Future Shock, first published in 1970, sounded the first contemporary alarm on all the ways science and technology change human societies, but anxiety over progressive change is probably as old as progressive change. 
The protests in 18th-century England of the Luddites, who smashed textile machinery, clearly illustrated that people fear and resent technological change over which they have no control. These ordinary people felt the effects on their lives—lost jobs, bypassed skills, and sidelining of whole communities, regions, even countries—of constantly changing forms of economic development.
I first met Alvin Toffler in 1968 at a conference of the American Institute of Planners (back then it was still okay in the USA to talk about how we planned!), in which we were both presenting. My paper, “Access to Media: A Problem in Democracy,” was reprinted in the Columbia Journalism Review (Spring, 1969). Alvin and I connected during lunch over the similarities in the views of our presentations.
When we met again at another conference of the Association of National Advertisers in 1969, just before the launch of Future Shock, by which time I had also met Heidi and we had found even more commonalities. I also remember, in late 1970 when Future Shock was climbing the bestseller lists, meeting the Tofflers at their home in Manhattan and seeing that their living room was crowded with desks and people answering phones. They lamented that they couldn’t keep up with all the calls or keep hiring ever more people to help field them! They soon realized it was a hopeless effort to try to be fully responsive to the millions reading their book.
As Future Shock took off, the Tofflers turned to their continuing love of futures research and studying the evolution of the human condition the world over. I was awed by their shared diligence and scholarship as mutually respecting partners. At that time, the dominant culture in Western countries was deeply patriarchal, and even in the academic and publishing worlds, women scientists, writers, and scholars were rarely recognized. Al and Heidi collaborated on every aspect of their research and writing in Future Shock, but because of the culture, only Alvin Toffler was listed as the author. Heidi was included in the book’s dedication, along with their daughter, Karen. I was dealing with similar asymmetries in my own writing, and once even thought of changing my name from Hazel to “Hayes” to mask my female identity.
The amazing richness and breadth of Future Shock was achieved in large part through the deep collaboration of two humans incorporating their oppositely gendered life experiences.
The book illustrates these constant conversations, melding their very different reactions to shared experiences of the phenomena of culture, science, and technology, and extrapolating from them the changes in psychologies and lifestyles of ordinary people everywhere. I witnessed many occasions when Alvin was being lionized and interviewed on business and government platforms, while Heidi, sitting in the front row, was ignored and often demeaned, causing much pain in their relationship. Then, at a World Future Society annual conference in New York City in 1990, when Alvin was introduced for his customary keynote speech, he began by inviting Heidi to join him at the podium. These two at that podium together smiled joyously as Alvin declared to the several thousand attendees that all of their books, including Future Shock, had been co-authored. The audience broke into lengthy applause as the truth finally emerged! I tell this story because no one else can or will.
The lasting content of Future Shock is as valuable and prophetic today as it was 50 years ago. All of the issues the Tofflers examined in Future Shock and in their subsequent bestsellers, The Third Wave (1980), Powershift (1990), and War and Anti-War (1993), are still with us today. Rereading Future Shock reminds us that this book identified in their infancy some of today’s global issues, those steered by narrow, money-focused metrics led by GDP-measured growth, and affecting millions, both in most mature industrial countries and, in different ways, in developing countries bypassed by globalization. This textbook economic model allowed the “externalizing” of all other concerns and community values from both corporate and government accounts. The sweep of technological change also followed this laissez-faire economic model and informed science policy, as I learned from my six years as a science-policy advisor to the US Office of Technology Assessment, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Engineering.
The Tofflers and I often discussed the trends which were leading, over the past 50 years, to today’s “populist” protests across the political spectrum in many countries. Whether Brexit voters in Britain, Trump supporters in the U.S., yellow-vest protesters in France, the rise of Green parties in Germany and Europe, or Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil, the themes are similar. These forgotten, or “rust-belt,” communities, have been bypassed by globalization and financialization. They see their values and livelihoods threatened or trampled by globe-trotting elites in business and government, making deals from exclusive resorts in Davos and Zug, Mar-a-Lago and Monaco, and from penthouses in Shanghai and Sao Paulo. These communities also see tax revenues misallocated or evaded altogether, as the same elites conduct business from tax havens around the world, as documented by Christiane Freeland and Nicholas Shaxon’s Treasure Islands (2011), and by me in The Politics of the Solar Age (1981) and Building A Win-Win World (1996), both of which Alvin and Heidi Toffler were kind enough to blurb, calling me “among the most eloquent, original—and readable—of the econoclasts.”
