It was the double date we had looked forward to more than any other. Just before sunset on a hot August day in Los Angeles, we sat in a nearly empty hotel restaurant awaiting the arrival of one of the most influential husband-and-wife intellectual teams in history: Alvin and Heidi Toffler.
They may be octogenarians now, but pick up a copy of the Tofflers' most famous books -- Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980) -- and you will quickly wonder why anyone bothers to write the redundant meta social and political commentaries that drown us today. These books, written when we were children, contain such stunning and prescient insights, encapsulated in elegant yet racing prose, that they ought to be essential reading four decades onward. Indeed, you couldn't be blamed for thinking they had just been published this year.
Terms and concepts that are on the tip of everyone's tongue today leap off the pages: the crisis of industrialism, the promise of renewable energy, ad-hocracy in business, the rise of the non-nuclear family, technology-enabled telecommuting, the power of the pro-sumer, sensors embedded in household appliances, a gene industry that pre-designs the human body, corporate social responsibility, "information overload" -- and yes, right there on p. 292 of The Third Wave, the phrase Wired magazine can't get enough of today: "DIY Revolution." No wonder the book has been dubbed the "classic study of tomorrow." (Of the very few things they seem to have gotten wrong, or at least not yet right, is widespread polygamist communes.)
In person, the Tofflers were just as insightful, making connections between America's congressional deadlock, Asians' obsession with high technology, and the inertia of Mideast politics. But what's so extraordinary about the Tofflers is not what they told us in that restaurant, but their long-ago insights about today's society that seem so relevant now, especially considering that many were not at all obvious at the time. Where conventional wisdom of the era saw mass industrialization turning common citizens into straitjacketed "mass man," the Tofflers saw stratification and functional differentiation generating a superindustrial society with a "quilt-like" diversity. And where the public was either ignorant or complacent about the far-reaching effects of advanced communications technology, the Tofflers foresaw telephony and virtual worlds that would force us to devise ever more creative ways to avoid overstimulation and preserve our privacy. From the vantage point of a present in which overexposure to the Internet is labeled an addiction, it seems quite an observation on their part to recognize that even diseases would be technologically generated. The Tofflers' "future shock" is at once a sickness and a way of life.
Clearly, the Tofflers -- now writing one last book, their memoirs -- still have cutting-edge ideas to offer. Just as importantly, they are their own best argument for the profession they invented: futurism. But how did they do it?
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While the field may have gotten its name from the fascist Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, who authored a brief and obscure "Futurist Manifesto" in 1909, the Tofflers made futurism a true calling -- something that one does. And they did it the hard way. Growing up in post-Depression America, they abandoned New York City and moved to the heartland, working for years as welders and union stewards at aluminum foundries and mills, experiencing all the hardship of industrialism at its peak. Only that way could they truly break it down and imagine what would come next.
Predicting the future is not about locking yourself in a room, staring into a crystal ball. It is, in a sense, reporting -- getting to the people and ideas on the bleeding edge. Through persistent travel, site visits, interviews, and embedding themselves like journalists, the Tofflers used their imagination to piece together an elusive future. The Tofflers didn't make any scientific discoveries, invent a new technology, or launch a brand-name business, but they pioneered a new vocabulary to capture how such activities intersect. How many mainstream books from the 1970s spoke of the multiplication of media channels enabling individuals to construct their own reality, or of the separatist region of Abkhazia in the then-Soviet republic of Georgia?
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