Building and Taming the Future Shock Bureaucracy

Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez, PhD

We are now deep into future shock territory. During Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional hearings of 2018, in the context of the US elections-tampering scandal, much was said about the original Facebook motto, “move fast and break things.” Rep. Greg Walden, Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, opened the hearing by stating, “While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it may not have matured. I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things” (United States. Congress. House. Committee on Energy and Commerce, Facebook: Transparency and the Use of Consumer Data, April 11, 2018).

Without knowing it, Congressman Walden kicked off the otherwise awkward debate by asking a “future shock” question: Had Facebook moved too fast for society and institutions to cope with the change it presented?

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that this is just a Facebook problem. In many jurisdictions, housing authorities are struggling to understand how Airbnb and similar platforms can drastically change the way people dispose of, and monetize, real estate properties. Governments all around the globe are still figuring out, in 2019, how to classify and regulate the labor relations created by the so-called shared or gig economy platforms.

These are all future shock symptoms associated with exponential technological changes that trigger the dislocation Alvin Toffler diagnosed as a consequence of a hyperaccelerated rate of change. As Toffler explains, “Technology makes more technology possible, as we can see if we look for a moment at the process of innovation. … The process is completed, the loop closed, when the diffusion of technology embodying the new idea, in turn, helps generate new creative ideas. Today there is evidence that the time between each of the steps in this cycle has been shortened” (Toffler, 1990, p. 27).

As more technologies are used to create more technologies, the collapse of institutional capacity to follow and regulate the technological development that Toffler talked about 50 years ago is now a reality. This happens because social systems, like any complex system, have delays built into them; it takes time for a new technological diffusion to manifest its unanticipated consequences. Nevertheless, because these technologies serve as tools to generate new technology-enabled business models, it is now a common occurrence that the consequences of a new technology are not yet fully understood at the time a given entrepreneur is already adopting that technology to create yet another transformation.

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Social systems, like any complex system, have delays built into them; it takes time for a new technological diffusion to manifest its unanticipated consequences.

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For example, while we are still learning about the cognitive and privacy changes produced by iPhone and Android devices, the smartphone has already been interwoven with urban mobility (e.g., Uber), our education systems (e.g., Canvas), our households (e.g., Nest), and even the travel industry (e.g., Airbnb). Future shock layered upon future shock.

While we are still in the process of understanding the individual perils of smartphone devices to our cognitive processes, as demonstrated by the relatively young age of the literature warning us against their addictive design properties, creative entrepreneurs have already introduced second-degree societal changes enabled by these platforms into other environments.

In 2018, triggered by an increased awareness of privacy invasions by tech giants, the global society reacted with future shock-esque symptoms to this accelerated pace of technological change with what the media has now labeled as the “techlash.” The techlash is nothing other than a backlash against future shock. These backlashes can be found in many other environments, including many that are not necessarily tech-related but have also very recognizable names.

Brexit and Trumpism, for example, represent some of the more dramatic political events of this first half of the 21st century. Both are examples of future shock backlashes against rapid changes (mostly demographic) that postindustrialized societies have, and are, experiencing. In this regard, the dislocation is probably even more extreme than what Toffler himself described because demographic trends have shifted since the original publication of Future Shock. Toffler described how in his time, “Never in history has distance meant less. Never have man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characterized as ‘the people of the future,’ commuting, traveling, and regularly relocating one’s family have become second nature. […] We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are” (Toffler, 1990, p. 75).

But if the extreme mobility Toffler identified has continued, it has done so in a very different and even more disruptive way. While forced migrations, state fragility, and violence still compel people to move great distances from, for example, Tegucigalpa to San Bernardino or from Aleppo to Berlin, native-born Americans are experiencing the lowest level of domestic mobility ever recorded. (Ihrke, 2017). Although for international, economically driven migrants the sense of place is as dynamic, if not more so, than what it was 50 years ago when Future Shock was published, for the coal miner in West Virginia or the factory worker in Swindon, the idea of migrating in pursuit of a job is less of a reality than what it used to be in the 1970s. Therefore, populations of different ethnonational origins are now experiencing future shock differently, increasing the sense of dislocation and spatial contextual collapse.

Toffler equated future shock to a culture shock you cannot escape within your own society. This is exactly how the demographic shifts confronting the highly nomadic south and the more sedentary north are feeding neo-nationalist movements. “Future shock is a time phenomenon,” he wrote, “a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society.

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The global society reacted with future shock-esque symptoms to this accelerated pace of technological change with what the media has now labeled as the “techlash.” The techlash is nothing other than a backlash against future shock.

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“But its impact is far worse. […] most travelers have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not.

“Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. […] Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others.

“Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

“This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it” (Toffler, 1990, p. 12).

