Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  In all the talk about the need for continuing education, in all the popular discussions of retraining, there is an assumption that man's potentials for re-education are unlimited. This is, at best, an assumption, not a fact, and it is an assumption that needs close and scientific scrutiny. The process of image formation and classification is, in the end, a physical process, dependent upon finite characteristics of nerve cells and body chemicals. In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish. How fast and how continuously can the individual revise his inner images before he smashes up against these limits?

  Nobody knows. It may well be that the limits stretch so far beyond present needs, that such gloomy speculations are unjustified. Yet one salient fact commands attention: by speeding up change in the outer world, we compel the individual to relearn his environment at every moment. This, in itself, places a new demand on the nervous system. The people of the past, adapting to comparatively stable environments, maintained longer-lasting ties with their own inner conceptions of "the-way-things-are." We, moving into high-transience society, are forced to truncate these relationships. Just as we must make and break our relationships with things, places, people and organizations at an ever more rapid pace, so, too, must we turn over our conceptions of reality, our mental images of the world at shorter and shorter intervals.

  Transience, then, the forcible abbreviation of man's relationships, is not merely a condition of the external world. It has its shadow within us as well. New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates – shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life. They demand a new level of adaptability. And they set the stage for that potentially devastating social illness – future shock.

  Part Three: NOVELTY

  Chapter 9

  THE SCIENTIFIC TRAJECTORY

  We are creating a new society. Not a changed society. Not an extended, larger-than-life version of our present society. But a new society.

  This simple premise has not yet begun to tincture our consciousness. Yet unless we understand this, we shall destroy ourselves in trying to cope with tomorrow.

  A revolution shatters institutions and power relationships. This is precisely what is happening today in all the high-technology nations. Students in Berlin and New York, in Turin and Tokyo, capture their deans and chancellors, bring great clanking education factories to a grinding halt, and even threaten to topple governments. Police stand aside in the ghettos of New York, Washington and Chicago as ancient property laws are openly violated. Sexual standards are overthrown. Great cities are paralyzed by strikes, power failures, riots. International power alliances are shaken. Financial and political leaders secretly tremble – not out of fear that communist (or capitalist) revolutionaries will oust them, but that the entire system is somehow flying out of control.

  These are indisputable signs of a sick social structure, a society that can no longer perform even its most basic functions in the accustomed ways. It is a society caught in the agony of revolutionary change. In the 1920's and 1930's, communists used to speak of the "general crisis of capitalism." It is now clear that they were thinking small. What is occurring now is not a crisis of capitalism, but of industrial society itself, regardless of its political form. We are simultaneously experiencing a youth revolution, a sexual revolution, a racial revolution, a colonial revolution, an economic revolution, and the most rapid and deep-going technological revolution in history. We are living through the general crisis of industrialism. In a word, we are in the midst of the super-industrial revolution.

  If failure to grasp this fact impairs one's ability to understand the present, it also leads otherwise intelligent men into total stupidity when they talk about the future. It encourages them to think in simple-minded straight lines. Seeing evidence of bureaucracy today, they naively assume there will be more bureaucracy tomorrow. Such linear projections characterize most of what is said or written about the future. And it causes us to worry about precisely the wrong things.

  One needs imagination to confront a revolution. For revolution does not move in straight lines alone. It jerks, twists and backtracks. It arrives in the form of quantum jumps and dialectical reversals. Only by accepting the premise that we are racing toward a wholly new stage of eco-technological development – the super-industrial stage – can we make sense of our era. Only by accepting the revolutionary premise can we free our imaginations to grapple with the future.

  Revolution implies novelty. It sends a flood of newness into the lives of countless individuals, confronting them with unfamiliar institutions and first-time situations. Reaching deep into our personal lives, the enormous changes ahead will transform traditional family structures and sexual attitudes. They will smash conventional relationships between old and young. They will overthrow our values with respect to money and success. They will alter work, play and education beyond recognition. And they will do all this in a context of spectacular, elegant, yet frightening scientific advance.

  If transience is the first key to understanding the new society, therefore, novelty is the second. The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas. This means that many members of the super-industrial society will never "feel at home" in it. Like the voyager who takes up residence in an alien country, only to find, once adjusted, that he must move on to another, and yet another, we shall come to feel like "strangers in a strange land."

  The super-industrial revolution can erase hunger, disease, ignorance and brutality. Moreover, despite the pessimistic prophecies of the straight-line thinkers, super-industrialism will not restrict man, will not crush him into bleak and painful uniformity. In contrast, it will radiate new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight. It will be vividly colorful and amazingly open to individuality. The problem is not whether man can survive regimentation and standardization. The problem, as we shall see, is whether he can survive freedom.

  Yet for all this, man has never truly inhabited a novelty-filled environment before. Having to live at an accelerating pace is one thing when life situations are more or less familiar. Having to do so when faced by unfamiliar, strange or unprecedented situations is distinctly another. By unleashing the forces of novelty, we slam men up against the nonroutine, the unpredicted. And, by so doing, we escalate the problems of adaptation to a new and dangerous level. For transience and novelty are an explosive mix.

