Future Shock in Place
Image: Nowy / New poster for film by J. Ziarnik. 1970
"We face a period as traumatizing as the evolution our ancestors had to undergo changing from sea creatures to land creatures. People who manage to adapt will adapt; those who do not will vegetate at a lower level of development or perish, cast ashore by the waves" - Lawrence Suhm, University of Wisconsin.
The main thesis of Future Shock (1970) is the claim that this period has already begun, and its author attempts to determine the character, scope and striking power of the "tomorrow's world" explosion that is taking place among us.
The acceleration of civilization's developmental process and the pace of changes in the human condition have passed so much "from quantity to quality" before our eyes that the word "explosion" has an almost literal meaning, and the titular future shock has been applied in the book in an almost hospital-clinical sense.
A fashion for futurology and various revelations under the sign of "do you know that..." has become quite an irritating cliché for some time. "Every age is a turning point" wrote Karol Irzykowski 50 years ago. But this book deserves attention not so much because of the colorful visions of the future, with which as a rule every work of this kind amuses, confuses and frightens, but because Toffler tries, among other things, to explain what is happening hic et nunc: ready-made and intellectual madness, the coexistence of computers and astrology. And above all the fact of humanity's growing possibilities as a species and the equally clear sense of deepening impossibility for humanity as individuals of flesh and blood.
"The collective value has burst, so to speak." We could describe this collapse using Czesław Miłosz's words, or understand it through Toffler's diagnosis of an adaptive crisis: future shock.
It must be stated immediately that the quantity and type of attention devoted (or devotable) to this best seller on both sides of the Atlantic depends on the place where one reads Future Shock.
The actualising factor, or conversely the this-still-doesn't-concern-us-much attitude, is the probability, scope and pace of changes in the world surrounding us. In the United States, the author's homeland, the accumulation of contrasts, diversification and changes, or to speak Polish in the American way, praaablems (necessarily with three a's!), is daily bread by no means sweet. The book addresses issues that are most definitely NOW.
In our society the 'natural course of things' consists in the rhythm of changes undergoing constant acceleration, bringing people and institutions to the ultimate limits of their adaptive capacities," notes Erik Erikson in a book devoted to youth problems in the United States. Indeed, in this country the issue of daily adaptation concerns everyone. In America futurology has reached the street.
The reaction to the book in other regions of the world will undoubtedly be different.
In Western Europe its subject matter belongs to matters with the status of 'yes, undoubtedly, certainly, soon', but one can still return to the same house for the same steak with fries and console oneself that tout fin ira bien par avoir une fin (or will it?!). In the Eastern bloc, against the background of geological shifts barely perceptible to the individual eye on a daily basis, it may even cause irritation, as shown by the hero of one of satirist Sławomir Mrożek's short stories who says, You say progress, progress! and here the dwarfs are pissing in our borscht!
One could therefore wonder where, between that bread and the borscht, the true relevance of the book is placed. Toffler bets without hesitation on American bread, claiming that it will become commonplace on a global scale sooner than we expect.
It was mentioned above that the value of the discussed book lies, among other things, in its explanatory qualities regarding contemporary times. To explain something means to refer to a more general theory, just as we explain the falling of a single stone by referring to the law of gravity, which constitutes part of physical theory. Toffler's theory, if we accept it, explains the above-mentioned differences in the relevance of the book depending on location on our globe.
According to the author of Future Shock, three epochs coexist side by side in the world: past, present and future. About 70% of the world's inhabitants still belong to pastoral-agricultural civilisations. These are people of the past whose way of life, work, level of knowledge, in short, their world, is constantly shrinking, giving way to industrial civilisation, such as 25% of humanity knows. This is a civilisation with industry prevailing over agriculture, with time measured by clock and factory siren, not by seasons. A civilisation of people segregated into narrow specialties and surrounded by things.
Through them and among them has begun an increasingly clear process, most often called the second industrial revolution, which Toffler prefers to call the beginning of the super-industrial era. Its features are growing automation, increased mobility of people and institutions, swelling quantum of information circulating in the world, and awareness that the world is changing faster and faster.
Increasingly visible becomes the still smaller group of people of the future. Technicians, managers, scientists, increasingly rapidly changing positions, continents and friends. Most of these people are found in America and on quite specific routes: the northern one leading toward the American scientific and industrial centres of the East Coast, and the southern one toward the increasingly rapidly developing and densifying California. Their lifestyle, thinking and work, and the style of being of institutions with which they are connected, constitute for Toffler a guideline according to which he orients his forecasts for the future and his diagnosis of contemporaneity.
