Newt introduced me to Al and Heidi Toffler in 1989. We became and remained close friends. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I served as Newt Gingrich’s “chief planner,” helping to organize the never-ending caravan of academics and intellectuals travelling through his world to offer wisdom and provocation. Newt introduced me to Al and Heidi Toffler in 1989. We became and remained close friends.
A few years later, in 1993, I co-founded The Progress & Freedom Foundation, a think tank dedicated to studying the digital revolution and its impact on public policy. The Tofflers’ ideas and writings—by then including The Third Wave and Powershift, with War and Anti-War headed for press—played an important role in my thinking and in the Foundation’s work. Indeed, Al agreed to co-author (with Esther Dyson, George Gilder, and Jay Keyworth) our August 1994 manifesto, Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. We also published a mash-up of the Tofflers’ previously published work, with some new material thrown in, titled Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave. When Newt became Speaker in January 1995, copies were sent to every member of Congress.
Those were heady days. Magna cartas, new civilizations, progress, and freedom. Readers of this volume may remember well the bouquet of that old wine: cyber-utopianism, sometimes nuanced and sophisticated, sometimes not so much. Either way, it hasn’t aged well.
In those days, we (and I think it is fair to include Al and Heidi in this) had visions of how the Enlightenment-inspired liberal democracy of the 20th Century would be thrown forward into the 21st. We did not imagine we had seen the “end of history,” but we certainly did believe that digital technologies would liberate human creativity and help advance the principles of democratic capitalism. We shared a libertarian vision of a better-functioning, more humane society, in which individual diversity would flourish within a more secure and stable civilization. As the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age put it:
Second Wave ideologues routinely lament the breakup of mass society. Rather than seeing this enriched diversity as an opportunity for human development, they attack it as “fragmentation” and “balkanization.” But to reconstitute democracy in Third Wave terms, we need to jettison the frightening but false assumption that more diversity automatically brings more tension and conflict in society…. Given appropriate social arrangements, diversity can make for a secure and stable civilization.
The Tofflers hypothesized that such stabilizing social arrangements would include “‘electronic communities’ bound together not by geography but by shared interests” which would “play an important role knitting together the diverse communities of tomorrow.”
As we now know, the future turned out to be more complicated and challenging than any of us expected, the centrifugal forces were more powerful, and the centripetal ones less so. As standards have been diluted and authority has waned, so too have the stability and security they provided. The “electronic communities” that were supposed to replace traditional values and age-old mores have united some but divided many; the society of the digital revolution has proven to be more chaotic than secure.
At the same time, the bureaucratic power of the state—which the Tofflers as much as anyone believed to be a dying manifestation of “Second Wave” civilization—has refused to retire quietly. On the contrary, as change has threatened safety, people have turned to the state as protector, against everything from Islamic terrorism to uncontrolled immigration and economic disruption. Globally, rather than the ascendancy of individual liberty, the information revolution has spawned a truly existential threat to Western democracy in the form of digitally enabled “adaptive authoritarianism,” practiced most thoroughly in modern China. For all its Orwellian horrors, the citizenry mainly does not rebel—perhaps in part hoping for a level of social stability lacking in the modern West.
Remarkably, the Tofflers anticipated and explained the dark side of the digital revolution 50 years ago. Indeed, Future Shock was anything but utopian. Rather, it was—first—a warning that the pace of change was too rapid, tearing society apart faster than we could knit it back together, and—second—a diagnosis of the societal harm that would result from such unabated disruption.
The Tofflers were anything but Luddites; they believed the information revolution would yield immeasurable benefits, as it has and will. But they were also realists. And their realism led them to write, in 1970, that the “first and most pressing need” was not to find better ways of adapting to change, but rather to “halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting millions to future shock.”
First, decelerate. That was and remains a radical message, especially coming from “futurists” like the Tofflers. But it is their prescription in Future Shock, and looking back over the history of the last five decades, it is clear they were largely correct. Fifty years later, the message for us seems clear. Recognize, as the Tofflers did, the limits of humans both as individuals and as societies to tolerate change, and work to develop and implement a thoughtful futurist agenda that balances the benefits of change against its costs, recognizing that faster, however alluring, is not always better.
Jeff Eisenach is a managing director and co-chair of the Communications, Media, and Internet Practice at NERA Economic Consulting, an adjunct professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and served as president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation, which he co-founded with George A. Keyworth. His consulting practice focuses on economic analysis of competition and regulatory issues in the information technology sector, and he has advised clients in some of the world’s largest IT sector mergers. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia.