Future Shock

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

A DIVERSITY OF LIFE STYLES Motorcyclists and Intellectuals Style-Setters and Mini-Heroes Life-Style Factories The Power of Style A Superabundance of Selves The Free Society 303 305 308 309 312 316 321 PART FIVE: THE LIMITS OF ADAPTABILITY 323 Chapter 15. FUTURE SHOCK: THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION Life Change and Illness Response to Novelty The Adaptive Reaction 325 327 334 337 Chapter 16. FUTURE SHOCK: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION The Overstimulated Individual Bombardment of the Senses Information Overload Decision Stress Victims of Future Shock The Future-shocked Society 343 344 348 350 355 358 365 PART SIX: STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL 369 Chapter 17. COPING WITH TOMORROW Direct Coping Personal Stability Zones 371 374 377 Situational Grouping Crisis Counseling Half-way Houses Enclaves of the Past Enclaves of the Future Global Space Pageants 383 385 388 390 392 393 Chapter 18.

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It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock. We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation. Different people react to future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy.

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Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results. Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock. Chapter 16 FUTURE SHOCK: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION If future shock were a matter of physical illness alone, it might be easier to prevent and to treat. But future shock attacks the psyche as well. Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the "mind" and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

° ° ° ° ° ° We’re in the forty-fifth year of future shock. The book Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler (with contributions from his wife, Heidi), has endured since its publication in 1970, selling six million-plus copies all over the world. Future Shock captured the feeling and sensibility of an era in transition from the progressive shared futurism embedded in the nationalist project to the cutthroat techno-individualism we are familiar with today. The Toffler tome was widely read and quoted precisely because it tapped into the sense of a society in destabilizing flux. “Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time,” the pair wrote.16 (The italics are mine.)

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It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”18 First, the Tofflers fetishize technology—after all, what else offers “the supreme exhilaration of riding change, cresting it, changing and growing with it”? Then they warn of its awesome danger—“future shock!” “info overload!”—then they insist that the answer, the cure to future shock, is to dive in head first. Don’t fight it; embrace it. For, as the Tofflers make clear in Future Shock and beyond, their solution to the problem of widespread psychological (and social) destabilization due to an ideology of permanent technological change is more change. What we need is to find a way to fully embrace the liberating awesome of technology freed of anxiety and fear.

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Or, as they put it, if you “make the necessary effort to understand the fast-emerging super-industrial social structures” and “find the ‘right’ life pace, the ‘right’ sequence of subcults to join and lifestyle models to emulate,” then “the triumph” will be “exquisite.”19 According to the Tofflers, we have future shock because we aren’t properly preparing human beings to embrace the onrushing future. What we need, then, is better preparation so more people can go further faster. “To survive,” write the Tofflers, “to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.” Forty-five years before World Future Society’s Patrick Tucker, the Tofflers preached the mantra of empowering individuals to own the future; they argued that the solution to overcoming future shock was teaching people how to better navigate the turbulent, but inevitable and necessary, waters of constant change.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

Ralph Lauren: “Ralph Lauren,” Biography. Alvin Toffler: Schneider, “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87.” “dizzying disorientation”: Toffler, Future Shock, 11. “the only remedy for the phenomenon of future shock”: Toffler, “The Future as a Way of Life.” “trend towards residential renting”: Toffler, Future Shock, 64. 56 percent in 1940 to 37 percent in 1970: Data from www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/geographic-mobility/time-series/historic/tab-a-1.xls. “breeding a new race of nomads”: Toffler, Future Shock, 75. “the death of industrialism”: Toffler, The Third Wave, 18. “information age, electronic era, or global village”: Toffler, The Third Wave, 25.

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The Tofflers left New York for Cleveland, were married by an inebriated justice of the peace, and built their careers writing about the economy. In 1970, Toffler struck publishing gold with Future Shock, a two-word phrase defined as the “dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future,” which Toffler argued “may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.” Writing in the 1960s, Toffler perceived “a greatly accelerated rate of change in society,” which he thought responsible for “malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence.” Toffler coupled this diagnosis with a prescription that “the only remedy for the phenomenon of future shock” is to form a “clearer, better, stronger conception of what lies ahead.”

