Future Shock

by Alvin Toffler

  Anyone who has strolled through Newport Center, an incredibly lavish new shopping plaza in Newport Beach, California, cannot fail to be impressed by the attention paid by its designers to aesthetic and psychological factors. Tall white arches and columns outlined against a blue sky, fountains, statues, carefully planned illumination, a pop art playground, and an enormous Japanese wind-bell are all used to create a mood of casual elegance for the shopper. It is not merely the affluence of the surroundings, but their programmed pleasantness that makes shopping there a quite memorable experience. One can anticipate fantastic variations and elaborations of the same principles in the planning of retail stores in the future. We shall go far beyond any "functional" necessity, turning the service, whether it is shopping, dining, or having one's hair cut, into a pre-fabricated experience. We shall watch movies or listen to chamber music as we have our hair cut, and the mechanical bowl that fits over the skull of a woman in the beauty parlor will do more than simply dry her hair. By directing electronic waves to her brain, it may, quite literally, tickle her fancy.

  Bankers and brokers, real estate and insurance companies will employ the most carefully chosen decor, music, closed circuit color television, engineered tastes and smells, along with the most advanced mixed-media equipment to heighten (or neutralize) the psychological charge that accompanies even the most routine transaction. No important service will be offered to the consumer before it has been analyzed by teams of behavioral engineers to improve its psychic loading.

  EXPERIENTIAL INDUSTRIES

  Reaching beyond these simple elaborations of the present, we shall also witness a revolutionary expansion of certain industries whose sole output consists not of manufactured goods, nor even of ordinary services, but of pre-programmed "experiences." The experience industry could turn out to be one of the pillars of super-industrialism, the very foundation, in fact, of the post-service economy.

  As rising affluence and transience ruthlessly undercut the old urge to possess, consumers begin to collect experiences as consciously and passionately as they once collected things. Today, as the airline example suggests, experiences are sold as an adjunct to some more traditional service. The experience is, so to speak, the frosting on the cake. As we advance into the future, however, more and more experiences will be sold strictly on their own merits, exactly as if they were things.

  Precisely this is beginning to happen, in fact. This accounts for the high growth rate visible in certain industries that have always been, at least partly, engaged in the production of experiences for their own sake. The arts are a good example. Much of the "culture industry" is devoted to the creation or staging of specialized psychological experiences. Today we find art-based "experience industries" booming in virtually all the techno-societies. The same is true of recreation, mass entertainment, education, and certain psychiatric services, all of which participate in what might be called experiential production.

  When Club Mediterranee sells a package holiday that takes a young French secretary to Tahiti or Israel for a week or two of sun and sex, it is manufacturing an experience for her quite as carefully and systematically as Renault manufactures cars. Its advertisements underscore the point. Thus a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine begins with the headline: "Take 300 men and women. Strand them on an exotic island. And strip them of every social pressure." Based in France, Club Mediterranee now operates thirty-four vacation "villages" all over the world.

  Similarly, when the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, offers weekend seminars in "body-awareness" and "non-verbal communication," at seventy dollars per person, or fiveday workshops at $180, it promises not simply to teach, but to plunge its affluent customers into "joyous" new interpersonal experiences – a phrase some readers take to mean adventures with sex or LSD. Group therapy and sensitivity training sessions are packaged experiences. So are certain classes. Thus, going to an Arthur Murray or Fred Astaire studio to learn the latest dance step may provide the student with a skill that will bring enjoyment in the future, but it also provides a pleasurable here-and-now experience for the lonely bachelor or spinster. The learning experience, itself, is a major attraction for the customer.

  All these, however, provide only the palest clue as to the nature of the experience industry of the future and the great psychological corporations, or psych-corps, that will dominate it.

  SIMULATED ENVIRONMENTS

  One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, danger, sexual titillation or other pleasure without risk to his real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth's court, the "sexoticism" of an eighteenth-century Japanese geisha house, and the like. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original – i.e., unsimulated – reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future.

  Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus "happenings" in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. "Theater has traditionally said to an audience, 'Sit down and I'll tell you a story.' Why can't it also say, 'Stand up and we'll play a game?'" Schechner's work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and the audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus.

  Artists also have begun to create whole "environments" – works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happen. In Sweden the Moderna Museet has exhibited an immense papier-mache lady called "Hon" ("She"), into whose innards the audience entered via a vaginal portal. Once inside, there were ramps, stairways, flashing lights, odd sounds, and something called a "bottle smashing machine." Dozens of museums and galleries around the United States and Europe now display such "environments." Time magazine's art critic suggests that their intention is to bombard the spectator with "wacky sights, weirdo sounds and otherworldly sensations, ranging from the feeling of weightlessness to hopped-up, psychedelic hallucinations." The artists who produce these are really "experiential engineers."