  If all this seems doubtful, let us contemplate some of the novelties that lie in store for us. Combining rational intelligence with all the imagination we can command, let us project ourselves forcefully into the future. In doing so, let us not fear occasional error – the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside. Moreover, in thinking about the future, it is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution.

  One sees why the moment one begins listening to the men who are even now creating that future. Listen, as they describe some of the developments waiting to burst from their laboratories and factories.

  THE NEW ATLANTIS

  "Within fifty years," says Dr. F. N. Spiess, head of the Marine Physical Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "man will move onto and into the sea – occupying it and exploiting it as an integral part of his use of this planet for recreation, minerals, food, waste disposal, military and transportation operations, and, as populations grow, for actual living space."

  More than two-thirds of the planet's surface is covered with ocean – and of this submerged terrain a bare five percent is well mapped. However, this underwater land is known to be rich with oil, gas, coal, diamonds, sulphur, cobalt, uranium, tin, phosphates and other minerals. It teems with fish and plant life.

  These immense riches are
about to be fought over and exploited on a staggering scale. Today in the United States alone more than 600 companies, including such giants as Standard Oil and Union Carbide, are readying themselves for a monumental competitive struggle under the seas.

  The race will intensify year by year – with far-reaching impacts on society. Who "owns" the bottom of the ocean and the marine life that covers it? As ocean mining becomes feasible and economically advantageous, we can expect the resource balance among nations to shift. The Japanese already extract 10,000,000 tons of coal each year from underwater mines; tin is already being ocean-mined by Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Before long nations may go to war over patches of ocean bottom. We may also find sharp changes in the rate of industrialization of what are now resource-poor nations.

  Technologically, novel industries will rise to process the output of the oceans. Others will produce sophisticated and highly expensive tools for working the sea – deep-diving research craft, rescue submarines, electronic fish-herding equipment and the like. The rate of obsolescence in these fields will be swift. The competitive struggle will spur ever accelerating innovation.

  Culturally, we can expect new words to stream rapidly into the language. "Aquaculture" – the term for scientific cultivation of the ocean's food resources – will take its place alongside "Agriculture." "Water," itself a term freighted with symbolic and emotional associations, will take on wholly new connotations. Along with a new vocabulary will come new symbols in poetry, painting, film and the other arts. Representations of oceanic life forms will find their way into graphic and industrial design. Fashions will reflect dependence on the ocean. New textiles, new plastics and other materials will be discovered. New drugs will be found to cure illness or alter mental states.

  Most important, increased reliance on the oceans for food will alter the nutrition of millions – a change that, itself, carries significant unknowns in its wake. What happens to the energy level of people, to their desire for achievement, not to speak of their biochemistry, their average height and weight, their rate of maturation, their life span, their characteristic diseases, even their psychological responses, when their society shifts from a reliance on agri– to aquaculture?

  The opening of the sea may also bring with it a new frontier spirit – a way of life that offers adventure, danger, quick riches or fame to the initial explorers. Later, as man begins to colonize the continental shelves, and perhaps even the deeper reaches, the pioneers may well be followed by settlers who build artificial cities beneath the waves – work cities, science cities, medical cities, and play cities, complete with hospitals, hotels and homes.

  If all this sounds too far off, it is sobering to note that Dr. Walter L. Robb, a scientist at General Electric, has already kept a hamster alive under water by enclosing it in a box that is, in effect, an artificial gill – a synthetic membrane that extracts air from the surrounding water while keeping the water out. Such membranes formed the top, bottom and two sides of a box in which the hamster was submerged in water. Without the gill, the animal would have suffocated. With it, it was able to breathe under water. Such membranes, G.E. claims, may some day furnish air for the occupants of underwater experimental stations. They might eventually be built into the walls of undersea apartment houses, hotels and other structures, or even – who knows? – into the human body itself.

  Indeed, the old science fiction speculations about men with surgically implanted gills no longer seem quite so impossibly far-fetched as they once did. We may create (perhaps even breed) specialists for ocean work, men and women who are not only mentally, but physically equipped for work, play, love and sex under the sea. Even if we do not resort to such dramatic measures in our haste to conquer the underwater frontier, it seems likely that the opening of the oceans will generate not merely new professional specialties, but new life styles, new ocean-oriented subcultures, and perhaps even new religious sects or mystical cults to celebrate the seas.

  One need not push speculation so far, however, to recognize that the novel environments to which man will be exposed will, of necessity, bring with them altered perceptions, new sensations, new sensitivities to color and form, new ways of thinking and feeling. Moreover, the invasion of the sea, the first wave of which we shall witness long before the arrival of A.D. 2000, is only one of a series of closely tied scientific-technological trends that are now racing forward – all of them crammed with novel social and psychological implications.