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Among the less accurate claims in Future Shock is an alleged “trend towards residential renting” that “underscores the tendency towards ever-briefer relationships with the physical environment.” In fact, surging suburbanization meant the share of American households living in rental units was declining steadily from 56 percent in 1940 to 37 percent in 1970. Instead of “breeding a new race of nomads,” as Toffler wrote, the geographic mobility of Americans is far lower today than it was in 1970. The 1970s were a catastrophic decade for much of urban America. When Toffler followed Future Shock with The Third Wave in 1980, he expressed far less confidence that cities would survive.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964). 20. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 186. 21. Henry Raymont, “‘Future Shock’: The Stress of Great, Rapid Change,” The New York Times, July 24, 1970, 28; Toffler, Future Shock, 155. 22. Sanford J. Ungar, Review of Future Shock, The Washington Post, August 7, 1970, B8; “Mom,” The Washington Post, April 12, 1970, N2. 23. Toffler, Future Shock, 125. 24. Congressional Record 116, part 155, Sept. 8, 1970, 1662. 25. Neil Gallagher, “The Right to Privacy,” speech delivered before the Institute of Management Sciences, Chicago Chapter, March 26, 1969, reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day 35 (1969): 528–29; Gallagher, “The Computer as ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’” Computers and Society 1, no. 2 (April 1970): 1–12. 26.

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The modern world, he memorably concluded, had an acute case of “information overload.”21 In a nation already deeply anxious about technology and nearly everything else, Toffler’s book was a hit straight out of the gate. Three major book-of-the-month clubs chose Future Shock, and it had buoyant sales despite withering reviews. (One called it “a high school term paper gone berserk.”) Style aside, the book’s dystopic overtones were certainly a lot to swallow; Toffler’s own mother remarked: “if that’s the way it’s going to be, I don’t want to be here.” Nonetheless, Future Shock ultimately sold five million copies, and made Alvin Toffler into an inescapable seer of the information age.22 For all its wilder ideas and overstuffed prose, Toffler’s book was stunningly prescient.

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Most academic seers of postindustrial society generally operated on the presumption that bigness would still prevail, even if the means of production would change. Future Shock reflected a shift in a different direction. Technology might instead become a way to fix the problems of the world, to push against social institutions, and achieve self-actualization. But the path to do so would be by going small. One of the few optimistic notes sounded by Future Shock had to do with the destiny of big and unfeeling organizations. “The bureaucracy,” wrote Toffler, “the very system that is supposed to crush us all under its weight, is itself groaning with change.”

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

2005 Sermons via text message 2009 Virtual funeral ceremonies 2011 US study predicts religion may become extinct in nine countries 2020 Catholic Church under pressure to support euthanasia 2030 First female pope 2050 Return of the Messiah (but this time she’s called Kylie) 50 Future shock 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.

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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.

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30 The pursuit of happiness TOWARD A POSTHUMAN SOCIETY 31 Human beings version 2.0 32 Brain–machine interfaces 33 Avatar assistants 34 Uncanny Valley 35 Transhumanism SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER 36 Alt.Space & space tourism 37 Solar energy from space 38 Moon mining 39 Space elevators 40 Alien intelligence DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS 41 Cell phone radiation 42 Biohazards & plagues 43 Nuclear terrorism 44 Volcanoes & quakes 45 The sixth mass extinction UNANSWERED QUESTIONS 46 The Singularity 47 Me or we? 48 Mind modification 49 Is God back? 50 Future shock Glossary Introduction The future is unwritten, but how we imagine it to be can influence present attitudes and behaviors, much in the same way that our individual and collective histories can define who we are and how we act, as most psychoanalysts will tell you. In other words, both past and future are always present.

Accelerando
by Stross, Charles
Published 22 Jan 2005

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents.

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The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It's confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.

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You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated – it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches. Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck.

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

Before we begin, let me share one more thing—it’s my favorite maxim of professional futures thinking: In dealing with the future . . . it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent “right.”7 This bit of wisdom comes from Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 book Future Shock, which kicked off professional futures thinking as we know it today. Toffler proposed the idea that society occasionally experiences a period of profound and sustained change previously so unthinkable that the people who live through it suffer a kind of “future shock.” We’re disoriented. Our strategies for being happy, healthy, and successful no longer work. Old assumptions no longer hold up. And it’s incredibly difficult to wrap our minds around what exactly is happening, and why.

