Totally embarrassed by the depiction of exhuberant gleaming youth in this clip, with whom I clearly identified too strongly at far too impressionable an age, some 40 years ago. Wonder how I got “this way?” By believing what Toffler explained and yet still being subjected to the very vestigial technium / techonomy that he describes, herein, a lifetime ago. It was like, “Here’s everything that’s most broken about the world, go do something to try and help fix it.”
Maybe consider this as Exhibit A for the argument that The Singularity Already Happened and Is In The Process of Happening; marking the year 2029 more like the time at which a critical mass of 8 billion humans will look back, defining that new default reality.
Toffler: “All of us think about the future, but the futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what’s going to happen next.”
“We go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, MAKING the future. So this is not some mystical exercise in Nostradamus style prediction, but an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing our lives in the years and decades ahead.”
“It occured to us that when you go to a foriegn culture, you’re bombarded by strange cues, by visual, sound and other inputs that may be different from the ones in your own culture and that are hard to understand and some people get truly disoriented, and upset, and sociologist and anthropologists call it culture shock.”
“What happens, if a new environment comes to you, _where you are,_ and comes to you rapidly? So that you don’t understand IT’S inputs, and it’s CUES? And the answer to use was, if you can have culture shock by relocating to another location in space; you could have Future Shock by, in effect, relocating in time. A future comes toward you, that you don’t understand.”
“You also hear people than ever complaining about being time harrassed, time squeezed, time over-worked, too many hours, and I think everybody feels this pressure. You’re under pressure usually to make more and more decisions in shorter and shorter intervals of time.”
“And guess what? There’s a limit beyond which we don’t make good decisions. If we push ourselves to decide quickly about things that are terribly complex, the chance are, we’ll make some serious mistakes; and we do. The hope was, computers will solve this problem.”
“The computer does simplify decision making, but it complexifies everything else, so you have to make more complex decisions, anyway. The computer as a source of complexity, as well as a machine for dealing with complexity has not yet been fully understood.”
“Technology and Social Change are all interrelated. The industrial revolution changed, not just the technologies of production, it meant that people stopped being peasants, they became urban industrial people. Totally different value systems, totally different forms of social organization, new institutions. They invented department stores. They invented post offices. Social inventions, not just technological inventions.”
Ed. Note: don’t miss “the miracle of HIGH SPEED wire communication is commonplace today, lift a telephone receiver and the world is at your fingertips.” at 5:48. LOL!
“It’s the civilization that gave rise to the world that most of us watching this were born into. The world of mass production, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment, mass recreation, and in some countries, Weapons of Mass Destruction.” (Hipster Hints: he’s not talking about Iran or Iraq, homies.)
“In that kind of a world, conformity is idealized; you are _supposed to_ be like everyone else; and that is because it is economically advantageous for that system to produce people who are prepared to spend their lives doing work on the predicate; basically unthinking work, on assembly lines; or in offices built to operate like assembly lines. That product of the industrial revolution is not just an economy, it’s a way of life.”
Oh, we’re sooo much smarter now, right? :-)
LOLCATSROTFLXPALADOCIOUS!