  SUNLIGHT AND PERSONALITY

  The conquest of the oceans links up directly with the advance toward accurate weather prediction and, ultimately, climate control. What we call weather is largely a consequence of the interaction of sun, air and ocean. By monitoring ocean currents, salinity and other factors, by placing weather-watch satellites in the skies, we will greatly increase our ability to forecast weather accurately. According to Dr. Walter Orr Roberts, past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "We foresee bringing the entire globe under continuous weather observation by the mid-1970's – and at reasonable cost. And we envision, from this, vastly improved forecasting of storms, freezes, droughts, smog episodes – with attendant opportunities to avert disaster. But we can also see lurking in the beyond-knowledge of today an awesome potential weapon of war – the deliberate manipulation of weather for the benefit of the few and the powerful, to the detriment of the enemy, and perhaps of the bystanders as well."

  In a science fiction story entitled The Weather Man, Theodore L. Thomas depicts a world in which the central political institution is a "Weather Council." In it, representatives of the various nations hammer out weather policy and control peoples by adjusting climate, imposing a drought here or a storm there to enforce their edicts. We may still be a long way from having such carefully calibrated control. But there is no question that the day is past when man simply had to take whatever heaven deigned to give in the way of weather. In the blunt words of the American Meteorological Society: "Weather modification today is a reality."

  This represents one of the turning points in history and provides man with a weapon that could radically affect agriculture, transportation, communication, recreation. Unless wielded with extreme care, however, the gift of weather control can prove man's undoing. The earth's weather system is an integrated whole; a minute change at one point can touch off massive consequences elsewhere. Even without aggressive intent, there is danger that attempts to control a drought on one continent could trigger a tornado on another.

  Moreover, the unknown socio-psychological consequences of weather manipulation could be enormous. Millions of us, for example, hunger for sunshine, as our mass migrations to Florida, California or the Mediterranean coast indicate. We may well be able to produce sunshine – or a facsimile of it – at will. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is studying the concept of a giant orbiting space mirror capable of reflecting the sun's light downward on night-shrouded parts of the earth. A NASA official, George E. Mueller, has testified before Congress that the United States will have the capacity to launch huge sunreflecting satellites by mid-1970. (By extension, it should not be impossible to loft satellites that would block out sunlight over preselected regions, plunging them into at least semidarkness.)

  The present natural light-dark cycle is tied to human biological rhythms in ways that are, as yet, unexplored. One can easily imagine the use of orbiting sun-mirrors to alter the hours of light for agricultural, industrial or even psychological reasons. For example, the introduction of longer days into Scandinavia could have a strong influence on the culture and personality types now characteristic of that region. To put the matter only half-facetiously, what happens to Ingmar Bergman's brooding art when Stockholm's brooding darkness is lifted? Could The Seventh Seal or Winter Light have been conceived in another climate?

  The increasing ability to alter weather, the development of new energy sources, new materials (some of them almost surrealistic in their properties), new transport
ation means, new foods (not only from the sea, but from huge hydroponic food-growing factories) – all these only begin to hint at the nature of the accelerating changes that lie ahead.

  THE VOICE OF THE DOLPHIN

  In War With the Newts, Karel Capek's marvelous but little-known novel, man brings about the destruction of civilization through his attempt to domesticate a variety of salamander. Today, among other things, man is learning to exploit animals and fish in ways that would have made Capek smile wryly. Trained pigeons are used to identify and eliminate defective pills from drug factory assembly lines. In the Ukraine, Soviet scientists employ a particular species of fish to clear the algae off the filters in pumping stations. Dolphins have been trained to carry tools to "aquanauts" submerged off the coast of California, and to ward off sharks who approach the work zone. Others have been trained to ram submerged mines, thereby detonating them and committing suicide on man's behalf – a use that provoked a slight furor over inter-species ethics.

  Research into communication between man and the dolphin may prove to be extremely useful if, and when, man makes contact with extra-terrestrial life – a possibility that many reputable astronomers regard as almost inevitable. In the meantime, dolphin research is yielding new data on the ways in which man's sensory apparatus differs from that of other animals. It suggests some of the outer limits within which the human organism operates – feelings, moods, perceptions not available to man because of his own biological make-up can be at least analyzed or described.

  Existing animal species, however, are by no means all we have to work with. A number of writers have suggested that new animal forms be bred for specialized purposes. Sir George Thomson notes that "with advancing knowledge of genetics very large modifications in the wild species can no doubt be made." Arthur Clarke has written about the possibility that we can "increase the intelligence of our domestic animals, or evolve wholly new ones with much higher I.Q.'s than any existing now." We are also developing the capacity to control animal behavior by remote control. Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, in a series of experiments terrifying in their human potential, implanted electrodes in the skull of a bull. Waving a red cape, Delgado provoked the animal to charge. Then, with a signal emitted from a tiny hand-held radio transmitter, he made the beast turn aside in mid-lunge and trot docilely away.