Past, present, future are not merely units of diachrony: as living conditions and concepts of the world they coexist synchronically, though the boundaries between them become increasingly thin. Acceleration of development causes the future to arrive faster and faster and increasingly often finds us in place, unprepared. This often unwanted confrontation is precisely future shock. To determine more precisely what it consists of and how to mitigate the force of its impact, let us see how this future is supposed to look.
According to Toffler, the super-industrial epoch into which we are entering can be characterized by three key terms: ephemeral, innovation, diversification.
The word ephemeral applies to the environment, to objects of perception, as 19th-century philosophy would define it; subjectively it means the impression of the provisional nature of everything around us. Wherever we are, we are only tenants of furnished rooms.
Trying to define the concept of ephemeral more precisely, Toffler observes that what we usually call the world consists of five elements: things, places, people, institutions and ideas. One can speak of the level of ephemeral, measured by the durability of our relationship to these elements.
The so-called present times are characterized by increased and constantly accelerating rotation of relations: human-human, human-thing, and so forth. In other words, the mentioned objects of perception wear out faster now. Contemporary society is increasingly a civilization of throwaway things.
Starting from cans and Kleenexes and ending with cars, things serve… then are thrown away. This undoubtedly happens because automation of production lowers the price of an object below the cost of renovation. Thanks to this, new shoes cost less than repairing old ones. But there is also a shift in the psychological concept of the object where essence becomes less and less important, and function more and more so.
A house is a place where one lives with family. Since the family grows, the house should be enlarged, rebuilt or another one bought. We preserve only the function of the house, not a given complex of bricks. We apply the principle of modularity by exchanging parts we preserve the whole. In our example, house is the whole (function plus concrete building), and we exchange the latter while still preserving the function.
The house is a good example because it is an almost symbolic object, also in America, and its possession was always a sign and generator of stabilization and rootedness. Not accidentally, the peak of domestic lyricism in England (Tennyson) falls in the mid-19th century, the period of industrial revolution and migrations of population from native places to cities. In the United States, the cult of one's own house was a continuation of English tradition, and additionally became distinctly established as a symbol of shelter and security during the Great Depression.
Currently, attachment to the house begins to diminish. According to data from the author of the discussed book, in 1955 apartment buildings constituted only 8% of all construction activity in the United States; in 1964 already 24%, and in 1969 for the first time in this country's history more of them were built than single-family homes. The tendency toward non-commitment begins to dominate, due to the increasing mobility of people working in super-industry, namely new companies organized on new principles. A company joke among IBM employees, the largest computer manufacturer, explains the company name as an acronym for I've Been Moved.
The tendency to rent instead of own draws increasingly wider circles. Hertz Rent-a-car already provides millions of people with cars at the time and place chosen by them, without the troubles associated with buying, maintaining, and finally disposing of one's own car. The mentioned IBM rents computers, similarly Xerox copying machines. In the long run this principle can revolutionize economics, radically changing the producer's relationship to the manufactured product. The stimulus for achieving truly maximum quality of the object will become not only competition, but above all the threat of mass return of borrowed objects in case customers are not satisfied with them.
In the final analysis, there occurs not only an acceleration of the rotation of the human-thing relationship, but the very character of this relation undergoes change. Property, defined in Roman law as ius utendi et abutendi, becomes split into basic components, giving ius utendi to the sublessee, and concern for the dangers of abutendi to the producer.
One could discuss the positives and negatives of these changes. Toffler observes that many critics of contemporary times behave as if they cannot grasp the principle that you cannot eat your cake and have it too. The same people who lament the civilization of things and materialism simultaneously moan about the depersonalized relationship to these same things.
Depersonalization is the price paid for mobility, which in turn is an inseparable component of ephemeral civilization. Increasingly changing technology, organization and production goals cause personnel to increasingly have to move from place to place. The awareness that in two years, one year or 3 months we will no longer be here causes people to try to arrange things so they can leave without excessive troubles, material and psychological.
The emigrant, nomad and traveler have a different mentality than settled people. The fact that in one year alone (March 1967 - March 1968) nearly 37 million Americans changed their places of residence does not remain without a trace, especially in the area of views on what is commonly called normal life.
For the average European, the uprooting of Americans seems something strange, inhuman, and at best worthy of pity. Toffler points out, however, that Europe too is becoming a territory of wanderings of new nomads. One need only mention the hundreds of thousands of guest workers from Southern Europe. Mobility necessarily becomes a point of view after some time.
