to

(04:20):
the new normal as people can when overcoming culture shock,
because with culture shock you can eventually maybe learn the
language and learn the local norms and adapt. Or you conversely,
you can just go home. With future shock, you can't
ever really do that because you can't go back to
the past, and by the time you get used to it,
you learn the new language and the new customs, it

(04:42):
has changed again. And technology will just keep changing the
world faster and faster, so we can never keep up.
And they say this leads to a widespread sense of unease, anxiety, frustration,
and confusion, the future shock that defines our age.

Speaker 2 (04:59):
You know, I have to throw in here that in
the first episode I mentioned that when I explained the
concept again to my wife. She was like, Oh, well,
that's not real. I don't really believe that's the thing.
But then a listener wrote in and encouraged everyone to
watch a particular episode of SpongeBob square Pants, an episode
or part of an episode titled SB one nine, in

(05:20):
which Squidward travels into the future and is overcome by
all of the chrome technological advancements around him, including multiple
SpongeBob clones, curls up in a ball on the floor
and begins to go future future over and over again.
My family watched this episode over the weekend, and my
wife tells me that now she understands future shock.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Oh okay, wait, she understands it, but still thinks that
it does not describe the reality we live in. Or
she does think it describes the reality we live in.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
I would say that she understands the concept and sees
how you could apply that concept to some of our
interactions with technology today.

Speaker 3 (06:00):
Okay, so she's partially converted, thinks it is partially descriptive
of reality.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, you can't argue with squidword on this one.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
I'd say that's where I am. I think it is
partially correct, partially descriptive of our reality.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Well, anyway, in this series, we've been taking a look
at this fifty three year old book future Ology to
see what we think about it, what we think the
Tofflers were right about, what we think they were wrong about,
if there's any empirical evidence that can be brought in
to assess the accuracy of their predictions, and so forth.
And so we've already talked about a number of their

(06:34):
specific predictions about the future. Though to be fair, I
do recall there's a part in the book where Toffler says,
these are not quote predictions. You know, so when I say, like,
in the future, we're going to be living a lot
more underneath the ocean and having to learn to navigate
submarine environments and stuff, for some reason, he says, they're
not predictions. They're more just sort of like imaginings, and

(06:57):
we shouldn't be overly concerned with whether d specifics are right,
but instead should think about the general trend. Okay, fair enough, Alvin,
But in fact, the way we use the word prediction,
I do think these are predictions, so I think it's
fair to describe them that way, even though he didn't
like using that word.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
Yeah, I kind of see where he's coming from. Like,
he's not saying we will definitely put embryos on spaceships
and send them to other planets, but he points to
that as sort of like in the Tree of conceivable possibilities,
based on like unchecked scientific advancement, that's somewhere we might
get to. And if we do get there, are we

(07:39):
really ready to deal with that? And I'd think the
most part he tends to lay out those ideas in
a very sort of neutral fashion, though again, it is
a book written in the late sixties, published in nineteen seventy,
and some of that cultural texture is there, as we've discussed, agreed.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
But anyway, in the previous episodes, we've talked about of
these things which I do think are fair to call predictions,
but you're right, he couches them in a more nuanced way,
but they range from quite thoughtful and accurately predictive to
totally wrong and extremely funny ways. In the former column.

(08:17):
One thing that stands out to me, I mean, it's
often been pointed out that, wow, you know, he really
sort of got a lot right about things like personal
computers and the internet and how media would change over time.
Like the rising importance of electronic media more and more
in human life. I think he was on track about
a lot of that. One that really stood out to

(08:37):
me in the book is essentially the prediction of personally
curated news feeds as opposed to having to read the
same newspaper or watch the same news evening news as
everybody else, which I think that's a profoundly meaningful development
that I'm not so sure would have been easy to
predict in nineteen seventy. But as an example of the

(08:59):
things that they got wrong, you know, there is again
like leaning heavily on the idea that way more of
human life would shift to take place in the ocean
or in space. That hasn't really panned out yet and
I'm kind of doubtful whether it will. And there's a
bunch of stuff about the changing biomedical environment like that.
They say a lot about cloning, which in some ways
I think is pretty accurate about like where the technological

(09:24):
capability could be going, but wrong about the way that
it would impact culture and the possibilities it would provide
to the average person.

Speaker 4 (09:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, the cloning talk is very interesting. To decide a
couple of details from it, I mentioned the spaceships already.
That's definitely something that has brought up the idea that well,
embryo is just way less than people, so it's cheaper
to blast those into space, and those will presumably robots
will raise them and grow them when they get to
where they're going. But there's a bit where he's where

(09:56):
they're citing molecular biologist Joshua Letterberg, and they raise the
problem that narcissist will be the most likely to clone
themselves and this could result in just more narcissist. Though
Tofler mentions, this is really more of a concern if
narcissism is biologically transferable rather than culturally transferable. And I

(10:17):
started looking into this a little bit, and I realized
we might have to come back and talk about narcissism
in more detail, because it looks like there have been
studies about narcissism as possibly being like something you can inherit.
But I'm not sure where we currently are regarding the
nature nurture discussion of narcissism.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
I mean, if it's like most personality traits that I've
read about, it's going to be a mix. It will
usually be that there's some kind of there is a
heritable level of predisposition, but then that that doesn't get
you all the way there. That just sort of like
somewhat increases or decreases the chance that a person will
in a given environment environment develop narcissism. And then there's

