Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Renting has the net effect of multiplying the number of people with successive relationships to the same object, and thus reducing, on average, the duration of such relationships. When we extend this principle to a very wide range of products, it becomes clear that the rise of rentalism parallels and reinforces the impact of throw-away items, temporary structures and modularism.

  TEMPORARY NEEDS

  It is important here to turn for a moment to the notion of obsolescence. For the fear of product obsolescence drives businessmen to innovation at the same time that it impels the consumer toward rented, disposable or temporary products. The very idea of obsolescence is disturbing to people bred on the ideal of permanence, and it is particularly upsetting when thought to be planned. Planned obsolescence has been the target of so much recent social criticism that the unwary reader might be led to regard it as the primary or even exclusive cause of the trend toward shorter relational durations.

  There is no doubt that some businessmen conspire to shorten the useful life of their products in order to guarantee replacement sales. There is, similarly, no doubt that many of the annual model changes with which American (and other) consumers are increasingly familiar are not technologically substantive. Detroit's autos today deliver no more mileage per gallon of gasoline than they did ten model changes back, and the oil companies, for all the additives about which they boast, still put a turtle, not a tiger, in the tank. Moreover, it is incontestable that Madison Avenue frequently exaggerates the importance of new features and encourages consumers to dispose of partially worn-out goods to make way for the new.

  It is therefore true that the consumer is sometimes caught in a carefully engineered trap – an old product whose death has been deliberately hastened by its manufacturer, and the simultaneous appearance of a "new improved" model advertised as the latest heaven-sent triumph of advanced technology.

  Nevertheless, these reasons by themselves cannot begin to account for the fantastic rate of turnover of the products in our lives. Rapid obsolescence is an integral part of the entire accelerative process – a process involving not merely the life span of sparkplugs, but of whole societies. Bound up with the rise of science and the speed-up in the acquisition of knowledge, this historic process can hardly be attributed to the evil design of a few contemporary hucksters.

  Clearly, obsolescence occurs with or without "planning." With respect to things, obsolescence occurs under three conditions. It occurs when a product literally deteriorates to the point at which it can no longer fulfill its functions – bearings burn out, fabrics tear, pipes rust. Assuming the same functions still need to be performed for the consumer, the failure of a product to perform these functions marks the point at which its replacement is required. This is obsolescence due to functional failure.

  Obsolescence also occurs when some new product arrives on the scene to perform these functions more effectively than the old product could. The new antibiotics do a more effective job of curing infection than the old. The new computers are infinitely faster and cheaper to operate than the antique models of the early 1960's. This is obsolescence due to substantive technological advance.

  But obsolescence also occurs when the needs of the consumer change, when the functions to be performed by the product are themselves altered. These needs are not as simply described as the critics of planned obsolescence sometimes assume. An object, whether a car or a can opener, may be evaluated along many different parameters. A car, for example, is more than a conveyance. It is an expression of the personality of the user, a symbol of status, a source of that pleasure associated with speed, a source of a wide variety of sensory stimuli – tactile, olfactory, visual, etc. The satisfaction a consumer gains from such factors may, depending upon his values, outweigh the satisfaction he might receive from improved gas consumption or pickup power.

  The traditional notion that each object has a single easily definable function clashes with all that we now know about human psychology, about the role of values in decisionmaking, and with ordinary common sense as well. All products are multi-functional.

  An excellent illustration of this occurred not long ago when I watched a little boy purchase half a dozen pink erasers at a little stationery store. Curious as to why he wanted so many of them, I picked one up for closer examination. "Do they erase well?" I asked the boy. "I don't know,." he said, "but they sure smell good!" And, indeed, they did. They had been heavily perfumed by the Japanese manufacturer perhaps to mask an unpleasant chemical odor. In short, the needs filled by products vary by purchaser and through time.

  In a society of scarcity, needs are relatively universal and unchanging because they are starkly related to the "gut" functions. As affluence rises, however, human needs become less directly linked to biological survival and more highly individuated. Moreover, in a society caught up in complex, high-speed change, the needs of the individual – which arise out of his interaction with the external environment – also change at relatively high speed. The more rapidly changing the society, the more temporary the needs. Given the general affluence of the new society, he can indulge many of these short-term needs.

  Often, without even having a clear idea of what needs he wants served, the consumer has a vague feeling that he wants a change. Advertising encourages and capitalizes on this feeling, but it can hardly be credited with having created it single-handedly. The tendency toward shorter relational durations is thus built more deeply into the social structure than arguments over planned obsolescence or the manipulative effectiveness of Madison Avenue would suggest.

  The rapidity with which consumers' needs shift is reflected in the alacrity with which buyers abandon product and brand loyalty. If Assistant Attorney General Donald F. Turner, a leading critic of advertising, is correct, one of the primary purposes of advertising is to create "durable preferences." If so, it is failing, for brand-switching is so frequent and common that it has become, in the words of one food industry publication, "one of the national advertiser's major headaches."