In the same vein, Future Shock highlighted the emergence of today’s divisions in U.S. society, as populations shifted with changing jobs and technologies toward transience in lifestyles and relationships. The book’s observations on how these nomadic shifts led to urbanization in not just the U.S., but in all countries, with rural communities sidelined, depopulated, and ignored in macro-statistics (which fly over the real world at sixty thousand feet). Today, over 50% of the world’s populations have moved to ever-growing, gigantic cities. Thousands of other cities have more than one million residents. The current trend is toward 60% urbanization.
The breakdown in traditional relationships was inevitable, termed by the Tofflers as “adhocracy,” as family units break apart and scatter, following ever less reliable jobs and companies. This transience, in turn, drove the processes of individuation and shaping of new identities, groups, and subcultures—all documented in Future Shock—and continues to drive the polarization and “identity politics” of today. A memorable quote sums up these trends: “America is tortured by uncertainty with respect to money, property, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self.” (Page 303).
The book discusses the U.S. fault line of race relations in many different contexts, but without facing U.S. history’s legacy of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow. (Today’s political reckoning with its past is covered by Jill Lepore in These Truths (2018).) Yet, Future Shock picked up on the early rise of socially responsible investing and how endowments, church pension funds, and mutual funds had begun to address racial inequality and all the broader values and issues missing in economics textbooks. The efforts to correct GDP and set up a Council of Social Advisors, which the Tofflers, many social reformers, and I discussed, are reflected in Chapter 20, “The Strategy of Social Futurism.” They are also the subject of the two TV programs I produced with Alvin Toffler in the 1970s: “Anticipatory Democracy” and “East Meets West” with Islamic scholar Ziauddin Sardar (both free on demand at www.ethicalmarkets.tv<http://www.ethicalmarkets.tv>).
Finally, on another personal note, in the early 1970s, Al and Heidi suggested to me that I run for an open Senate seat in the tristate New York metropolitan area, when I was an obscure writer and social activist working since the 1960s with Ralph Nader on the campaign to “Make General Motors Responsible!” They were kind enough to offer to fund my campaign with some of the royalties flowing from Future Shock! I was overwhelmed, but decided that my path was to remain an independent futurist, as I am to this day.
While Future Shock will remain a literary and political landmark for the future, I also recommend The Third Wave and my favorite, Revolutionary Wealth (2006), where our shared thinking on the politics of money creation melded in our concern to document the other half of all economies: their unpaid caring, sharing voluntary sectors, which I analyzed as their hidden “Love Economies.” This book, along with my work, uncovered the still-unrecognized work of the world’s women, which the UNDP recognized in 1995, estimating in its Human Development Report as being worth $11 trillion, along with the unpaid work of men at $6 trillion—totaling $17 trillion of value simply missing from the annual GDP that year, which was $24 trillion! Today, we are moving away from GDP, and since 2015, with the adoption of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by its 195 member countries, we can steer our societies away from the precipice and toward growth of the SDGs, as in our TV show, “Steering our Societies from GDP to the SDGs,” free at www.ethicalmarkets.tv. This is an indication of the social revolution Alvin and Heidi Toffler began 50 years ago.
Hazel Henderson D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, is founder of Ethical Markets Media, LLC (USA and Brazil), a Certified B Corporation. She is a world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist, and author of the award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006) and eight other books. She created the Ethical Markets TV series in global distribution at www.films.com, the EthicMark® Awards, and the Green Transition Scoreboard®, and co-created Ethical Biomimicry Finance®. Her editorials are syndicated globally by Inter Press Service, and her book reviews appear on SeekingAlpha.com. Her articles have appeared in over 250 journals, including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and The Christian Science Monitor, as well as journals in Japan, Venezuela, China, France and Australia.