(10:59):
probably a huge influence of like you know, experience, childhood,
upbringing and things like that.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, it seems like there's a lot to work out
before we can actually make an argument for heritability for narcissism.
But the angle is interesting, I think to me in
light of the TV series Foundation, which I don't know
how many listeners out there have been watching this. I
guess caveat that we did read some ads for Foundation

(11:25):
on the show, but afterwards we got into watching it
and really great show.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
But you're not being paid to say this.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
I'm not being paid to say this, but it's a
terrific show. But there's this whole angle that's apparently not
in the Asimov books but is quite fascinating on the series,
and that is that you have this genetic dynasty in
the Empire where you see a procession of cleon the
first clones that rule this vast interstellar civilization, and of course,

(11:55):
many or if not most of them are narcissists. But
you can also raise the question like how much of
that is tied up in the genes of Cleon the
first and how much of it is the way that
Cleon is raised, because they are you know, they're raised.
Each one is raised to be the emperor of an
interstellar civilization.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
And presumably raised by other narcissists.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yeah, you actually do, because you have three at a time.
So there's there's a brother Don, a brother Day, and
a brother Dusk. There's like a young version of the Clone,
an adult version of the Clone, and like an elderly
version of the Clone, with the middle Clone being the
primary ruler, and so Day and Dusk are essentially raising Dawn. Anyway,

(12:38):
we'll put a pin in that for later discussion, But
in general, the toddlers do raise concerns over a number
of quote unquote birth technologies, especially the idea of engineering
certain properties into children. And this also crosses over into
concerns that are raised elsewhere about the future of the family,
and we talked about that in the previous episode. How
a lot of these concerns about like the future of

(13:00):
the family haven't really panned out, like, you know, the
idea that well, the people will just be raised in
communes and so forth. Now I feel like there are
sort of three things going into modern considerations of the
birth technology thing though, because on one hand, as we discussed,
perhaps the alarm was raised early enough and we have
been largely more careful in this area of technological advancement.

(13:24):
But I think we also might consider that we're just
not yet at the point of real crisis with birth technologies,
at least not at scale. And also, you know, the
tofflers might not be fully recognizing the overall benefits of
birth technologies, and that we might be less culturally open
to drastic changes in the basic family unit. After all,
I don't know, but I do know people, real people

(13:45):
in the world who have benefited from strategies you might
call birth technologies. And I wouldn't say it feels it
didn't feel super future shocky to me. It just feels like, well,
there are perhaps some extra options available today, and people
take advantage of those options if they can.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Yes, And you could also argue that the fact that
we're not currently surrounded by human clones could be an
indication that, like the Tofflers suggest, in their sort of
solutions section of the book. It could be indicative of
the fact that, you know, scient the bodies governing scientific
research saw this change coming and were able to essentially

(14:25):
get enough thought and discussion out there early enough that
there hasn't been much temptation for scientists to experiment with
human cloning, at least not in the open.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:36):
Never underestimate humanity's power to fear change as well as
a void doing anything with it.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
But unfortunately, to come back on the other side, I
think a lot of times seeing a potentially dangerous or
disruptive change coming is not enough if there are people
who have powerful individual incentives to pursue it.

Speaker 5 (14:56):
Anyway.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, for the record, I think clone baby They're fine.
I'm pro clone baby babies. Now.

Speaker 3 (15:04):
One thing we got into at length in part two
was a paper that tried to use empirical research from
the last fifty years to assess the general predictions that
the Toffler's made about how we will use time.

Speaker 5 (15:19):
In the future.

Speaker 3 (15:19):
So this primarily concerns their prediction that the future would
be characterized by greater and greater transience in life, a
sort of general shortening of the length of episodes both
large and small, and a shortening of commitments throughout life.
The paper tried to compare these predictions to actual time
use studies and concluded that for the parts we could check,

(15:43):
the Toffler's predictions about time use were actually pretty good.
Like we have seen time use become more fragmented, which
you could characterize as as having more transience to it,
more fragmented, more irregular, and more overlapped, and people do
feeling increasingly stressed and hurried about time, even in cases

(16:04):
where they actually objectively have more of it. However, there
were also some predictions they made about time use that
didn't really pan out, such as they sort of implied
that people would end up devaluing home life and spending
more time outside the home, coming and going a lot.
In fact, the research has shown the opposite. People in

(16:26):
high technology cultures seem to be valuing home life more
and more and spending more time inside the home. Though
it strikes me that this could possibly be interpreted as
an effect of changing technology and to some extent future shock.
So like the internet and media technology make it easier
to stay home without being bored, and it's possible that

(16:49):
like anxiety which may or may not be related to
future shock increasingly makes people hesitant to go out. So
we've already talked a lot about how the Tofflers described
future shock, why they argued it was likely to become

(17:14):
an increasing feature of human life. But they also spend
a significant amount of time in their book talking about
our reaction to it, like what could we do about
future shock to help alleviate and even prevent it?

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, and they also lay out several different what they
call maladaptive coping strategies that can emerge so ways that
will sort of deal with future shock on our own terms,
without perhaps even realizing that future shock is going on.
And I found these categories rather insightful. You know, I

(17:50):
have some caveats to add, but I want to go
through these because I think there's some interesting ideas here.
So the first category of maladaptive coping strategies for future
shock that they outline is that of the denier. The
denier blocks out unwanted reality and clings to the idea
that any change is just superficial quote. He finds comfort

(18:14):
in such cliches as young people were always rebellious, or
there's nothing new on the face of the earth, or
the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
This is funny because I did not expect when they
said that there are deniers this is what they were
going to mean by it. But I do see. So
they're saying, like denier in the sense of denying that
anything is really different this time, when they're saying no, no,
it objectively is actually different this time. The technological regime
we're living in now is different. It is actually happening faster.