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Along the way, I will be giving you many forecasts for the next decade of unthinkable change, covering everything from the future of learning and the future of work to the future of food and the future of money; from the future of social media and the future of health care to the future of climate action and government—all so you have a better idea of the risks, opportunities, and dilemmas ahead. These ten-year forecasts will help you become more resilient to future shocks. They will help you lean into the fact that there is no “going back to normal.” They will also give you some ideas about how you might take advantage of this historic period of disruption and reinvention to change your own life, your community, or the world for the better. The next decade is likely to be the most significant opportunity most of us have in our lifetimes to really transform the way society works—and we all have a part to play in creating that positive long-term change.

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And it’s incredibly difficult to wrap our minds around what exactly is happening, and why. It feels like a collective trauma, the psychological equivalent of being struck by a freight train. The turbulent period of the late 1960s, when Toffler wrote this seminal text, was a time of future shock for many. The 2020s, now, even more so. It might seem that getting ahead of the next shock by making the most accurate predictions we can about the future is our ticket out of this trauma. And yes, seeing what’s coming so it doesn’t blindside us is helpful. But there’s a deeper truth to futures thinking that goes beyond just trying to be right.

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

(Washington, D.C.: NASA, 2009). 83. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 84. In this case, too, there’s a Soviet equivalent: the Tupolev TU-144, which was actually the first supersonic passenger plane, and which first flew a few months before the Concorde in 1968, but was abandoned for commercial purposes in 1983. 85. Source: www.foundersfund.com/uploads/ff_manifesto.pdf. 86. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 87. Toffler’s own politics are slightly more ambiguous, but not much. Before the success of Future Shock, he had been known mainly as a business journalist, whose greatest claim to fame was probably that he had interviewed Ayn Rand for Playboy.

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But since then, most apparent technological advances have largely taken the form of either clever new ways of combining existing technologies (as in the space race), or new ways to put existing technologies to consumer use (the most famous example here is television, invented in 1926, but only mass-produced in the late forties and early fifties, in a self-conscious effort to create new consumer demand to ensure the American economy didn’t slip back into depression). Yet the space race helped convey the notion that this was an age of remarkable advances, and the predominant popular impression during the sixties was that the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying, uncontrollable ways. Alvin Toffler’s 1970 breakaway bestseller Future Shock can be seen as a kind of high-water mark of this line of thought. In retrospect, it’s a fascinating and revealing book.83 Toffler argued that almost all of the social problems of the 1960s could be traced back to the increasing pace of technological change. As an endless outpouring of new scientific breakthroughs continually transformed the very grounds of our daily existence, he wrote, Americans were left rudderless, without any clear idea of what normal life was supposed to be like.

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By 1990, he had become the personal intellectual guru of Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, who claimed that his own 1994 “Contract with America” was inspired, in part, by the understanding that the United States needed to move from an antiquated, materialist, industrial mindset to a new, free-market, information-age, Third Wave civilization. There are all sorts of ironies here. Probably one of the greatest real-world achievements of Future Shock had been to inspire the government to create an Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) in 1972, more or less in line with Toffler’s call for some sort of democratic oversight over potentially disruptive technologies. One of Gingrich’s first acts on winning control of Congress in 1995 was to defund the OTA as an example of useless government waste.

Is God a Mathematician?
by Mario Livio
Published 6 Jan 2009

In particular, Berkeley demonstrated that Newton’s concept of “fluxions,” or instantaneous rates of change, was far from being rigorously defined, which in Berkeley’s mind was sufficient to cast doubt on the entire discipline: The method of fluxions is the general key, by help whereof the modern Mathematicians unlock the secrets of Geometry, and consequently of Nature…But whether this Method be clear or obscure, consistent or repugnant, demonstrative or precarious, as I shall inquire with the utmost impartiality, so I submit my inquiry to your own Judgement, and that of every candid Reader. Berkeley certainly had a point, and the fact is that a fully consistent theory of analysis was only formulated in the 1960s. But mathematics was about to experience a more dramatic crisis in the nineteenth century. CHAPTER 6 GEOMETERS: FUTURE SHOCK In his famous book Future Shock, author Alvin Toffler defined the term in the title as “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” In the nineteenth century, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers experienced precisely such a shock.

