Many of the themes and observations, now half a century old, still hold true. Reading Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock today, I can’t be faulted for mistaking the work for something printed last month, not 50 years ago. Many of the themes and observations, now half a century old, still hold true.
Future Shock gave voice to a collection of ideas about the currents of change reaching from the past and shaping the modern world. And for a work so focused on change, it’s ironic that today’s society asks many of the same questions and faces similar challenges to those that absorbed the Tofflers’ attention 50 years ago.
And though 50 years have passed since the initial publication of Future Shock, the pace of change it’s focused on has not slowed.
In fact, what seems most stunning about such a prophetic piece of writing is that it was born well before one of the most significant and world-changing technological developments in human history. The book preceded the development of a notable cause of the “future shock” experienced today: the internet.
The internet also had a significant birthday this year. It just turned 30. And I know this because we share a birthday party.
My birthday, March 8th, 1989, is only four days earlier than the day regularly acknowledged as the day that the modern internet was invented. Of course, the internet’s sterile beginning as Arpanet trace back to the colorless rooms of government research labs, but it wasn’t until Tim Berners-Lee proposed a meaningful new way of managing information flows using hyperlinked text that the internet became what it is today.
Soon after Berners-Lee’s proposed “World Wide Web” technology, useful interfaces like web browsers and online service providers like AOL emerged. Then came world domination.
I don’t have first-hand experience of those early days on the web, but I am part of a generation of internet natives—a collection of young people whose world views, habits, expectations, communication quirks, and brains have been shaped by the forces of connectivity and life online.
We are the first such generation; we are certainly not the last.
In some ways, reflecting on life after the internet is a difficult task; it’s like trying to describe what breathing air is like or detailing the impact that tables have had on society. The internet is hard to describe because it’s simply everywhere. There’s a well-known drug dealer in San Francisco’s Dolores Park, near where I live, who accepts credit cards using a mobile internet payment system on his phone. Buyers can get a receipt for illegal drugs sent to their email (if they want).
Growing up, my older brother and sister carried around disc players and large bricks of CD sleeves to access their music library. I can’t remember that I did. I remember downloaded libraries of music files from Napster (please don’t sue me).
I never once looked up, checked out, or even opened a physical book from my university’s library during college. I graduated relying entirely on digital libraries like JSTOR (and Wikipedia!).
My parents caught up with friends over the phone, while my friends and I spent countless hours using AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), one of the most definitive growing-up internet experiences for most people my age.
I was in high school when Facebook came on the scene, and it transformed our social dynamics almost overnight. On Sunday nights, classmates published photos of the parties they went to that weekend, and everyone suddenly knew who was where and with whom. It was an early glimpse of today’s “social media influencer” culture and how status dynamics are shaped by publishing your life for all to see. The social dynamics of the lunchroom had moved online.
These may not be world-shaping examples, but they do highlight the internet’s ability to integrate with even the most mundane parts of daily life. And more than anything, for good and for bad, internet natives like me have grown up in a world defined by ever-increasing connectivity.
We’ve been connected to media from around the world, to news and information in an instant, to the pizza shop that’s only just opened down the street. And we’ve been connected to each other. The biggest concepts of the last twenty years—peer-to-peer, crowdsourcing, platform economics, the sharing economy—are all just an assortment of names referring to the same phenomenon: a world shaped by connectivity.
And connectivity breeds the speed that can create a sense of future shock. More ideas connecting, spreading, replicating, mixing, and breeding. The more connected people are, the quicker change can happen—for good or bad. Viral marketing campaigns, memes, and images from terrorist attacks are all amplified as they are tunneled through the web. Similarly, ideas for startups, inventions, and innovation can spread around the globe at an ever accelerating speed.
Now we’re seeing the early stages of a world where not just humans, but machines link up and connect as well. A network of devices can spread information to every other device on a network. A single autonomous vehicle can share what it has learned with the group, meaning the algorithms powered by connected machines can absorb thousands of hours of practice in a single moment. Machines teaching machines will stimulate the fastest pace of innovation our world has yet seen.
And perhaps the brains of young people (and I mean younger than I am) will be even more used to this kind of speed. Just as my own brain was shaped by my own era’s pace of change.
Connectivity brings dangers, too, including the challenges of designing and governing such a wired society. The internet can all too quickly become a tool of isolation, providing echo chambers for voices of the like-minded. On the internet, belief systems can be the customer, and platforms are all too willing to serve up personalized and self-reinforcing feedback loops of content. And if we’re not careful to sort out the business models which incentivize recommendation engines that polarize their users toward extreme ideas, a high school kid with a basic physics question risks landing in a convincing online community where the Earth is actually flat.
The internet used to be simple; today it is not. It’s as complex as we are, and we humans are strange animals. We’re at once anxious and defensive, caring and sweet, loving and angry. We’re a contradiction, and so the internet is, too. It’s both a savior and a villain, a place where the good and evil of our species now lives. The internet can give us a glimpse into ourselves. (And apparently, we like cats.)
And for the generations yet to come, if it can be preserved, the internet may be a monument to and record of the things that came before. Like the greatest library ever made.
As I reflect on the most basic, day-to-day ways I use the internet, aside from the extensive list of actions made possible by the hidden infrastructure of the web, they are mostly to watch European soccer in my American living room, to video call with my girlfriend when we’re halfway across the world from one another, and to stay in touch with loved ones and family.
Mainly, the internet has collapsed the distance between me and the people I care about, and the things I love.
To Future Shock, I say happy birthday. The world today is a bit stranger, a bit faster, and a lot more connected than the day you were written. And to the internet, I say that I know from experience that it’s hard growing up. I’m sure there are challenges to come, problems to face, and mistakes to learn from. Here’s to another 50 years together.
Aaron Frank is a researcher, writer, and lecturer, based at Singularity University as full-time Principal Faculty. As a writer, his work has been published in Vice’s Motherboard, Wired UK, Forbes, and Venturebeat. As a speaker, Aaron has addressed many audiences across business and government, including the CIA, the Department of Defense, and Under Armour. He routinely advises large companies, startups, and government organizations on trends related to a broad set of emerging technologies, with a focus on augmented and virtual reality.