(18:48):
And so the denier here is saying, you know, it's
always been like this.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
Yeah, And the toddlers, the denier essentially puts off change
until change is forced upon them in just a one single,
massive life catastrophe. So the preferable alternative would be, of course,
to take on a series of manageable problems and solve
those instead of dealing with one gigantic problem at the end.

(19:13):
And I think it's an interesting way of looking at things,
because I mean, certainly you don't need a future shock
scenario to see, you know, versions of this. You know,
there are all sorts of realities in life that you
that are conquerable if you deal with them as small battles,
as opposed to one enormous world ending battle.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
I think the denier attitude can be attractive to a
lot of people because it sounds very care free, you know.
It's actually it communicates a sense of confidence to say, like, ah, you.

Speaker 5 (19:45):
Know, I wouldn't worry about it. Things have always.

Speaker 3 (19:48):
Been like this, which that can be an assuring thing
to hear, especially in the face of like actual, actual alarmism,
when people are like getting freaked out about something that's
not actually a prop problem, which happens all the time.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, I feel like with the denier there's sort of
two I have sort of two feelings about. On one hand,
I feel like you do kind of have to block
it all out sometimes, like you can't constantly be waging
battles against change and dealing with change. Sometimes you just
got to, like, you know, get to work and do
whatever you do. And as far as these generalities, you know,

(20:25):
the more things change, the more they stay the same,
or the young people are always rebellious and so forth.
They are a million of these. And on one hand,
reading this, I kept thinking, well, some of these are
kind of true, right, I Mean, the reason we say
them is that there is at least some truth to them.
So I'm not sure we should just commpletely throw those
out or see those as just red flags. But on

(20:45):
the other hand, I do see where they're coming from,
Like you could just if you need a generality to
grab onto to keep from having to deal with change,
they are available.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, I mean, I guess another way of thinking about
it is that when you are concent coittering whether things
are really different today or whether a change is a
change is really happening in the world, there are, to
use statistics terms, there are type one and type two
errors happening all the time around us. There are people
saying this is totally different, it's never been like this before,

(21:17):
when when it has it's you know, it's not different.
And there are people who are ignoring things that are
totally different now be saying like, ah, don't worry about it,
it's always been like this, when it actually is something
totally different.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
And I guess I guess we should also acknowledge that, Yeah,
things can also be both, right, I mean, you can
have something happening in a given culture that matches up
with expected trends, but to channel into the future shock
a little bit like if things are happening and it
advanced great technologically, then you're dealing with a slightly different scenario.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
Also, if you're talking about future shock, you're talking about
psychological effects on the person, in which case an error
of the alarmist sort would still have negative psychological effects
on you because you would still be perceived does a change.
So you know, here's a false change that is freaking
you out alongside all of the real changes.

Speaker 4 (22:08):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
Now, The next example that they give of a maladaptive
coping strategy is that of the specialist. So the specialist
doesn't block out everything. The specialist specializes in one area
of the changing world and keeps pace with that, which
creates the feeling that they're keeping pace with the larger
pace of change in the world. Quote, he narrows the
slit through which he sees the world, so it can

(22:33):
be superficially successful as a coping mechanism for a while.
But this too, they right, will eventually catch up with
the specialist.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
This is the person who thinks that they're the master
of reality because they're in the crypto forums. It's like
I've figured out cryptocurrency, I know everything about the future,
and then suddenly, yeah, you just get according to the Toddlers,
at least then that might sort of lully you for
a while, but then it'll all catch up to you
and you'll feel this shock where you're like, wait, I

(23:03):
don't understand you know, what else is happening in culture
for some reason.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Yeah, yeah, so you think you're still stable on the bicycle,
but then it's going to fall over anyway.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
This was an interesting one to think about because on
one hand, I feel like you do have to sort
of focus on the things you can change and adapt,
where you can adapt and where it makes the most
sense to adapt. But yeah, I suppose the idea is
that if that's your day to day reaction, it still
could eventually catch up with you.

Speaker 4 (23:31):
All right.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
The next category that they present is that of the reservationist,
one who rages against change and clings to the past,
adapting not to the future but to outdated modes of
what came before.

Speaker 4 (23:47):
Now.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
This one is interesting because the Toddlers note that this
sort of thing can manifest among both liberal individuals and
conservative individuals. They're just reaching back to different models of
the past, which I thought was interesting. So for my
example that came to mind is like you had someone
like Terence McKenna who called for an archaic revival.

Speaker 4 (24:07):
You know, it's like, oh, you.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Need to go back to these older models of how
we viewed the world. And on the other side of
the spectrum you have you know, social conservatives who call
for what a return to family values and so forth.
So both see an escape from the future into the
past to some degree. You know this ideas the toddlers
drive home, you know, they're rallying around, we have to

(24:30):
return to what worked. And I don't think it's necessarily
you know, I don't think it's necessarily putting your head
in the sand to look backwards. But I do see
what they're going for here.