  Many brands drop out of existence. Among brands that continue to exist there is a continual reshuffling of position. According to Henry M. Schachte, "In almost no major consumer goods category ... is there a brand on top today which held that position ten years ago." Thus among ten leading American cigarettes, only one, Pall Mall, maintained in 1966 the same share of the market that it held in 1956. Camels plunged from 18 to 9 percent of the market; Lucky Strike declined even more sharply, from 14 to 6 percent. Other brands moved up, with Salem, for example, rising from 1 to 9 percent. Additional fluctuations have occurred since this survey.

  However insignificant these shifts may be from the long-run view of the historian, this continual shuffling and reshuffling, influenced but not independently controlled by advertising, introduces into the short-run, everyday life of the individual a dazzling dynamism. It heightens still further the sense of speed, turmoil and impermanence in society.

  THE FAD MACHINE

  Fast-shifting preferences, flowing out of and interacting with high-speed technological change, not only lead to frequent changes in the popularity of products and brands, but also shorten the life cycle of products. Automation expert John Diebold never wearies of pointing out to businessmen that they must begin to think in terms of shorter life spans for their goods. Smith Brothers' Cough Drops, Calumet Baking Soda and Ivory Soap, have become American institutions by virtue of their long reign in the market place. In the days ahead, he suggests, few products will enjoy such longevity. Every consumer has had the experience of going to the supermarket or department store to replace some item, only to find that he cannot locate the same brand or product. In 1966 some 7000 new products turned up in American supermarkets. Fully 55 percent of all the items now sold there did not exist ten years ago. And of the products available then, 42 percent have faded away altogether. Each year the process repeats itself in more extreme form. Thus 1968 saw 9,500 new items in the consumer packaged-goods field alone, with only one in
five meeting its sales target. A silent but rapid attrition kills off the old, and new products sweep in like a ride. "Products that used to sell for twenty-five years," writes economist Robert Theobald, "now often count on no more than five. In the volatile pharmaceutical and electronic fields the period is often as short as six months." As the pace of change accelerates further, corporations may create new products knowing full well that they will remain on the market for only a matter of a few weeks.

  Here, too, the present already provides us with a foretaste of the future. It lies in an unexpected quarter: the fads now sweeping over the high technology societies in wave after wave. In the past few years alone, in the United States, Western Europe and Japan, we have witnessed the sudden rise or collapse in popularity of "Bardot hairdos," the "Cleopatra look," James Bond, and Batman, not to speak of Tiffany lampshades, Super-Balls, iron crosses, pop sunglasses, badges and buttons with protest slogans or pornographic jokes, posters of Allen Ginsberg or Humphrey Bogart, false eyelashes, and innumerable other gimcracks and oddities that reflect – are tuned into – the rapidly changing pop culture.

  Backed by mass media promotion and sophisticated marketing, such fads now explode on the scene virtually overnight – and vanish just as quickly. Sophisticates in the fad business prepare in advance for shorter and shorter product life cycles. Thus, there is in San Gabriel, California, a company entitled, with a kind of cornball relish, Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-O specializes in fad products, having introduced the hula hoop in the fifties and the so-called Super-Ball more recently. The latter – a high-bouncing rubber ball – quickly became so popular with adults as well as children that astonished visitors saw several of them bouncing merrily on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Wall Street executives gave them away to friends and one high broadcasting official complained that "All our executives are out in the halls with their Super-Balls." Wham-O, and other companies like it, however, are not disconcerted when sudden death overtakes their product; they anticipate it. They are specialists in the design and manufacture of "temporary" products.

  The fact that fads are generated artificially, to a large extent, merely underscores their significance. Even engineered fads are not new to history. But never before have they come fleeting across the consciousness in such rapid-fire profusion, and never has there been such smooth coordination between those who originate the fad, mass media eager to popularize it, and companies geared for its instantaneous exploitation.

  A well-oiled machinery for the creation and diffusion of fads is now an entrenched part of the modern economy. Its methods will increasingly be adopted by others as they recognize the inevitability of the ever-shorter product cycle. The line between "fad" and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.

  The turnover of things in our lives thus grows even more frenetic. We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship.

  The foreshortening of our ties with the physical environment, the stepped-up turnover of things, however, is only a small part of a much larger context. Let us, therefore, press ahead in our exploration of life in high transience society.