Even though this is a time of technological abundance and living conditions are better than they have ever been in the history of humankind (Rosling, 2006), you would not know this by listening to the news or talking with the fearful ethnic majorities that are driving the political conversations of the global north. Incapable of coming back to the “great” society of yesterday, as Toffler anticipated, they react with nostalgia and otherness. They are rebelling against the future shock they are experiencing.

One important consequence of this dislocation is a political impetus to create a bureaucracy to deal with it. This structure is imperfect and, in many ways, designed to respond to the representations and fears of this population that is suffering future shock, and not to the actual root causes (Madrigal, 2018). In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security emerged as a consequence of 9/11, an event where a small group of technologically super-empowered individuals imposed, as Toffler anticipated, dire changes to a society in ways that would not have been possible before, without the technology they appropriated (Nieto-Gomez, 2011).

What we call in the United States “homeland security” is a kind of bureaucratic response to an acceleration in the rate of change that overwhelms governmental institutions. Homeland security is much more than what the public identifies with the policy. It includes, yes, law enforcement and fire response, border management and immigration, but also public health, emergency management, technology regulation (including the so-called “cyber”), and even urban planning, among many other fields.

Homeland security is, as a policy space, an organizational attempt to mitigate future shock where it is present or respond to it when it shows its most negative consequences. It aspires to be a bureaucracy of crises for when state capacity has been surpassed by circumstances—often, by future shock. This is why it regulates not only technology, but also demographic flows (e.g., immigration or border management) or global warming consequences (e.g., megafires or super hurricanes). While nobody explicitly conceived of it in these terms, an emerging meta-objective of homeland security institutions (much more than just the federal Department of Homeland Security) is to slow down the forces behind future shock. It is the closest thing to the future shock bureaucracy Toffler anticipated in the first edition of his book:

“At the level of social consequences, a new technology might be submitted for clearance to panels … who would determine, to the best of their ability, the probable strength of its social impact at different points in time. Where an innovation appears likely to entail seriously disruptive consequences, or to generate unrestrained accelerative pressures, these facts need to be weighed in a social cost-benefit accounting procedure. In the case of some high-impact innovations, the technological appraisal agency might be empowered to seek restraining legislation, or to obtain an injunction forcing delay until full public discussion and study is completed. In other cases, such innovations might still be released for diffusion—provided ample steps were taken in advance to offset their negative consequences. In this way, the society would not need to wait for disaster before dealing with its technology-induced problems.

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Even though this is a time of technological abundance and living conditions are better than they have ever been in the history of humankind (Rosling, 2006), you would not know this by listening to the news or talking with the fearful ethnic majorities that are driving the political conversations of the global north.

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“By considering not merely specific technologies, but their relationship to one another, the time lapse between them, the proposed speed of diffusion, and similar factors, we might eventually gain some control over the pace of change as well as its direction.

“Needless to say, these proposals are themselves fraught with explosive social consequences, and need careful assessment” (Toffler, 1970).

We should take Alvin Toffler’s warning seriously. Homeland security policies are indeed fraught with bitter conflict. They also can be “captured” to become part of future shock problems instead of part of the solutions—and not only in the context of technology control. For example, in the San Bernardino shooting case of Apple vs. the FBI (Contributors to Wikimedia projects, 2016), we as a society confronted, without resolving, the question of how far should we go to protect our privacy, even against the most violent consequences of future shock. In the family-separation policies regarding Central American asylum seekers, we saw how easy it is to encourage tribalism under the justification of taming demographic changes.

Nevertheless, homeland security, or something like it, still seems to be the closest we have ever been to the policy tool Alvin Toffler recommended: a bureaucracy to deal with the anxiety triggered by a world that moves faster than the capacity of parts of humanity to adapt. The challenge is that, depending on the political architecture of this policy, it can either exacerbate the dislocation triggered by future shock for the benefit of some policymakers who reap the benefits of fear or, instead, tame its negative effects, for the benefit of all.

This is why, for the next 50 years of continuing future shock waves, we urgently need for the people who care about the consequences of the accelerating pace of change to pay much more attention to the homeland security policy space to make sure that the mechanisms created by governments to deal with future shock are built in ways that are democratic, inclusive, and innovation-friendly.

Dr. Rodrigo Nieto-Gómez is a geostrategist and defense futurist focused on the consequences of the accelerating pace of change in security environments and governance. He is a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a faculty member of Singularity University. For more than a decade, Dr. Nieto-Gómez has advised high-ranking law enforcement, military, and homeland security leaders on how to create and execute strategies to transform their agencies to meet the requirements of rapidly changing environments and threat profiles. As an innovation expert and an academically trained geostrategist, he has built a reputation as an expert on future threats to national security and policing and how to confront them.

Bibliography

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