Speaker 3 (24:40):
Well, yeah, one thing I would say about any model
that says, I want to go back and you know
it used to be good in the past, and we
should make it like that. Again, that's always a fantasy.
I mean, you can get sort of closer and closer
to but like you're never really understanding exactly what the
past was like, what that past point the you're idealizing

(25:01):
is like. In many cases, it's just like a pure fantasy.
It's just people like sort of dreaming up what they
imagine the past was like, and then saying I want
to return to that. In some cases it might be
more based in actual knowledge about history, but no matter what, like,
you can't perfectly recreate that past time, it is gone.
There are things that have changed about the material world

(25:22):
that cannot be undone, so you're not actually going to
be able to go back. The best you could do
is try to kind of imitate it.

Speaker 4 (25:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
It reminds me of an interview I saw with a
musician whose work I like, and the interviewer asked him,
if you could live in any time in human history,
where when would you live? And they said the Middle Ages?
And they're like, well, but then you wouldn't have electric guitars.
And they're like, oh, okay, I guess that's a good point.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
So yeah, live now. Yeah, but yeah, But personally, I
tend to see anybody who wants to go back to
a time in the past that they think is better
that's always involving some kind of inaccurate idealization of the
path is just like failing to realize that there were
problems then too, and that many of the things that

(26:13):
you think were good about that time cannot be recreated.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
And really this gets into the next category I think
quite well, and that is that that of the super
simplifier who seeks a quote unquote unitary solution and goes
all in on it as a means of explaining the
world or simplifying the challenges of the present. You know,
it's a in their words, a quote simple way out
of urgeoning complexity of choice in general overstimulation.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
The person who's got it all figured out because they
read a book or maybe an article, or nowadays maybe
they watched a video and that person they laid it
all out for him. Now they know, now they understand
the world because doctor so and so told them this
is this is what's really going.

Speaker 4 (26:56):
On, right right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:58):
They stress that this can only kind of take on
a form as opposition or or support. So, you know,
this world in this this worldview can be defined by
its savior or by its enemy. Like if you know,
this is the bad guy, and once you realize this
is the bad guy, everything makes sense. Or this is
the solution, and once you realize that everything makes sense,

(27:19):
and of course you can dip into both categories.

Speaker 3 (27:22):
Unfortunately, I think the Internet these days is just rampant
with people who are who are trying to become sort
of the world explaining cult leader to an army of
people on the internet who listen to their podcast or
you know whatever. It's like, I've got the one solution
to tell you how everything is. Everybody out there be
wary of this, especially if the person is a very

(27:44):
charismatic speaker. Nobody is going to be able to explain
how everything works or like, you know, nobody. Nobody is
going to be the person who, like, ah, here's the
here's the guy who's got it all figured out, and
now I can just listen to him and he'll tell
me what's going on.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Yeah, I think this guy of thing is especially noticeable
and conspiracy thought. But I suppose you could also argue
that it can be beneficial to some degree, Like if
one goes all in on a particular social cause, you know,
I can see the appeal of that, and and if
them going all in on that particular social cause ends
up producing beneficial results, then I don't know. I mean,

(28:22):
are they happy, are they fulfilled? Are people benefiting from this?
I can see where you can make it, you know,
a more complex.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
Equation to figure out.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
And I should also know that the book stresses that
this unitary solution might be found in various intellectual ideas,
which of course could even include the concept of future shock.
They note like they point out that you know that
their book is not immune to this kind of thing,
but they also stress that it could be an investment
in action rather than thought, like I am you know,

(28:52):
I'm going to do this one thing. I'm going to
be this one thing, and that is going to sort
of super simplify this realm of choices that would otherwise
confound me. And again, I don't know that that is
necessarily a bad thing in all cases, like if someone
goes all in on cross training or whatever, you know,

(29:14):
like this is who I am, now, this is what
I'm doing, Like I don't know, live and let live
right Well.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
I mean, I think that's even even if you did
this with a very good book or something. I think
just there there's no authority or no single text that
explains everything. And so if you try to under if
every problem you're faced with, you try to say, well,

(29:39):
what does my text say about it? And even if
that text is future shock, you know, what wisdom can
I get from the tofflers that would make sense of
what's going on to me right now, I think that's
just very limiting. Like you, you've got to reach out
broader and like have more more influences on your mind
than just sort of like one leader text stoor, a

(30:00):
leader idea or person that you always go back to
to explain everything.

Speaker 4 (30:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah, And I guess you could even apply it, of
course to religion, like yes, one can. You could talk
about religion as being a super simplifier kind of approach,
and I think that would only be true to a
certain extent, because I think once you really get into
any given religion, there's a lot of complexity there. It's
not just a simple top down system, though you might

(30:26):
have like a slice of that again with a particular
charismatic individual at the heart of it and so forth.
But even then, it's like, Okay, future changes are coming,
and they're coming at a pace that human beings can't keep.

Speaker 4 (30:38):
Up with the basic idea of future shock.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Retreating into religion or becoming super religious might help to
some degree on an individual level, but it is not
going to help at the level and at the scale
that they're talking about long term. I'm of course not
accounting for any supernatural aspects, just focusing on the natural
world scenario.

Speaker 3 (30:59):
Here as a way of trying to find some kind
of explanation to help you understand what's going on in
this confusing world. And yeah, you know, it's hard, Like
the world is confusing to some extent that maybe due
to the causes that the tofflers identify, and maybe there
are other causes too, but yeah, it's like it's hard

(31:19):
to make sense of this world. And it can be
very comfortable to just find one authority to turn to
that'll tell you here's what's going on. But like I
just warned people, like, don't do that. You don't want
to be the person who's who can't stop always referring
to the internet guy they just latched onto that explains everything.

