It’s the end of the world. At least that’s how many people are feeling. We’re still reeling from 9/11, the global financial crisis, climate change and political upheaval. It feels as though change has itself changed and we’re all struggling to keep up. But will this last? Perhaps the issue is that we’re currently exposing ourselves to too much information and this is resulting in temporary disorientation.
In the early 1970s, Alvin Toffler wrote a best-selling book called Future Shock. The author argued that too much technological change, or at least the perception of too much rapid change, over what was felt to be too short a period of time, was resulting in psychological damage to individuals and even to society as a whole. Toffler also placed the term “information overload” into the general consciousness.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180)
In many ways, the concept of future shock is similar to that of culture shock. Both refer to the way in which individuals feel disoriented when they quickly move from one familiar way of life to another. In the case of culture shock, this usually refers to physical movement from one country, or culture, to another. In the case of future shock, we might use the term to describe the shift from analog to digital culture or from a period containing what were thought of as fixed truths and geopolitical certainties to an era where boundaries are fluid and nothing feels certain. The danger here, of course, is that such anxiety and bewilderment is fertile ground for false prophets of order and populist politicians who promise final solutions.
The rapid-change argument is certainty plausible. Adherents to this argument could cite Moore’s Law (see Chapter 17), the rapid rate of development in genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology or the breathless expansion of social media. By the time you read this, it might be necessary to add further upheavals in the Middle East, Europe or developments in China. But was it not ever thus? The Internet, a fundamentally disruptive development, can be compared in terms of impact to the rapid development of the telegraph, the railways or electricity in Victorian times. As for the Middle East, Europe or China, history tends to repeat itself, often as tragedy and sometimes as farce, as Karl Marx observed. So why are we feeling so ill at ease? Why is doom and gloom in the ascendant? Why are we so worried all of a sudden? Will our current anxieties slowly evaporate or will they suddenly shift from bad to worse?
Do we know too much? The answer is that while events continue to go on more or less as they’ve always done, globalization, digitalization and above all personal connectivity mean that the reporting and distribution of such events has exploded. We have entered a period where everything is visible and to some extent knowable. Blissful ignorance is dead or, at the very least, on temporary life support.
Something else that doesn’t help: 24-hour news cycles. There are also more actors on the stage in terms of media pundits, politicians and instant experts, all of whom thrive on the creation of short-term anxiety and crisis to which they themselves are the only answer. The reaction of some people to this new state of affairs is to switch off. The Luddites are back, only this time they’re switching off iPhones rather than smashing machines. But this is a pretechnological solution to a postindustrial problem. A more practical and sustainable solution is information filtering and partial withdrawal. Over time we will learn to adjust. We’ll use technologies not yet invented to filter out things that we don’t need to know.
“The only thing we know about the future, is that it will be different.”
Peter Drucker, management theoretician and writer
We will also get better at ignoring certain types, or sources, of information and will learn that constant connectivity isn’t healthy. We will slowly rediscover the joys of temporary disconnection and start to switch off various devices at night or at weekends. We will also rediscover real sleep, which is absolutely vital to the proper processing of the daily deluge of data.
We do it to ourselves One connected point: perhaps we worry about imagined threats, or we blow real, but unlikely, risks out of all proportion because there are not enough real threats present, or maybe we somehow feel that we have only ourselves to blame. Hence the fashion for misanthropic loathing of human achievement. As the Economist magazine has pointed out: “In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society are treading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism.”
According to Dr. Richard Landes, an apocalypse expert at Boston University in the USA, our enthusiasm for apocalypse is also connected with our own sense of our own importance: “It appeals to our megalomania,” he says.
Personally, I think we should learn to relax. The fact is that some of the issues we worry about (e.g. volcanoes) do not have human causes and may not have human solutions. We will have to adapt, that’s all. Having said this, we should remain vigilant. We should keep our eyes open for individuals who promise quick fixes or suggest easy targets. But over the longer term we should congratulate ourselves. Things have been far worse historically and for the majority of humankind things have never been so good. As for the future, we’ll deal with it when it happens.
the condensed idea
Everything turns out OK
| timeline | |
|---|---|
| 1400s | “Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices.” Trithemius, De Laude Scriptorum |
| 1800s | “Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” Dr. Dionysys Lardner |
| 1839 | “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it …” Dr. Alfred Velpeau, surgeon |
| 1888 | “We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.” Simon Newcomb, astronomer |
| 1904 | “Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” Marechal Ferdinand Foch |
| 1909 | “The automobile has practically reached the limit of its development” Scientific American |
| 1923 | “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.” Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics |
| 1948 | “Television won’t last. It’s a flash in the pan.” Mary Somerville, pioneer of radio educational broadcasts |
| 1956 | “Space travel is utter bilge.” Richard van der Riet Woolley, Astronomer Royal |
| 1968 | “But what … is it good for?” Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM (commenting on the microchip) |
| 1979 | “People won’t want to play these electronic games for more than a week, not once we start selling pinball machines for the home.” Gus Bally, Arcade Inc. |
| 1994 | “I will believe in the 500-channel world only when I see it.” Sumner Redstone, chairman, Viacom and CBS |
| 2002 | “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Dick Cheney |