  Chapter 5

  PLACES: THE NEW NOMADS

  Every Friday afternoon at 4:30, a tall, graying Wall Street executive named Bruce Robe stuffs a mass of papers into his black leather briefcase, takes his coat off the rack outside his office, and departs. The routine has been the same for more than three years. First, he rides the elevator twenty-nine floors down to street level. Next he strides for ten minutes through crowded streets to the Wall Street Heliport. There he boards a helicopter which deposits him, eight minutes later, at John F. Kennedy Airport. Transferring to a Trans-World Airlines jet, he settles down for supper, as the giant craft swings out over the Atlantic, then banks and heads west. One hour and ten minutes later, barring delay, he steps briskly out of the terminal building at the airport in Columbus, Ohio, and enters a waiting automobile. In thirty more minutes he reaches his destination: he is home.

  Four nights a week Robe lives at a hotel in Manhattan. The other three he spends with his wife and children in Columbus, 500 miles away. Claiming the best of two worlds, a job in the frenetic financial center of America and a family life in the comparatively tranquil Midwest countryside, he shuttles back and forth some 50,000 miles a year.

  The Robe case is unusual – but not that unusual. In Califomia, ranch owners fly as much as 120 miles every morning from their homes on the Pacific Coast or in the San Bernardino Valley to visit their ranches in the Imperial Valley, and then fly back home again at night. One Pennsylvania teen-ager, son of a peripatetic engineer, jets regularly to an orthodontist in Frankfurt, Germany. A University of Chicago philosopher, Dr. Richard McKeon, commuted 1000 miles each way once a week for an entire semester in order to teach a series of classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. A young San Franciscoan and his girlfriend in Honolulu see each other every weekend, taking turns at crossing 2000 miles of Pacific Ocean. And at least one New England matron regularly swoops down on New York to visit her hairdresser.

  Never in history has distance meant less. Never have man's relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characterized as "the people of the future," commuting, traveling, and regularly relocating one's family have become second nature. Figuratively, we "use up" places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.

  THE 3,000,000-MILE CLUB

  In 1914, according to Buckminster Fuller, the typical American averaged about 1,640 miles per year of total travel, counting some 1,300 miles of just plain everyday walking to and fro. This meant that he traveled only about 340 miles per year with the aid of horse or mechanical means. Using this 1,640 figure as a base, it is possible to estimate that the average American of that period moved a total of 88,560 miles in his lifetime. (* This is based on a life expectancy of 54 years. Actual life expectancy for white males in the United States in 1920 was 54.1 years.) Today, by contrast, the average American car owner drives 10,000 miles per year – and he lives longer than his father or grandfather. "At sixty-nine years of age," wrote Fuller a few years ago, "... I am one of a class of several million human beings who, in their lifetimes, have each covered 3,000,000 miles or more" – more than thirty times the total lifetime travel of the 1914 American.

  The aggregate figures are staggering. In 1967, for instance, 108,000,000 Americans took 360,000,000 trips involving an overnight stay more than 100 miles from home. These trips alone accounted for 312,000,000,000 passenger miles.

  Even if we ignore the introduction of fleets of jumbo jets, trucks, cars, trains, subways and the like, our social investment in mobility is astonishing. Paved roads and streets have been added to the American landscape at the incredible rate of more than 200 miles per day, every single day for at least the last twenty years. This adds up to 75,000 miles of new streets and roads every year, enough to girdle the globe three times. While United States population increased during this period by 38.5 percent, street and road mileage shot up 100 percent. Viewed another way, the figures are even more dramatic: passenger miles traveled within the United States have been increasing at a rate six times faster than population for at least twenty-five years.

  This revolutionary step-up in per capita movement through space is paralleled, to greater or lesser degree, throughout the most technological nations. Anyone who has watched the rush hour t
raffic pileup on the once peaceful Strandveg in Stockholm cannot help but be jolted by the sight. In Rotterdam and Amsterdam, streets built as recently as five years ago are already horribly jammed: the number of automobiles has multiplied faster than anyone then thought possible.

  In addition to the increase in everyday movement between one's home and various other nearby points, there is also a phenomenal increase in business and vacation travel involving overnight stays away from home. Nearly 1,500,000 Germans will vacation in Spain this summer, and hundreds of thousands more will populate beaches in Holland and Italy. Sweden annually welcomes more than 1,200,000 visitors from non-Scandinavian nations. More than a million foreigners visit the United States, while roughly 4,000,000 Americans travel overseas each year. A writer in Le Figaro justifiably refers to "gigantic human exchanges."

  This busy movement of men back and forth over the landscape (and sometimes under it) is one of the identifying characteristics of super-industrial society. By contrast, preindustrial nations seem congealed, frozen, their populations profoundly attached to a single place. Transportation expert Wilfred Owen talks about the "gap between the immobile and the mobile nations." He points out that for Latin America, Africa and Asia to reach the same ratio of road mileage to area that now prevails in the European Economic Community, they would have to pave some 40,000,000 miles of road. This contrast has profound economic consequences, but it also has subtle, largely overlooked cultural and psychological consequences. For migrants, travelers and nomads are not the same kind of people as those who stay put in one place.