Speaker 4 (31:40):
You know. Oh yeah, yeah absolutely.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Now there's another thing I've been thinking about in terms
of maladaptive reactions to future shock, which is, what if
the idea of future shock is to some extent real,
if the toafflers were to some extent on target and
describing a real phenomenon, but people don't quite realize it,

(32:13):
and instead it manifests as a kind of anxiety and
psychic distress that arises as if out of nowhere, and
people end up blaming it on unrelated third party phenomena.
You know, this kind of reminds me that. So I
was reading the New York Times obituary for Alvin Toffler

(32:33):
that was written by Keith Schneider, published when Alvin died
in twenty sixteen, and there was a passage where the
obituary quoted a critic of Toffler's and I thought this
was kind of interesting. So I want to read this
quote first. In recent years, benefiting from hindsight, some critics
said mister Toffler had gotten much wrong. Shell Israel, an

(32:55):
author and commentator who writes about social media for Forbes,
took issue with mister Toffler twenty twelve for painting quote
a picture of people who were isolated and depressed, cut
off from human intimacy by a relentless fire hose of
messages and data barraging us. But he added, we are
not isolated by it, and when the information overloads us,

(33:17):
most people are still wise enough to use the power
of the off button to gain some peace. You know,
I think this is a This is an interesting and
funny example to highlight, because, of course I do think
Tofler got a lot of stuff wrong, but I don't
personally think that this was one of them. Like just
to zero in on one example of information overload, it

(33:39):
really does seem to me that the the bombardment of
information we're getting from media, especially now Internet based media
and social media, video content on the Internet and all that,
I personally think that probably is responsible for a lot
of feelings of isolation and depression. And I think it
does make a lot of people more lonely, and a

(34:01):
lot of us really do have trouble using the off
button to escape from it. And here's kind of where
we get back to what I was wondering about us
not identifying the actual cause of potential future shock. Apart
from the innately compelling addictive qualities of social media and
Internet video media and all that, the things that like

(34:23):
naturally just keep us scrolling for more. Often we are
not quite able to realize it is the media that
is causing us to feel so bad. And this is
true about a lot of things in life. We're often
just not good at identifying the causes of our own unhappiness.
There's a whole like therapy industry that a big part
of it is like helping people figure out what it

(34:45):
is in their life that is making them anxious, you know,
and so like it's just not always obvious to us
what the sources of our unease are. And so I
admit that this is I don't have like empirical evidence
for this. All I can go on is just sort
of my hunch about reality. But my opinion is that

(35:06):
it is a really odd thing to choose to criticize,
because I think this is one of the more prescient
generalizations situated among many less prescient ones that you know,
this information overload through media can really make people feel
isolated and lonely and distressed. And I wonder if it's
possible that a lot of future shock like effects exist

(35:26):
in a context like that, where like they do have
this negative psychological effect on us, but we don't really
realize that it's the technology or the cultural changes downstream
from that technology that are the root cause of it. Instead,
it just kind of like life feels bad right now,
and I feel confused and afraid and I don't know
what's going on, but you don't realize why.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yeah, yeah, because it's you can always find other reasons
and not to say those other reasons aren't in play too, Like, yeah,
there are terrible things going on in the world, you know,
there are a lot of things to be concerned about,
and then certain generalities are also probably in play, you know.
I mean, the youth are always rebelling, right, I mean.

Speaker 4 (36:09):
It.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Is often the case that it seems it's like harder
to make friends when you get older, things like that,
you know, And those are often sided as well. But
perhaps the technology is a part of these scenarios and
others as well.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
So I guess part of what I'm reacting to is
maybe the assumption that when changes to our lives are
brought on by technology, it will be clear to us
that is what's happening. I don't know if it will
be clear.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
Yeah, no, that's a great point.

Speaker 3 (36:37):
But okay, we said we were going to get to
the section of the book where the Tofflers talk about
strategies for reacting to and weathering the storm of changes
brought on by technology. How do people how should people
deal with future shock? Maybe prevent it in some cases
or alleviate its effects in others.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, and this is a very interesting part of the
book as well. And again they're dealing with like essentially
strategies for survival off future shock, not for survival of
any particular you know, realistic or even fanciful prediction of
what the future might consist of. Right, So, the first
thing they lay out is direct coping. This is managing

(37:20):
overstimulation and anxiety at the individual level, not just at
the and not just at a subconscious level as in
like the maladaptive practices, but at the conscious level of things.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
Okay, so what does that mean? Managing it at the
conscious level?

Speaker 2 (37:33):
I think this is basically the pushing the off switch
area of the equation, like the idea that like, okay,
at some point, you've got to be able to to
to some degree, step up and manage your over stimulation.
Like maybe you, you know, to go back to the
movie we watched most recently on Weird House Cinema. Maybe
you cut down your wall of television sets to just

(37:54):
one or two television sets that you play at one time.
You know, you make like sensible decisions that you can
regarding your overstimulation. You're not gonna have control over everything,
but you are going to have control over some things, right.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
Right, Realize when it's getting to you, and then demand
as David Bowie did, that the televisions get out of
my mind. Yeah, in a practical sense by turning them off.