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Shaw once wrote an insightful article: The article “The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance” appears in Newman 1956. In a pamphlet entitled The Analyst: The pamphlet was written by George Berkeley in 1734. An edited version by David Wilkins is maintained on the Web; see Berkeley 1734. Chapter 6. Geometers: Future Shock In his famous book Future Shock: Toffler 1970. Hume identified “truths”: Hume 1748. Kant asked not what we can know: According to Kant, one of the fundamental philosophical tasks is to account for the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge of mathematical concepts. Among the many references, I note Höffe 1994 and Kuehn 2001 for the general concepts.

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QA8.4.L586 2009 510—dc22 2008045850 ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9443-7 ISBN-10: 1-4165-9443-4 Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com To Sofie CONTENTS Preface 1. A Mystery 2. Mystics: The Numerologist and the Philosopher 3. Magicians: The Master and the Heretic 4. Magicians: The Skeptic and the Giant 5. Statisticians and Probabilists: The Science of Uncertainty 6. Geometers: Future Shock 7. Logicians: Thinking About Reasoning 8. Unreasonable Effectiveness? 9. On the Human Mind, Mathematics, and the Universe Notes Bibliography Credits PREFACE When you work in cosmology—the study of the cosmos at large—one of the facts of life becomes the weekly letter, e-mail, or fax from someone who wants to describe to you his own theory of the universe (yes, they are invariably men).

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projects of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.3 Toffler believed things were changing so fast that we would soon lose the ability to adapt. New drugs would make us live longer; new medical techniques would allow us to alter our bodies and genetic makeup; new technologies could make work obsolete and communication instantaneous. Like immigrants to a new country experiencing culture shock, we would soon be in a state of future shock, waking up in a world changing so rapidly as to be unrecognizable. Our disorientation would have less to do with any particular change than the rate of change itself.

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Add real-time technologies, from the iPhone to Twitter; a disposable consumer economy where 1-Click ordering is more important than the actual product being purchased; a multitasking brain actually incapable of storage or sustained argument; and an economy based on spending now what one may or may not earn in a lifetime, and you can’t help but become temporally disoriented. It’s akin to the onslaught of changing rules and circumstances that 1970s futurist Alvin Toffler dubbed “future shock.” Only, in our era it’s more of a present shock. And while this phenomenon is clearly “of the moment,” it’s not quite as in the moment as we may have expected. For while many of us were correct about the way all this presentism would affect investments and finance, even technology and media, we were utterly wrong about how living in the “now” would end up impacting us as people.

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Along with that, however, everything else seemed to be doubling as well—our stock indexes, medical bills, Internet speeds, cable-TV stations, and social networks. We were no longer adjusting to individual changes, we were told, but to the accelerating rate of change itself. We were in what futurist Alvin Toffler called “future shock.” As a result, everything and everyone was leaning toward the future. We weren’t looking forward to anything in particular so much as we were simply looking forward. Trend casters and “cool hunters” became the highest-paid consultants around, promising exclusive peeks at what lie ahead. Optimistic books with titles like “The Future of This” or “The Future of That” filled the store shelves, eventually superseded by pessimistic ones titled “The End of This” or “The End of That.”

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

If anything, science and technology policy are today more political and more ideological in nature than ever before in American history.42 Still, it was ironic that the assault on the OTA was led by then House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Not only had Gingrich deemed himself a high-tech visionary and admirer of gurus Alvin and Heidi Toffler, but it was Alvin Toffler’s bestselling Future Shock (1970) that, for all its flaws, made millions of readers aware of the need to anticipate the future more systematically than had ever been attempted before. The disappearance of the OTA hardly contributed to this effort. That a self-proclaimed leading policy-maker like Gingrich, with a Ph.D. in history to boot, had pushed for its disappearance appeared to make no intellectual sense.

