Author coined term ‘future shock’
Alvin Toffler, a guru of the post-industrial age whose million-selling Future Shock and other books anticipated the disruptions and transformations brought about by the rise of digital technology, has died. He was 87.
He died June 27 in his sleep at his home in the Bel Air neighbourhood of Los Angeles, said Yvonne Merkel, a spokeswoman for his Reston, Virginia-based consulting firm, Toffler Associates.
One of the world’s most famous “futurists,” Toffler was far from alone in seeing the economy shift from manufacturing and mass production to a computerized and information-based model. But few were more effective at popularizing the concept, predicting the effects and assuring the public that the traumatic upheavals of modern times were part of a larger and more hopeful story.
Future shock, a term he first used in a 1965 magazine article, was how Toffler defined the growing feeling of anxiety brought on by the sense that life was changing at a bewildering and ever-accelerating pace. His book combined an understanding tone and pageturning urgency as he diagnosed contemporary trends and headlines, from war protests to the rising divorce rate, as symptoms of a historical cycle overturning every facet of life.
“We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots — religion, nation, community, family, or profession — are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust,” he wrote.
Toffler offered a wide range of predictions and prescriptions, some more accurate than others. He forecast “a new frontier spirit” that could well lead to underwater communities, “artificial cities beneath the waves,” and also anticipated the founding of space colonies — a concept that fascinated Toffler admirer Newt Gingrich, the former U.S. House Speaker and presidential candidate. In Future Shock, released in 1970, Toffler also presumed that the rising general prosperity of the 1960s would continue indefinitely.
“We made the mistake of believing the economists of the time,” Toffler told Wired magazine in 1993.
But Toffler attracted millions of followers, including many in the business community, and the book’s title became part of the general culture. Curtis Mayfield and Herbie Hancock were among the musicians who wrote songs called Future Shock and the book influenced such science fiction novels as John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider. More recently, Samantha Bee hosted a recurring Future Shock segment on Comedy Central.
Toffler is credited with another common expression, defining the feeling of being overrun with data and knowledge as “information overload.”
In the decades after the publication of Future Shock, Toffler wrote such books as Powershift and The Adaptive Corporation, lectured worldwide, taught at several schools and met with everyone from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to network executives and military officials. China cited him along with Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Gates and others as the Westerners who most influenced the country even as Communist officials censored his work.
His most famous observation: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”