Speaker 2 (38:18):
Yeah, okay, And that's again sometimes easier said than done.
But O get we acknowledge that that could be one step.

Speaker 3 (38:24):
Well, I mean, it's certainly easier to do if you
are put in place a sort of cultural regime around
yourself to remind you that that's an option and to like,
you know, bring it up over and over. It's easier
then than it is if you're just like sitting there
with your media devices and like never even hearing you know,
people say, hey, if you considered that this media might

(38:46):
be making you less happy than you could be or
causing you anxiety, maybe you should do something.

Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
And then again, it's also easier to imagine with the
basic like nineteen seventies television scenarios like the television is
stressing you off, We'll just turn that baby off, man.
But it's different now, like when you have so many
people that you work through the internet that you need
the Internet and social media for their job, Like you
can't just ease necessarily easily just hit the.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Off switch on all of that, right, I have to
have my phone on because I might get a work
email I have to reply to. But then also, yeah,
there's the old Twitter or whatever it's called.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
Now, yeah it's the X.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
It's the X Joe, right, because you exit out and you.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
Make it go away. Right. I'm sure I'm the million
person to make that.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
Joke the first time I've heard it.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
I've actually when I have checked it out once or twice,
you know, to see what somebody had to say about something.
And I found my finger going to the X logo
because I identify it with A with a canceling out
and exit out, and I'm perfect. It just feels like
a design error. But who am I to say?

Speaker 3 (39:50):
Get out of my mind?

Speaker 4 (39:52):
All right.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
The next thing that they highlight is the idea of
personal stability zones, so a way of managing in life
rather than suppressing it, sensible preparations for the future, planning
for things that that fulfill you, and avoiding unnecessary changes,
especially the just cause changes, you know, like we're changing
this just because you know, update and something you don't

(40:15):
really need, but we're just changing it because we need
the next upgrade. Like figuring out ways to avoid that
and maintain stability.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Okay, so you understand that there are a lot of
changes that are going to happen that you cannot avoid.
So you identify what are the things that you can
avoid changing, that don't have to change, and you can
keep those stable to help give yourself a sort of
a foothold.

Speaker 4 (40:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
The next one that they highlight is that of situational grouping.
So future shock absorbers social organization not based on what
we are, but what we are becoming.

Speaker 3 (40:53):
Right, So they say, because life is just going to
be characterized by more and more change all of the time,
we should have social groupings that help people through changes.
They're designed to be sort of social identification groups based
on the changes that you're experiencing, for example, sort of

(41:14):
social clubs or social organizations for people who are moving
to a new city, or people who are changing careers,
or people who are getting divorced or whatever.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
The ultimate irony, based on what we were just saying,
is that you do kind of find this with various
like Facebook groups, right, I mean, there is a group
for everything these days. And you know, I didn't attempt
to do anything like itally, but I'm betting there are
you know, a huge number of groups that are positioned
to help people going through various changes in life, or

(41:46):
could certainly be utilized for them.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Well, from my own recent memory, I know that there
are a lot of things that are geared toward people
who are currently or about to have a baby.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yes, yes, so anyway, with all these would be interesting
to hear listener feedback. But hey, listeners, if you if
if you have benefited from some sort of a group
in real life or online, et cetera, that is essentially
situational grouping, it'd be interesting to hear from you, all right.
The next one is crisis counseling, one on one counseling

(42:17):
during the crisis of adaptation. This one I felt I
felt like this one. I felt like this one made
a fair amount of sense, right, I mean, if if
you're going through some sort of a crisis, be it
a crisis of future shock or something else, it makes
sense to get professional help if professional help is available
and you know, affordable and so forth.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
I mean, it seems like it would just be generally
socially beneficial to have more free crisis counseling for crisis
of whatever cause.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Right right, Yeah, And it and it also kind of
falls in line with the whole idea of like when
are you when when are you going to get involved
in a crisis scenario? Are you going to get involved
in those little winnable battles or that one massive life
destroying catastrophe, and you, I think you can. You can
certainly point to examples in the world where yeah, there's
some sort of crisis, counseling wasn't available, and then at

(43:07):
the very end, you end up with a situation nobody
wanted to have.

Speaker 4 (43:09):
To contend with.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
All Right, the next thing that they recommend is halfway
house future shock absorbers, so urban recreation centers for rural
people entering into their systems. I'm not so sure about this.
And this is the basic idea that like, cities are
just going to get bigger and bigger, and they're just
going to keep drawing in people from rural environments, and
they're going to go through future shock, especially as they

(43:34):
enter into these urban centers, and so you're going to
need to have a halfway house, a way a place
where they can go and become better at and more
adapted to what's going on in the city.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
Yeah, I don't know how much this one, how much
sense this one makes then again, I mean, I guess
the idea of a halfway house, you know, the main
sense in which we're familiar with the halfway house is
like for people coming out of institutions, like people who
have been in a you know, in a prison or
maybe in like a mental health care facility or something

(44:06):
like that, will have a sort of semi stable house
where it's like, you know, everything is the same and
it's a controlled environment for a part of the day,
maybe at night, where you stay there, and then you
are being slowly reacclimated into the rest of society by
spending part of your day outside the house. So I

(44:26):
don't know. I mean to think about it in that
broader sense, I could maybe imagine something like that, But
then again, I don't know how much Like I don't
know how much like the future shock is really different
between say, like the rural environment in the city environment.

Speaker 5 (44:44):
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong about that one.