Ernst Dichter, an American authority in the field of motivation research, writes about inhabitants of countries at the threshold of the super-industrial era that most of them have already eaten their fill and have a decent roof over their heads. Now after realizing this eternal dream of humanity they seek new satisfactions. They desire to travel, discover, enjoy greater independence, at least physical. The car has become a mobile symbol of mobility. In a certain way, Marinetti's futuristic provocation is fulfilled when he claimed the car is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.
We said that the ephemeral consists in increasingly rapid rotation of man's relationship to the elements. One of them are Sartre's others, and one of the main charges (against whom actually?) is the dehumanization of human-human relations. Let us pause for a moment on this issue, first because it is interesting in itself, second because it well illustrates Toffler's rational-empirical attitude.
The depersonalization of average interpersonal contacts (the proverbial stewardess smile) is a fact. In a large city a person cannot enter into equally intimate contacts with fellow humans as a member of a small group, simply because there are too many such contacts. A few years ago, one of the sociologists from MIT asked his students to note the number of all new people they would encounter in 100 days. This figure ranged from 500 to 2,500. It is a physical or at any rate psycho-physical impossibility to maintain relations of total engagement with such a mass of people. It would lead to total disintegration, that is, simply madness of the person attempting such a feat.
One must agree with the opinion of theologian Harvey Cox that a person not only has the right, but even should maintain with the majority of people who find themselves on his path, relations more or less impersonal —precisely in order to preserve the ability to choose certain friendships that he intends to cultivate and develop. This fact is generally not taken into account by advocates of global engagement with another person. Toffler observes that fulfilment of this ideal would not only lead to disturbances of our internal balance, but above all would very much limit our freedom. And it is precisely the majority of writers complaining about the superficiality of interpersonal relationships who are simultaneously in the ranks of zealous defenders of individual freedom.
Sentimentalism in treating human nature obscures the fact that every engagement increases the number of expectations and hopes of reciprocation, and thus also pressure in that direction.
People living in more integrated groups, for example in the provinces, know all too well the totalitarianism of such groups and the number of conventions to which they must submit in exchange for acceptance, or at least a more or less neutral attitude from their environment.
The observed dehumanization of the world at increased speeds is, in Toffler's terms, yet another application of the principle of modularity. Our relationships with the growing number of people in our environment are based mainly on their functions. For example, when buying shoes we treat the salesperson in the store precisely as a shoe salesperson, and we end our interpersonal relationship the moment we step out onto the street.
Of course one can say that the person in this arrangement becomes yet another throwaway thing, but in the end this is only a negatively coloured formulation of the inevitable fact that only at this price can we manage to live at all on our overpopulated globe, and perhaps enjoy greater personal freedom.
Every civilisation has its duration scale, namely the average duration of a given activity or state. Conflicts between civilisations or generations have as their foundation, among other things, different duration scales. For the average Frenchman, Americans are barbarians devouring a sandwich in 10 minutes, instead of delighting in eating for an hour and a half, which in turn for a normal American is an idiotic waste of time in the middle of the day.
In pre-technological civilisation the duration of normal stay in one locality was a whole lifetime because people were born and died in the same village. This same duration in the United States currently averages 4 years and is constantly shortening. Similar differences in duration scale exist in the field of interpersonal relationships, which is particularly visible in the epoch of ephemeral. Through premature extrapolation one can reach the conclusion about the disappearance of all bonds between people, which is not true.
Cautious optimist Toffler draws attention to the positive aspect of the acceleration phenomenon. Thanks to modular relationships with people we have greater possibilities of choice. One could again speak of increased freedom, consisting in departing from the rather sad rule that if you don't have what you like, you like what you have.
Against this background, the observation of English psychologist Sargant Florence looks interesting, who calculated that for a person with university education to be able to form 20 truly interesting and enriching friendships, natural selection from among a million people is needed. In the pre-super-industrial duration scale, few could count on such possibilities and were content with settling for little.
The presentation of the book's main line so far has emphasised the main tendency of the future according to Toffler: toward loosening, toward ephemeral.
This image stands in complete contradiction to traditional visions, from Kafka through Marcuse and Jacques Ellul, from the world's development toward hardened super-bureaucracy, and at best toward millions of identical clean little people in millions of identical, clean little houses of Aldous Huxley. Toffler claims that instead of this, today's bureaucracy will give way to ad-hocracy, increasingly loose, temporary working groups, resembling task forces organised in leading industries, conducting individual projects, and then disbanded.
