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The Futurists.
Such figures as Margaret Mead, R. Buckminster Fuller, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan discuss the future of civilization
- GenresEssaysFuturismNonfiction
320 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1972
210 people want to read
About the author
Alvin Toffler
53 books700 followersAlvin Eugene Toffler was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists.
Toffler was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed "information overload". In 1970, his first major book about the future, Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies.
He and his wife Heidi Toffler (1929–2019), who collaborated with him for most of his writings, moved on to examining the reaction to changes in society with another best-selling book, The Third Wave, in 1980. In it, he foresaw such technological advances as cloning, personal computers, the Internet, cable television and mobile communication. His later focus, via their other best-seller, Powershift, (1990), was on the increasing power of 21st-century military hardware and the proliferation of new technologies.
He founded Toffler Associates, a management consulting company, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, visiting professor at Cornell University, faculty member of the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, and a business consultant. Toffler's ideas and writings were a significant influence on the thinking of business and government leaders worldwide, including China's Zhao Ziyang, and AOL founder Steve Case.
Toffler was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact, which he termed "information overload". In 1970, his first major book about the future, Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies.
He and his wife Heidi Toffler (1929–2019), who collaborated with him for most of his writings, moved on to examining the reaction to changes in society with another best-selling book, The Third Wave, in 1980. In it, he foresaw such technological advances as cloning, personal computers, the Internet, cable television and mobile communication. His later focus, via their other best-seller, Powershift, (1990), was on the increasing power of 21st-century military hardware and the proliferation of new technologies.
He founded Toffler Associates, a management consulting company, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, visiting professor at Cornell University, faculty member of the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, and a business consultant. Toffler's ideas and writings were a significant influence on the thinking of business and government leaders worldwide, including China's Zhao Ziyang, and AOL founder Steve Case.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 4, 2009
The usually limited introduction to Alvin Toffler is normally Future Shock.
Additionally I'd recommend this book that lays out what futurism and its proponents are all about. Readers of later Toffler work will be well served by this earlier work.
edited 9-4-09
Additionally I'd recommend this book that lays out what futurism and its proponents are all about. Readers of later Toffler work will be well served by this earlier work.
edited 9-4-09
April 20, 2017
For a book published in 1972, this prescient compilation of essays was ahead of it's time. I frankly could not put it down and in finishing it today, am thirsty for more and will surely need to dive into the additional and noteworthy works of Toddler, Ehrlich, R. Buckminster Fuller and the like. Especially in times like these, we need more reminders of how best to strategize, plan, and research for the future.
June 16, 2023
50 year old predictions of the future make for some melancholy reading. This book is a very mixed bag, as it was intended to be. Alvin Toffler was probably the most famous futurist of the 20th century, introducing the concept of "Future Shock" in a bestselling book in 1970. That book did well enough that Toffler was able to put out this volume of essays by 22 different authors two years later. He collected a fascinating group of people, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who was already in her 70s at publication, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller whose fame has survived to a degree ( at least to 40 somethings like me!) and many other thinkers who are now quite anonymous.
There are some ways that this book was too pessimistic. I assume the only writer represented who is still living is Paul Ehrlich of "The Population Bomb" fame. His fevered predictions of environmental catastrophe and famine of billions by the 1980s opens the book. Long pre-dating Naomi Klein, at least half of the writers in this volume assume that a drastic re-organization of civilization, and acceptance of degrowth will be necessary to support the world's growing population. 50 years later, it's clear that this was all very wrong. We've managed to stay far ahead of the apocalypses they were all very confident were coming due to supposedly concrete "limits to growth". They could be right eventually, but it's nice to reflect that we've done a much better job with this collective action problem than most of the writers expected. Atmospheric carbon didn't come up once in this volume. The writers assumed that our pollution issues would be much more straightforward, and that they would be insoluble. They were wrong. We solved most pollution issues without needing to make many sacrifices. Or at least we have so far.
But by and large the book makes for grim reading. Mostly in relation to the Baby Boomers. At the time this book was written, today's grandparents were younger than the Zoomers, the Generation Z of today. Margaret Mead and many others, writing two years after the 1968 campus explosions across the developed and developing worlds, assumed that this new generation was going to introduce a kinder, gentler, more planned and socialistic world. 50 years later, the jury is in, and we know that the boomer legacy ended up being a new form of hyper capitalism that would probably have shocked and dismayed most of the corporate titans of 1972.