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If anything, the OTA kept such a low bureaucratic profile that, according to Bimber, it failed to develop sufficient political support that might have saved it from elimination by persons with political agendas ultimately having little to do with the OTA itself, including Gingrich.43 Moreover, however partisan the OTA might have been perceived as being, it was set up in 1972 not to block scientific and technological developments but instead to assess their potential 118 Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia ramifications, positive and negative, for American society. Its creation reflected the initial wavering American faith in scientific and technological progress, for if there had been no skepticism about progress there would logically have been no reason to assess those potential ramifications. In the wake of Future Shock’s extraordinary popularity, the special concern at the time was preparing for the unexpected: the “effects on all sectors of a society that may occur when a [particular] technology is introduced, extended, or modified, with special emphasis on any impacts that are unintended, indirect, or delayed.”44 In the early 1970s, though, there was still sufficient bedrock faith within both parties in government and in scientific and social scientific expertise to justify the OTA’s establishment.

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Second, present-day advances dwarf all prior scientific and technological advances in their extraordinary speed and impact, including the English Industrial Revolution that began in the 1750s and spread throughout the world. Third, comparisons with all prior scientific and technological revolutions can therefore be ignored, so profoundly different will the future be from the past. History no longer matters. Not surprisingly, old-fashioned and simple-minded technological determinism pervades such books as Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), Gates’ The Road Ahead (1995), and Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995). Fuller was hardly a professional historian, but he did understand that his was not the first technological utopian vision in all history (though, in his own mind, it was surely the best). It is so seductive, if so simplistic, to assume that high tech transforms everything in its path and that the twenty-first century will therefore reflect the globalization of culture as well as technology.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

And that means knowledge is not the same as it was. Not for science, not for business, not for education, not for government, not for any of us. Info Overload as a Way of Life Information overload isn’t what it used to be. Alvin Toffler introduced the idea of information overload to the general public in 1970 in his book Future Shock.12 He positioned information overload as a follow-on to sensory overload:13 When our environment throws too many sensations at us—say, at a Grateful Dead concert with a light show and the mixed scents of a thousand sticks of incense—our brains can get confused, causing a “blurring of the line between illusion and reality.”14 But what happens when we go up a level from mere sensation, and our poor little brains are buffeted by information?

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As the amount of information has overloaded the overload, we have not proportionately suffered from information anxiety, information tremors, or information butterflies-in-the-stomach. Information overload has become a different sort of problem. According to Toffler, and for three decades following Future Shock’s publication, it was a psychological syndrome experienced by individuals, rendering them confused, irrational, and demotivated. When we talk about information overload these days, however, we’re usually not thinking of it as a psychological syndrome but as a cultural condition. And the fear that keeps us awake at night is not that all this information will cause us to have a mental breakdown but that we are not getting enough of the information we need.

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Smitha, “An Imperfect Democracy,” in Macrohistory and World Report, http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/hell04.htm. 11 The IBM 650 could use the “IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing machine with a series of disk memory units, which are capable of storing a total of 24-million digits” (http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/650/650_pr2.html). I am assuming that a desktop computer these days has a terabyte of hard-disk space. 12 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House, 1970), p. 350. The term “information overload” appeared as early as 1962; see Bertram M. Gross, “Operation Basic: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge,” Journal of Communication 12 (1967): 67–83, DOI: 10.1111. And Norbert Wiener talked about overloading the nervous system even earlier in his 1948 book Cybernetics (MIT Press, reprinted in 1961). 13 The concept of sensory overload was itself new.

Toast
by Stross, Charles
Published 1 Jan 2002

When I first met Lynda, she’d been wearing a fortune in home-made RISC processors bound together by black lacy tatters of goth finery, cracking badly-secured ten-year-old financial transactions every few milliseconds. (And selling any numbered offshore accounts she detected to the IRS for a thief taker’s cut, in order to subsidize her nanoassembler design start-up.) Now she was wearing Armani. <EDITORIAL> A business suit is a future-shock exoskeleton, whispering reminders in its wearer’s ears to prompt them through the everyday niceties of a life washed into bleeding monochrome by the flood of information they live under. Corporate workers and consultants today—I gather this, because I dropped out of that cycle a few years ago, unable to keep up with a new technological revolution every six months—live on the bleeding edge of autism: so wrapped up in their work that if their underwear didn’t tell them when to go to the toilet their bladders would burst.