This may still seem like distant music of the future, because bureaucracy by definition is a structure with a tendency to last forever. Nevertheless within the framework of super-industrial civilisation it is, according to Toffler, doomed to destruction.
The key problem of development of all systems cooperating with the environment is the speed of information circulation. Usually one speaks here of readiness to make accurate decisions. In traditional bureaucracy, information from the external world travels a long way upward, to the top of the vertical hierarchy, then takes the same path in the opposite direction to the organs that implement the decision. In conditions of ephemeral, the amount of stimuli constantly increases and communication channels, as well as the decision-making centre, become increasingly overloaded. The reaction and adaptation capabilities of such systems constantly decrease.
Given the increased possibilities of transferring routine activities to machines and the simultaneous increase in the cost of time of living people, the only reasonable path seems to be delegating decisions to lower levels, or more precisely, liquidating levels as such and creating autonomous decision-making centres where they are needed at a given moment. This is the sense of the neologism ad-hocracy.
It is difficult, of course, to determine when such a change will occur, but the fact is the growing tendency to increase the staff of decision-makers in leading industries. American economist George Kozmetsky estimates that in 2001 non-routine type enterprises will employ about 65% of the United States workforce.
One can imagine the impact of these changes on people. The disappearance of rigid hierarchy, where everyone had their niche, and on which depended the bread, butter and status of organisation men, will allow for increased personal freedom. The concept of position will begin to give way to the concept of profession, or rather professional path, leading from one ephemeral to another. One can expect greater development of pioneering spirit, because the paralysing fear of failure should also weaken. In the world of ephemeral, failure is also only ephemeral.
Man and world interact with each other. The word dialectics often appears in the book. One could replace it with the term feedback. The reader finally asks where then is the beginning, and where the end? What is the motor, or the decisive link, of this process?
It seems that the key concept is growing information, in a very broad sense. Dr. Robert Hilliard, member of the federal Communications Commission, recently stated that accepting the pace at which human knowledge is currently expanding, by the time a child born today leaves university, its sum of knowledge will be 4 times greater than now. By the time it reaches 50 years of age, this knowledge will be 32 times greater and 97% of it will consist of discoveries made since the day of its birth. It is obvious that a world so saturated with information does not remain in place.
The second feature of the super-industrial era, besides ephemerality, is innovation: not simple accumulation of things and matters, but the appearance of new ones.
Let us mention for example several perspectives on a rather not distant future.
Mastery of oceans as a source of raw materials and living space; emergence of underwater cities, adaptation of people to life in this new world.
Revolution in biology: possibility of designing genes, changing natural features of man, blurring of the boundary between science-fiction and reality, possibility of artificial breeding of programmed embryos, production of homunculi with desired physical and psychological properties, creation of mechanical-biological hybrids.
Further development of informatics: virtually unlimited possibilities of thinking automata. Consider the existing OLIVER project, a kind of handy computer-secretary, reminding about friends' birthdays, bill payments and putting on warm socks; possibility of transforming it into a miniaturised alter-ego, implanted under the skull skin.
Revolution in the field of eternal human affairs: in connection with the biological revolution, the possibility of acquiring ready-made children for old age, collective parents, multi-child homosexual families, professional parents etc.
Innovation will cause tomorrow's world to be a world of mad diversification. That is: irregularity, unnaturalness, uncertainty, the unexpected. Again a prognosis different from the vision of pessimists of the future.
Toffler claims that the image of a gleichgeschaltet robot society is an unjustified, short-sighted transposition of the current industrial era into the future. In his opinion, possibilities of choice are growing, not decreasing. The problem of the future will rather be paralysis from excess. A concrete example may be the growing number of possible car choices: not only of a specific brand and colour, but also thanks to the principle of modularity, we can determine what kind of engine, tyres and brakes our chosen, say, sea-green Mustang should have.
The leading issue will become hyper-choice: of lifestyle. Toffler points out that even today one can no longer speak of mass culture, only of culture for many audiences. The so-called masses cannot be compared to shapeless plasma, but rather to a complex of tissues, composed of individual and individualised cells.
In theory, the principle of modularity allows for enormous possibilities of combining elements of lifestyle. In reality, however, we observe tendencies to choose complete sets of possibilities. For an external observer, these sets are indicators of belonging to certain groups. For the subject himself, they are what is commonly defined as personality or identity.
Observing people passing on the street, for example a motorcycle gang member and a pipe-and-tweed scientist, we immediately realise that behind the difference in clothing and accessories lie differences in value scales, life goals and assessment of reality.