  In a deceptively shabby storefront on a Lower Manhattan street lined with factories and warehouses, I visited Cerebrum, an "electronic studio of participation" where, for an hourly fee, guests are admitted into a startling white, high-ceilinged room. There they strip off their clothing, don semi-transparent robes, and sprawl comfortably on richly padded white platforms. Attractive male and female "guides," similarly nude under their veils, offer each guest a stereophonic headset, a see-through mask, and, from time to time, balloons, kaleidoscopes, tambourines, plastic pillows, mirrors, pieces of crystal, marshmallows, slides and slide projectors. Folk and rock music, interspersed with snatches of television commercials, street noises and a lecture by or about Marshall McLuhan fill the ears. As the music grows more excited, guests and guides begin to dance on the platforms and the carpeted white walkways that connect them. Bubbles drift down from machines in the ceiling. Hostesses float through, spraying a variety of fragrances into the air. Lights change color and random images wrap themselves around the walls, guests and guides. The mood shifts from cool at first to warm, friendly, and mildly erotic.

  Still primitive both artistically and technologically, Cerebrum is a pale forerunner of the "$25,000,000 'super' Environmental Entertainment Complex" its builders enthusiastic
ally talk of creating some day. Whatever their artistic merit, experiments such as these point to far more sophisticated enclave-building in the future. Today's young artists and environmental entrepreneurs are performing research and development for the psych-corps of tomorrow.

  LIVE ENVIRONMENTS

  Knowledge gained for this research will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. But it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colorless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs – a date with a lovely and willing lady if he wins, perhaps a day in solitary confinement if he loses. As the stakes rise, more imaginative payoffs and punishments will be designed.

  A loser may have to serve (by voluntary pre-agreement) as a "slave" to a winner for several days. A winner may be rewarded by ten free minutes of electronic pleasure-probing of his brain. A player may risk flogging or its psychological equivalent – participation in a day-long session during which winners are permitted to work off their aggressions and hostilities by sneering, shouting at, reviling, or otherwise attacking the ego of the loser. High rollers may play to win a free heart or lung transplant at some later date, should it prove to be necessary. Losers may have to forego a kidney. Such payoffs and punishments may be escalated in intensity and varied endlessly. Experiential designers will study the pages of Krafft-Ebing or the Marquis de Sade for ideas. Only imagination, technological capability, and the constraints of a generally relaxed morality limit the possibilities. Experiential gambling cities will rise to overshadow Las Vegas or Deauville, combining in a single place some of the features of Disneyland, the World's Fair, Cape Kennedy, the Mayo Clinic, and the honky-tonks of Macao. (For a brilliant and provocative insight into experiential gambling and its philosophical implications, see "The Lottery in Babylon," by Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian philosopher-essayist. This short work is found in Borges' collection entitled Labyrinths.)

  Once again, present-day developments foreshadow the future. Thus certain American television programs, such as The Dating Game, already pay players off in experiential rewards, as does the contest recently discussed in the Swedish Parliament. In this contest, a pornographic magazine awarded one of its readers a week in Majorca with one of its "topless" models. A Conservative M.P. challenged the propriety of such goings-on. Presumably, he felt better when he was assured by the Finance Minister, Gunnar Strang, that the transaction was taxable.

  Simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge man's grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury's vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such "interactive" films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulations and "reals" will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products.

  But the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with one another will contribute color, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. Beauty, excitement, danger or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: "Let us plan (part of) your life for you." In the transient, change-filled world of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers.

  The packaged experiences offered in the future will reach far beyond the imagination of the average consumer, filling the environment with endless novelties. Companies will vie with one another to create the most outlandish, most gratifying experiences. Indeed, some of these experiences – as in the case of topless Swedish models – will even reach beyond tomorrow's broadened boundaries of social acceptability. They may be offered to the public covertly by unlicensed, underground psych-corps. This will simply add the thrill of "illicitude" to the experience itself.

  (One very old experiential industry has traditionally operated covertly: prostitution. Many other illegal activities also fit within the experience industry. For the most part, however, all these reveal a paucity of imagination and a lack of technical resources that will be remedied in the future. They are trivial compared with the possibilities in a society that will, by the year 2000 or sooner, be armed with robots, advanced computers, personalityaltering drugs, brain-stimulating pleasure probes, and similar technological goodies.)

  The diversity of novel experiences arrayed before the consumer will be the work of experience-designers, who will be drawn from the ranks of the most creative people in the society. The working motto of this profession will be: "If you can't serve it up real, find a vicarious substitute. If you're good, the customer will never know the difference!" This implied blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society with serious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the "psyche-service industries" and "psych-corps." Great globe-girdling syndicates will create super-Disneylands of a variety, scale, scope, and emotional power that is hard for us to imagine.

  We can thus sketch the dim outlines of the super-industrial economy, the post-service economy of the future. Agriculture and the manufacture of goods will have become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow's best and most resourceful entrepreneurs.

  The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the widow or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. Based on banks of detailed data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product.

  Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experiential terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experience industries as it begins to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to students. The communications and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their soft-ware as well. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioral technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic – if not the basic – sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete.


  THE ECONOMICS OF SANITY

  The essence of tomorrow's economy, declares the Stanford Research Institute in a report by its Long Range Planning Service, will be an "emphasis upon the inner as well as the material needs of individuals and groups." This new emphasis, SRI suggests, will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. "In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourths or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy."

  It is this convergence of pressures – from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing – that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future.

  The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the world may not stand idly by as the world's favored few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of mankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could defer the arrival of experientialism, could maintain a more conventional economy for a time by maximizing traditional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign aid programs.

  By creaming off "excess" productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the world, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future.