Think you've heard it all about the global financial crisis, the Internet distracting us into stupidity, dysfunctional and self-destructive politics, the demise of the nuclear family, and degenerating cities? Well imagine having predicted, written about, and imagined the consequences of all of these postmodern maladies -- before they ever happened. Meet Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the accidental futurists who have lived to see so many of their foresights become our daily reality.
As children of the Depression, the Tofflers met in New York City where both were students at New York University, he studying English and she linguistics. Considering themselves radicals, they ditched graduate school midstream and set off westward to join the industrializing masses in America's post-war heartland. Alvin worked in foundries and factories as a millwright and welder, while Heidi served as a union shop steward. But they didn't just live the blue-collar life, they studied it, gaining valuable insights into the changing behavioral patterns brought about by intensifying human-technology interaction. Returning to New York, Alvin became a correspondent for union newspapers and eventually Forbes, while Heidi worked in a business library. They gradually came into contact with IBM, Xerox, and AT&T, companies who sought their analysis while exposing them to technologies still invisible to the world. Their methodology always centered on listening, observing, and extrapolating, and they are credited with advising AT&T it would have to break-up a decade before it was forced to by the U.S. government.
The Tofflers effectively anticipated the Information Age before it had a name. Future Shock, then, was not only a book title but a phenomenon. Upon publication in 1970, it was called "explosive" and "brilliantly formulated" by the Wall Street Journal. Over 15 million copies have been printed in over 50 countries. With Future Shock and especially Third Wave (1980), the Tofflers became credited with formulating an entire theory of history. While much of the world had moved out of the purely agricultural "first wave" of civilization, most were stuck in the mass industrial landscape of the "second wave." The "third wave," by contrast, represented post-industrial societies in which knowledge was becoming as precious a commodity as monetary wealth. Not only is the transition from one wave to another hyper-disruptive, but many societies only make the transition partially, thus becoming existentially schizophrenic.
The Tofflers helped people around the world understand an incipient future they scarcely realized they were entering. Their writings played on what became the baby boomer's anxieties about the uncertain impact of technologies on the home, workplace, and society.
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Over the decades, their books have sold tens of millions of copies. Interestingly, to this day, Asia remains a major market for their insights. Perhaps this is because when it comes to boldly leveraging technology to re-shape entire nations, Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea are encountering the future before the rest of us -- and the Tofflers, after four decades, remain the best guide to the unintended consequences and moral challenges.
Their books ring with echoes of the calamities and quandaries we face today -- and should still be required reading. Below is a selection of some of the Tofflers most insightful and provocative passages going back 40 years -- each eerily presaging themes and crises from today's headlines. They betray a deep pessimism about the political class, realism about the promises and pitfalls of our growing integration with technology, and a willingness to present totally counter-intuitive scenarios that still resonate in today's unsettled debates.
The Third Wave (1980)
The Corporate Identity Crisis: Kabuki Currency
The most immediate change affecting the corporation is the crisis in the world economy. For three hundred years Second Wave civilization worked to create an integrated global marketplace. Periodically these efforts were set back by wars, depressions, or other disasters. But each time the world economy recovered, emerging larger and more closely integrated than before.
Today a new crisis has struck. But this one is different. Unlike all previous crises during the industrial era, it involves not only money but the entire energy base of the society. Unlike the crises of the past, it brings inflation and unemployment simultaneously, not sequentially. Unlike those of the past, it is directly linked to fundamental ecological problems, to an entirely new species of technology, and to the introduction of a new level of communications into the production system. Finally, it is not, as Marxists claim, a crisis or capitalism alone, but one that involves the socialist industrial nations as well. It is, in short, the general crisis of industrial civilization as a whole.
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