The broader collapse most of these writers were expecting did not materialize, but this 1972 book was published on the eve of a worldwide collapse of governing models. It may not be as sexy as Paul Ehrlich's apocalypse, but the oil crisis of 1973 did usher in dramatic changes. It led to the destruction of the post-war understanding of the world. The post-colonial countries, who many writers in this volume expected so much from ( not just the Soviet one ) were mostly crushed by the 1970s oil crises. With a few exceptions they've spent the past half century caught in a Western debt trap sprung by the oil producers and perpetuated by the US federal reserve. The Baby Boomers who responded to this oil crisis, and took control in the developed world, were the stock brokers rather than the hippies.
A lot of this book is about the study of the future itself. The professional futurists in this book, are all convinced that they are in on the ground floor of a new science. They expect every university to develop departments devoted to prediction, evaluation, and planning of future outcomes. They expect the individual governments of the world, and the world as a whole to come together and devote resources to planning the best way forward. This was a reasonable expectation considering the great successes of the post-war era, and the ways that capital, labor and government had worked during those thirty years. If anything, these futurists vastly under-rated the computing powers that would be available to them just a decade later. But the societal focus on planning, and a collaborative building of an "affluent society" was gone by the dawn of the 1980s, and certainly by the end of the cold war in the early 1990s.
That sense of all of us being in it together has never come back. The market was expected to provide. And to some extent it has. But it's hard to avoid feeling a massive sense of lost opportunity reading this book.
There are some ways that this book was too pessimistic. I assume the only writer represented who is still living is Paul Ehrlich of "The Population Bomb" fame. His fevered predictions of environmental catastrophe and famine of billions by the 1980s opens the book. Long pre-dating Naomi Klein, at least half of the writers in this volume assume that a drastic re-organization of civilization, and acceptance of degrowth will be necessary to support the world's growing population. 50 years later, it's clear that this was all very wrong. We've managed to stay far ahead of the apocalypses they were all very confident were coming due to supposedly concrete "limits to growth". They could be right eventually, but it's nice to reflect that we've done a much better job with this collective action problem than most of the writers expected. Atmospheric carbon didn't come up once in this volume. The writers assumed that our pollution issues would be much more straightforward, and that they would be insoluble. They were wrong. We solved most pollution issues without needing to make many sacrifices. Or at least we have so far.
But by and large the book makes for grim reading. Mostly in relation to the Baby Boomers. At the time this book was written, today's grandparents were younger than the Zoomers, the Generation Z of today. Margaret Mead and many others, writing two years after the 1968 campus explosions across the developed and developing worlds, assumed that this new generation was going to introduce a kinder, gentler, more planned and socialistic world. 50 years later, the jury is in, and we know that the boomer legacy ended up being a new form of hyper capitalism that would probably have shocked and dismayed most of the corporate titans of 1972.
The broader collapse most of these writers were expecting did not materialize, but this 1972 book was published on the eve of a worldwide collapse of governing models. It may not be as sexy as Paul Ehrlich's apocalypse, but the oil crisis of 1973 did usher in dramatic changes. It led to the destruction of the post-war understanding of the world. The post-colonial countries, who many writers in this volume expected so much from ( not just the Soviet one ) were mostly crushed by the 1970s oil crises. With a few exceptions they've spent the past half century caught in a Western debt trap sprung by the oil producers and perpetuated by the US federal reserve. The Baby Boomers who responded to this oil crisis, and took control in the developed world, were the stock brokers rather than the hippies.
A lot of this book is about the study of the future itself. The professional futurists in this book, are all convinced that they are in on the ground floor of a new science. They expect every university to develop departments devoted to prediction, evaluation, and planning of future outcomes. They expect the individual governments of the world, and the world as a whole to come together and devote resources to planning the best way forward. This was a reasonable expectation considering the great successes of the post-war era, and the ways that capital, labor and government had worked during those thirty years. If anything, these futurists vastly under-rated the computing powers that would be available to them just a decade later. But the societal focus on planning, and a collaborative building of an "affluent society" was gone by the dawn of the 1980s, and certainly by the end of the cold war in the early 1990s.
That sense of all of us being in it together has never come back. The market was expected to provide. And to some extent it has. But it's hard to avoid feeling a massive sense of lost opportunity reading this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews