After Shock by Schroeter John; Kurzweil Ray; Gilder George

Author:Schroeter, John; Kurzweil, Ray; Gilder, George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John August Media, LLC
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

1 “The Premature Arrival of the Future”

In Future Shock, Toffler detailed how our “super-industrial” society had disrupted the traditional social order so dramatically that humanity had become traumatized—fearful of the loss of yesterday’s traditions and uncertain of the tomorrows to come. Entering a future that was hurtling toward us at ever-increasing speed with ever-expanding patterns of change, we were finding ourselves overwhelmed by the social transformations of the industrialized and electrified world. As Toffler explains:

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow… unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments … Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. 1

For Toffler, science and technology have delivered “the future” so fast that traditional values and conventional notions of family, work, education, community, and the like have been drastically altered. It’s as if we don’t recognize our own culture and destiny, plunging us into uncertainty and doubt. In addition, Toffler asserts, the more technology develops, the less stable our culture will be, preventing us from ever feeling fully settled or sure of where we are going. Changes in our concepts of space and time are the one certainty:

In the coming decades, advances in [sciences and technologies] will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Nor will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. 2

Future Shock provided an exhaustive number of examples to support its thesis, although one does not have to agree with all of them to grasp the essential truths. Future shock is the emotional anxiety and existential dread felt toward a future that challenges all previous cultural narratives. And nothing has been more future-shocking than the universe revealed by space exploration.

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