Alvin Toffler, 87, wrote bestseller ‘Future Shock’
LOS ANGELES — Alvin Toffler, author of the influential 1970 futurist bestseller “Future Shock,” died June 27 in his sleep at his home in Bel-Air, according to Yvonne Merkel, a spokeswoman for his Reston, Va.-based consulting company, Toffler Associates. He was 87.
Mr. Toffler’s description of a nation bewildered by the rapid changes sweeping the globe made him a household name. He derived the term “future shock” from “culture shock” and asserted that technology would usher in a new era — a “Third Wave” — in which the explosion of choice and ease of communication would transform commercial, public and private life.
Mr. Toffler was dubbed the “Buck Rogers of predictive sociology” by The Washington Post. His books were described as survival manuals for the future.
While some critics derided them as glossily packaged oversimplifications, Mr. Toffler got many things right, predicting, for example, increased use of renewable energy, a shift away from traditional nuclear families, and the advent of a computerdriven information age.
With typical foresight, he questioned the wisdom of the European Union in an interview with The Guardian newspaper in the late 1990s. The problem was that the European Union “still believes bigger is better,” he said. Mr. Toffler said this was a mistake: flexibility, diversity and micro-markets would rule the future, he said.
But Mr. Toffler also offered arguments that seem to run counter to our present world of tech giants, propaganda and internet censorship around the world. He said society and commercial life were being “de-massified,” that the future would favor small enterprise, and that the information revolution would probably erode government control, not enhance it.
Mr. Toffler was born Oct. 4, 1928, to Polish Jewish immigrants in New York, and raised in Brooklyn. He graduated from New York University and married his longtime collaborator, Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell, known as Heidi.
He worked for five years in the Midwest as a welder to study assembly lines and mass production, according to Toffler Associates. He would later say the impulse was the same as the one that drove John Steinbeck to pick grapes and Jack London to go to sea.
He covered labor issues as a newspaper journalist, then moved into business management.
He began work on “Future Shock” in the 1960s, focusing on what he called “techno-social” changes looming on the horizon. Informed by his experience as a factory worker, he saw a progression in which laborers were first replaced by machines, then by lower-paid overseas workers.