Style is the man, it was said in the past. Belonging to a certain sect gives a sense of belonging and being among one's own. The price for this is the totalitarianism of the group. The choice of style determines a series of further choices, for example residence, political views, entertainment, and all deviations are punished by a more or less strongly induced feeling of falling away from the former group. In a world with a high level of ephemeral, both the existence of the groups themselves and the time of belonging to them undergoes shortening and wandering from one sect to another becomes increasingly frequent.
At first glance this may create the impression of social disintegration or identity crisis.
These charges against the human condition in the super-industrial era are often raised. Toffler agrees that the contemporary world gives less psychological stabilisation, but it gives new freedom: choice of style that suits us best. Instead of roots, the super-industrial world offers an abundance of cells for rent.
The story so far has proceeded under the sign of it is good, it will be better, which by no means corresponds to the experiences of the majority of inhabitants of the contemporary world. If it is so good, then why is it so bad?
The answer to this is contained in the title of the book. All these changes cause stress in people experiencing the current mutation. Every action causes a reaction. The multiplicity of external actions, bombarding us with increased new information requires increasingly greater adaptive effort. Anxiety, sense of threat, impression of losing control over the environment, desire to reduce the number of necessary decisions, hostility toward changes, tendency to close oneself in a shell, malaise and melancholy are all symptoms of future shock.
Let us look at the clinical description of the disease unit associated with moving to a new place of residence. Among immigrants one can observe three distinct phases of this process.
Initially the given person is interested in the immediate present, tries to find work, earnings and a roof over their head. This stage is accompanied by nervousness and increased psychomotor activity.
The next phase, called psychological arrival, is characterised by growing dejection and depression, often accompanied by obsessions and somatic disorders, withdrawal, hindering external activity, as well as symptoms of hostility and suspicion toward the environment. The impression of being different from the rest and of powerlessness deepens. This whole stage is marked by distinctly bad well-being. This period of more or less deep disorders can last from one to many months.
Then follows the third phase: more or less successful adaptation. With the exception of extreme cases, in which the symptoms described above appear in increasingly acute form, leading to complete psychological degradation, this means that certain people do not adapt at all. Those who can do it are no longer quite the same as they were previously.
I cited the above description with readers and emigrants in mind. Who among them doesn't know this? The fact that changes in lifestyle are objective overload of the organism and not a chimera of weaklings, was confirmed by research of two New York psychiatrists, T. H. Holmes and R. Rahe. Studying the interdependence of life changes and the number of illnesses in the following year, they found that the chances of illness of persons placing themselves among the upper 10% on the scale of changes are almost 100% greater than persons from the lower 10% of the scale.
In physical terms, stress caused by change is explained as overload of two alarm systems: nervous and internal secretion. Any, even minor, change in the everyday stimuli reaching from outside causes internal bristling: increased blood flow to the brain, elevated pulse etc. If such expectation reaction must be maintained longer, increased secretion of certain organic substances, for example adrenaline, is added to this. With excessively frequent and strong stimulation of the organism to these reactions, premature exhaustion and wear occur.
Stimulation is increased flow of information to the brain. The so-called rhythm of life, accepted as the normal dimension of duration, and similar phenomena determine the kind of information flow optimal for a given organism. Deviations upward and downward cause in the long run disorders of a distinctly pathological character. Various specialists in brain washing have taken advantage of this phenomenon from time immemorial. Depriving a person of their normal ration of information or overloading them beyond measure leads to states not differing in practice from normal schizophrenia, that is, a state of bad association of images and facts. Such bad association was observed during experiments, during which people subjected to them had the task of reacting to changes in information flow, for example by pressing appropriate combinations of buttons on a control panel in case of appearance on a moving tape of certain combinations of coloured blocks. In case of too slow tape tempo, attention weakened, drowsiness and distraction followed, leading as a result to errors. Errors also increased with excessive acceleration of the tape. People subjected to the experiment could not keep up, fell first into anger, then into apathy, finally gave up completely.
Their psychological reactions and behaviour did not differ from schizophrenia. And indeed recently a theory was put forward that this disease consists precisely in disturbances in the flow of information to the brain. Noise in the nerves of the sick causes similar distractions at normal pace of life, as in healthy people in case of excessive acceleration of the tape. In a very simplified way one can say that the accelerating world of the super-industrial era is just such a tape and subjects us to similar overloads.