Speaker 4 (44:48):
Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (44:48):
It also feels like the whole idea of future shock
is that you would have to always be in the
halfway house because you'd never be able to fully adapt.

Speaker 4 (44:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:56):
So yeah, this one, this one was I was definitely
less sure about. The next two are interesting to talk about,
though I'm not sure how how sensible they are either.
The first is that you would have enclaves of the past,
so communities in which turnover, novelty, and choice are deliberately limited,
basically Westworld or some other like past or simplified environment World.

(45:23):
I guess if we're to realistically imagine, it's like, Okay,
there's so much internet, there's internet everywhere. For the weekend,
we're going to go to No Internetville. And then when
you go there, you're going to feel a certain bit
of relief, and we often we often do. If you
travel around, you may find yourself in a situation that
is essentially no Internetville. It may be your mom's house
in the country. It may be you know, you've traveled

(45:44):
to somewhere where there's cell reception, isn't there you don't
have an international cell plan or something like that. But
this would be a place that is deliberately created for
this purpose.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
This was one section of the Solutions here where I
was noticing what I thought was kind of a recurring
problem with the book, which in my opinion was I
think the book sort of has a problem projecting a
realistic picture of what is likely to be done. Like,
there are a lot of recommendations and predictions in the

(46:16):
book that are things like you know, yeah, we will
we will create future shock absorption zones where people can
go live as like a you know, a medieval farmer
for a few months so that they can recover from
the pace of change in modern life. And I was
kind of thinking, like, apart from whether or not that's
a good idea, like, practically, how is that going to happen?

(46:38):
You know, like ninety nine percent of people they can't
afford to do that. They've got to go to work
to make enough money to survive, take care of their
families every day, and all that you can't just like
leave for however long you need to to you know,
recover like this. So I think a lot of predictions
sort of have the unspoken assumption of a post scarcity

(47:02):
abundance future where everything is like, you know, there's a
very generous state that like provides for whatever people need
in order to adapt, and you know, it's almost like
anything not prevented by the laws of physics will be possible.
But I think it turns out that there are like
big problems of will and incentive that prevent a lot

(47:22):
of things from happening, even if they are both desirable
and physically technologically possible, just because like I don't know,
it would like take resources and will to make this
possible for people in general, and that you know that
hasn't happened.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Yeah, I mean they would require a drastic restructuring of society,
which ultimately is something they kind of push for. Yeah,
but we'll I think we'll get back to that in
a minute. The flip side of West World, for those
of you who are familiar with the original movies at least,
is of course future World. They also argue for enclaves
of the future where people may experience aspects of the

(48:01):
future in advance, kind of a halfway house for future living. Right,
It's like, well, I don't know if I'm gonna be ready.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
For the future.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Well it's all right, we have a place you can
go for the weekend and that'll help you get ready
for it.

Speaker 3 (48:12):
Perfect, same caveats I had before. But yes, I think
that should be and it should be publicly subsidized. Everybody
should get to go to Future World, not just for
the super rich.

Speaker 5 (48:22):
As John Hammond said, Now.

Speaker 2 (48:33):
The next one is I think a little bit of
a head scratcher, but also makes sense, but also is
something that I think we're just going to do on
our own as human beings. And that is what they
call global space pageants. So the introduction of additional stability
points and rituals into a society to give it structure
as older stability points and rituals fall away. Again, one
of their whole things about future shock is like even

(48:55):
the institutions and ideas that you would cling to for
stability as you're moving into the future and dealing with
all these other changes, those are falling away too, and
so you feel completely unmoored from the past. There are
all things, well, we just need to keep coming up
with new things. But aren't we doing that already? Like
International Cat Day is a thing and we all love it,

(49:17):
but it's not like rooted in deep human history or anything.
I think things like that we're always going to keep
coming up with that, We're going to keep creating these
quote unquote stability points.

Speaker 3 (49:28):
I think this is a really good point. I think
in general it's true that we underestimate the importance of
rituals and the work they do in helping us feel
stability amidst the inevitable changes of life.

Speaker 4 (49:40):
Yeah. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
And then the final point that the survival tactic that
they mentioned this is a big one, and this one
makes perfect sense, really, and that is a future facing
education system, which is kind of a broad concept, but
certainly in like individual takes on it like this makes
perfect sense, Like you should be educat people in a
way to where the lessons they're learning are appliable to

(50:04):
the future, preparing them for change, etc.

Speaker 3 (50:08):
Yeah, And a big part of the future facing education
system both necessitates and would involve programs for predicting the future.
So in a lot of ways, the Solutions section of
the Toffler's book could be seen overall as a case
for futurology itself. A big part of the Toffler's Solution is,

(50:32):
for example, what they call anticipatory democracy, which would be
mechanisms for democratically predicting what will happen in the future
and setting long term goals. So you know, technocratic planning
will have tangible objectives to aim for. And they spend
a lot of time talking about the benefits of having

(50:52):
professional future imagineers who specialize in predicting the future in
various ways so we can anticipate what's coming and plan
around it to reduce future shock impacts.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
And uh.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
This could involve anything from banning a particularly dangerous coming
technological development to coming up with these future shock absorbers
like you were just talking about rob in advance of
the coming changes. But ultimately they say that this work
cannot be all top down. It can't all be from
like you know, the government Office of Predicting the Future