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At my age, I need all the regeneration time I can get, even if I have to take it hanging upside down in a brightly-coloured cocoon woven to the side of a tower block’s support column. I run some quackware from India that claims to be a white-box clone of the Kaiser-Glaxo program the Pope uses; my tent and travel equipment designs come courtesy of the Free Hardware Foundation. Having lost my main income stream years ago due to the usual causes, principally cumulative future shock and the let-down from the Unix millennium consultancy business, I’d be lost without the copylefted design schemata to feed to my assembler farm: I certainly can’t afford the latest commercial designs for anything much more exotic than a fountain pen. But life on a twentieth-century income is still tolerable these days, thanks to the FHF.

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He couldn’t have been topside of twelve years without maturity-mods. Neomacho, cued-up by background video. For the first time I looked at his tribals. He wore a one piece suit, ice camouflage militia-surplus. His wrist node was well-worn. Classic case of heroin from six years, riding the horse out from under the shadow of future shock; it’s the kids who suffer most, these days. “That would be kind of a bad idea,” I said, “for your friend. I got no chips. My wallet’s armed; tell your sister to put it back before she gets gluey fingers. You want me to give you some money?” “You what?” said the kid. I felt butterfly fingers slip something that buzzed into my pocket; it stopped buzzing when it sniffed me again.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Human relations become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life…. The third millennium augurs well.22 Wiring for Feudalism It was once widely hoped that emerging technologies would create a world of “new opportunities for personal growth, adventure and delight,” as the visionary Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock almost three decades ago. The prospect of a technologically advanced economy dangled like a bright gem for generations of utopian socialists, and for political thinkers on the right as well. Even today, some Marxists long for “a fully automated luxury communism” where technology has ended scarcity and created a “post-work society.”23 Sadly, such utopian visions can lead to frighteningly dystopian results.

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utm_term=.bb4a8855a73a; Irina Ivanova, “Wall Street’s campaign contributions are flowing mostly to Democrats,” CBS News, October 31, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wall-street-political-campaign-contibutions-flowing-mostly-to-democratic-candidates-for-congress/. 5 Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948–2017),” World Inequality Database, March 2018, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piketty2018.pdf. 6 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 452. 7 John Benjamin, “Business Class,” New Republic, May 14, 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/148368/ideology-business-school; John Gray, “The problem of hyper-liberalism,” TLS, March 30, 2018, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/john-gray-hyper-liberalism-liberty/; Angelo Codevilla, “America’s Ruling Class,” American Spectator, July 16, 2010, https://spectator.org/americas-ruling-class/; Jeremy Au and Rafael Rivera, “HBS Election Poll,” Harbus, October 18, 2016, http://www.harbus.org/2016/hbs-election-poll/. 8 Nick Dedeke, “Is Corporate Vigilantism a Threat to Democracy?”

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Quartz, July 7, 2018, https://qz.com/1323241/young-americans-arent-having-children-for-a-variety-of-reasons-beyond-the-economy/. 37 Jacqueline Howard, “The costs of child care around the world,” CNN, April 25, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/25/health/child-care-parenting-explainer-intl/index.html; Charlie Weston, “Cost of raising a child from birth to college is €100,000,” Independent, July 17, 2015, https://www.independent.ie/life/family/cost-of-raising-a-child-from-birth-to-college-is-100000-31383511.html. 38 “Are we facing a future without families?” Maclean’s, December 4, 2012, https://www.macleans.ca/politics/are-we-facing-a-future-without-families/. 39 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 238–51. 40 Tim Henderson, “Growing Number of People Living Solo Can Pose Challenges,” Pew Charitable Trust, September 11, 2014, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2014/09/11/growing-number-of-people-living-solo-can-pose-challenges; Steven Kurutz, “One Is the Quirkiest Number,” New York Times, February 22, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/garden/the-freedom-and-perils-of-living-alone.html; Ashley Fetters, “Living alone and liking it,” Curbed, June 20, 2018, https://www.curbed.com/2018/6/20/17479740/living-alone-tips-women-advice. 41 He Wei, “The rise of solo living,” China Daily, July 28, 2017, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-07/28/content_30286948.htm. 42 “Going it alone: Solo dwellers will account for 40% of Japan’s households by 2040, forecast says,” Japan Times, January 13, 2018, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/13/national/social-issues/going-alone-solo-dwellers-will-account-40-japans-households-2040-forecast-says/. 43 Norimitsu Onishi, “A Generation in Japan Faces a Lonely Death,” New York Times, November 30, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/asia/japan-lonely-deaths-the-end.html. 44 Seymour Martin Lipset and Gabriel Salman Lenz, “Corruption, Culture and Markets,” in Culture Matters, ed.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