Our reactions depend on our adaptive abilities, that is, coping with acceleration. This in turn is conditioned by age, upbringing, environment and perspectives for the future. These differences on the social plane result as generation gap, liberal or conservative tendencies etc., quite strictly correlated with certain social groups, or lifestyle.
It is interesting that future shock gives certain quite coherent types of defensive behaviour. Toffler distinguishes 4 such attitudes:
Refusal to accept change, attitudes: the whole world has gone mad, nothing new under the sun, let there be war in the whole world.
Specialisation: acceptance of certain changes while simultaneously negating changes in general, frequent in technical spheres.
Return to means once effective: for example police-coercive methods or former simplicity. Both in rightists and leftists of this type one can see distinct nostalgia for the good old days. Consider pre-technological accessories of hippies: walking barefoot, 19th-century costumes, wire glasses, terrorism in the style of Conrad's Secret Agent, cult of Che Guevara, associated with jungle and guerrilla warfare. Hostility toward technological, that is logical-empirical approach to social matters: tendency toward intuitive solutions, apology of former virtues, irrationalism and mysticism.
Super-simplification: uncritical acceptance of all proposed solutions, whether it be existentialism, astrology or McLuhanism, hunger for ideology, that is, striving for simplification at any cost. Toffler places here most extremists, for whom the word revolution is a magic key to all difficulties.
All these attitudes have one common feature: they falsify reality.
In the short term they may help in individual adaptation, or rather survival, but in the long term they complicate matters even more, leading to their accumulation, so that later impact becomes even more painful. They do not reduce tension anyway. There remains awareness that behind the thin wall of our withdrawal swirls a world that we do not understand, fear and do not accept.
With such an attitude toward the environment, emotional, para-rational or downright irrational components begin to dominate. Small stimuli cause disproportionate reactions, radical means have less and less in common with reality and experience. Never before have we observed such a wave of manifestations with a distinctly psychopathic foundation. Daniel P. Moynihan, ex-advisor to President Nixon, stated outright: The United States shows the same symptoms as a person in a state of nervous breakdown.
According to Toffler, there is no reason for Schadenfreude among inhabitants of the rest of the globe. This is the price of the fact that the States first entered the super-industrial era and first experience future shock.
The last part of the book bears the title How to Survive? The answer is less decisive than the diagnosis.
The difficulty stems from the fact that both superindustrialism and the reaction to it are new phenomena, and that remedial measures for side effects must also be invented first.
In any case, these measures should belong to the future, not to the past, because there is really no other way out. In individual life, Toffler proposes seeking new spheres of stabilisation, new ritual activities, habits and entertainments. One must reconcile oneself to the fact that life is a sequence of smaller and larger shocks and arrange one's life budget of forces and means accordingly.
In the social sphere, one must create devices facilitating and teaching adaptation. Far-reaching reform of education will be necessary, for example, whose system still has roots in the past, or at best in the passing era: industrial specialisation, and the concept of whistle and command. The future school should place emphasis rather on the technique of collecting and classifying data, not on their once-and-for-all established quantum.
Entire civilisations will soon face hyper-choice. A civilisation opting for the atomic bomb, manipulation of nature and LSD will be different from a civilisation that develops in the direction of increasing human intelligence, anti-aggressive means and production of cheap artificial hearts.
Already now the necessity of a certain kind of science policy is emerging, namely establishing research priorities, and on a broader scale, the necessity of social development strategy. Similarly to economics, laissez-faire-ism passes the test only to a certain point, after which it must be replaced by planning.
Toffler believes that the future is predictable to a certain degree and that it is possible to transform certain possibilities into probabilities. If this is indeed so, and if the development of these possibilities is more or less automatic and results from the nature of things, humanity must answer the urgent question: where do we want to go?
July 14, 2025—
Future Shock. VHS. Prism Leisure Video. 1994
A separate work unrelated to Toffler's book except in name, with music by The Future Sound Of London, Attic Attack, Bureau Of Beautiful Information, The Higher Intelligence Agency, Aphex Twin, Gods of Luxury, Banco De Gaia, Brian Eno, and others. The original VHS came with Cyberspecs Glasses, and the graphics were made with Autodesk 3D Studio.
References
Broński, Maciej. 'Szok przysłości'. Kultura, no. 5/284 (1971): 137-147.
In a coming note I introduce the essayist Wojciech Skalmowski, writing under the pseudonym Maciej Broński. An expert in Persian language, in 1968 Skalmowski left for Iran. Having heard what happened in Poland in March 1968, he decided to remain in exile. From Iran he went to Harvard University, then, in 1970, to Belgium.
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