(51:26):
with professional imagineers. There's also an important role for an
ad hoc democratic future anticipation potential. They say, maybe you
should assemble these units out of the people, so like
people maybe would be maybe would be selected at random,
just like juries are from from the demos, to come

(51:47):
together and predict what's going to happen in the future
and say what how that interacts with goals that they
have for their society and what should be done about it.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
I'm going to read a quote from the book here
where they get into this event quote. The time has
come for dramatic reassessment of the directions of change, a
reassessment made not by the politicians or the sociologist or
the clergy or the elitist revolutionaries, not by technicians or
college presidents, but by people, by the people themselves. We need,

(52:19):
quite literally to quote, go to the people with a
question that is almost never asked of them. What kind
of a world do you want ten, twenty, or thirty
years from now? We need to initiate, in short, a
continuing plebiscite on the future. The moment is right for
the formation in each of the high technology nations of
a movement for total self review, a public self examination

(52:41):
aimed at broadening and defining, in social as well as
merely economic terms, the goals of quote unquote progress. On
the edge of a new millennium, on the brink of
a new stage of human development, we are racing blindly
into the future. But where do we want to go?
What would happen if we actually tried to amend answer
this question.

Speaker 3 (53:01):
That's a very good point. And I don't know, I
don't know about like the particular mechanics that the Tofflers suggest,
but I would say I think it would be a
good thing if the conversation of democracies was way more
focused on the long term goals and on the future
instead of just like quarreling over what is or is

(53:23):
not happening in the present.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Yeah, so the Toddlers contend that contended that ultimately change
can certainly remain the protagonist of the human story, provided
that wild, unchecked and unanticipated change is control through a
host of personal and systemic changes. You know, what they're
proposing here is hardly as advanced is something like the
psychohistory of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series we have, which is

(53:48):
a you know, sort of an advanced sci fi concept
of futurology where you're like mathematically modeling the trends in
the future. But this thing still at its heart it
remains a challenge for you know, we can point to,
you know, to various examples in the modern world to
underline this. You know that our inability to really completely

(54:09):
appreciate changes that are coming and feel like they are
real to us and then act on that information. And
I think climate change is perhaps one of the more
alarming examples. You know. In response to scientific consensus that
modern industrialized society is inflicting considerable change on our environment
and altering the course of temperature and climate, a certain
amount of social and political effort has been applied to

(54:32):
the problem, but not seemingly enough so far to alter
the course to the degree that is advisable.

Speaker 3 (54:38):
And this seems to be to come back to actually
some of the points we raised earlier about like problems
of will and incentives, like there are also people who
have countervailing incentives and a lot of power to try
to pursue those incentives.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Yeah, and then just you know, individually, on the human level,
it's like, we just have difficulty dealing with problems that
extend into the into the future, you know, especially the
future that exists beyond our own lifespan. So you know,
this is not to say we should give up hope
or anything. You know, obviously I'm the climate front. There's

(55:12):
a lot of momentum out there, and small changes do
add up. But paradoxically, some of the ideas that the
Tofflers outline actually seem to work against these efforts though,
because people, again they don't want to change and change
be it. You know, various changes in your life to
lessen the effects of climate change or the changes brought
on by climate change itself, those can be ignored, avoided,

(55:35):
and explained away via the various maladaptive coping mechanisms discussed earlier,
at least for a certain amount of time.

Speaker 3 (55:42):
Yeah, thinking of direct analogies to you know, the Denyer mindset. Oh,
it's always been like this, you know.

Speaker 2 (55:48):
Oh, okay, this isn't really different, nothing's different.

Speaker 4 (55:51):
This is just the same.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
This is just you know, this is like the newsweek
cover from the nineties. But yeah, exactly anyway, you know,
the basic paradox here, I was certainly in play with
just future shock in general as a broader topic. According
to the Tofflers, we must change or we or we
will be changed.

Speaker 4 (56:08):
You can.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
You can either figure out those those small battles that
can be won and win those small battles, or you're
going to deal with that much larger conflict that is
going to be much more difficult to deal with. And again,
coming back to that basic question, what kind of future do.

Speaker 4 (56:23):
We actually want? And if, you know, if.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
We answer that question, we answer it honestly and intelligently,
then do we have the you know, do we have
the will to do something about it?

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Well said well, Rob, I am glad you you spurred
us to do this, this exploration of future shock. Like
I said in the first episode, I'd never read the
book before, it was only a little aware of the
the concept, and I think it is. This is the
kind of book that I think a lot of times
people don't go back to. But I think there's a

(56:55):
lot you can learn from it, even in the places,
there's a lot you can learn learn from like the
things that books like this get right and wrong. It's
interesting to see, like what they got wrong, why you
might think that they would end up thinking like that.

Speaker 5 (57:12):
So I don't know.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
I love this sort of thing. The future ology of
the past is endlessly interesting to me.

Speaker 4 (57:19):
Yeah, this is a fun one.

Speaker 2 (57:20):
So again, we'd love to hear from everyone out there
how these episodes or the book itself, if you have
read it on your own, or if you've watched the
TV documentary version of it that again can be streamed
in some places, though not in great quality. Let us
know we would love to hear from you. But yeah,
on that note, we're going to go ahead and close

(57:41):
out our look at Future Shock that we may discuss
some of it a little bit more in listener mail
episodes ahead. We'll remind you here that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Mondays, a short
form artifact or monster effect on Wednesdays, and on Fridays,
we set aside more serious concerns to just talk about
a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.