0000
Written
1970
Addressed to
1970-2000

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

Alvin Toffler

Future Shock

Annotation

Toffler coined 'future shock' in a 1965 magazine article and expanded it into a book that sold six million copies. His three-part diagnosis — transience of possessions and relationships, novelty of technologies, and paralyzing diversity of choice — described the 2010s more accurately than the 1970s. The concept's fate was itself Toffleresque: 'future shock' became a management-consulting cliché, repackaged as 'disruption' and 'digital anxiety,' the very acceleration he warned about commodified into a brand.

What Actually Happened

The three decades between 1970 and 2000 brought the personal computer, the internet, mobile phones, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the acceleration of globalization. Rates of anxiety and depression did rise in industrialized nations through the period, and survey data showed increasing reports of feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change. Whether this constituted the mass psychological crisis Toffler described is debatable, but his broader diagnosis — that technological acceleration would outpace human adaptation — became conventional wisdom.

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2000
expired0000

These societies, these generations which no longer expect anything from some future 'coming', and have less and less confidence in history, which dig in behind their futuristic technologies, behind their stores of information and inside the beehive networks of communication where time is at last wiped out by pure circulation, will perhaps never reawaken. But they do not know that. The year 2000 will not perhaps take place. But they do not know that.

Jean BaudrillardCulture & Society
1818
expired0000

Proportional access to professions or The middle way between free competition and commercial farmage. This would be a debate of the greatest importance if civilisation were to continue even for another ten years. But as that misfortune is unlikely to happen, it will be enough merely to touch on the question, and show that commerce is in danger of being subjected to farmage because of the need to remedy its increasing anarchy.

Charles FourierCulture & Society