I looked at things, watched consoles as they were poked and prodded, and nobody there, it seemed, could even begin to explain what it was I might be doing if I were to, uh, do one of these projects, whatever it was. It wasn’t writing, and it wasn’t directing. It was definitely something, though, and they were certainly keen to do it, but they needed those verbs. Another example. A week later I found myself in an FX compound situated off a quiet back street in North Hollywood, experiencing serious future-shock frisson. My hosts—young, fast, and scientific to the bone—had developed a real-time video puppet, a slack-faced Max Headroom suspended in the imaginary space behind a television screen. Invited to put my hand in a waldo that looked vaguely like a gyroscope, I caused this sleeping golem to twitch and shiver, and my own hair to stand on end.

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Noting these two pieces of more or less simultaneous news, I also noted that my imagination, which grew up on countless popular imaginings of exactly this sort of thing, could produce nothing better in response than a tabloid headline: SYNTHETIC BACTERIA IN QUANTUM FREE-SPACE TELEPORTATION SHOCKER. Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly.

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The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that. If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese. They’ve been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call “future shock” (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives). Consider the Mobile Girl, that ubiquitous feature of contemporary Tokyo street life: a schoolgirl busily, constantly messaging on her mobile phone (which she never uses for voice communication if she can avoid it). The Mobile Girl can convert pad strokes to kanji faster than should be humanly possible, and rates her standing in her cellular community according to the amount of numbers in her phone’s memory.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Government,” Quartz, October 10, 2013, http://qz.com/134093/all-of-these-companies-have-more-cash-right-now-than-the-us-government. 24. Brian Solomon, “The World’s Youngest Billionaires: 29 Under 40,” Forbes, March 4, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2013/03/04/the-worlds-youngest-billionaires-23-under-40. 25. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 186. 26. Associated Press, “Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey Says He Wants to Be NYC Mayor Someday,” New York Daily News, March 18, 2013. 27. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 85. 28. Jackie Calmes and Nick Wingfield, “Tech Leaders and Obama Find Shared Problem: Fading Public Trust,” New York Times, December 18, 2013. 29.

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Harris, “Occupy Wall Street Protesters Shifting to College Campuses,” New York Times, November 14, 2011; Saki Knafo, “Occupy Wall Street Spreads To Colleges With Protests Against Student Debt,” Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/occupy-wall-street_n_1314948.html. 10. Toffler, Future Shock, p. 474. 11. Richard E. Redding, “Scientific Groupthink and Gay Parenting,” The American, December 18, 2013, http://www.american.com/archive/2013/december/scientific-groupthink-and-gay-parenting. 12. “Actress Out of San Francisco Production after Endorsing Tea Party Candidate,” CBS San Francisco, January 18, 2014, http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/01/18/actress-out-of-san-francisco-production-after-endorsing-tea-party-candidate. 13.

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Samuel Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885-1914 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957, pp. 72, 93; Beard and Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, p. 419. 21. Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (Hamden, CO: Archon Books, 1974), pp. 232–35; Lasch, The Only and True Heaven, p. 58; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 643. 22. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 87; Toffler, Future Shock, p. 119. 23. David Dayen, “National Poverty Rate Approaching Pre-Great Society Highs,” Firedoglake, July 23, 2012, http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/23/national-poverty-rate-approaching-pre-great-society-highs. 24. Martin Earnshaw, “Communities on the Couch,” in Dave Clements et al., eds., The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated (London: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 148–49. 25.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

He met his future wife, Heidi (Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell), while both were civil rights and labor activists in the 1940s. See Jill Leovy, “Alvin Toffler, Author of 1970 Bestseller ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-alvin-toffler-20160629-snap-story.html, accessed July 29, 2021; Kenneth Schneider, “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/books/alvin-toffler-author-of-future-shock-dies-at-87.html, accessed July 29, 2021; David Henry, “Alvin Toffler, Author of BestSelling ‘Future Shock’ and ‘The Third Wave,’ Dies at 87,” Washington Post, June 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/alvin-toffler-author-of-bestselling-future-shock-and-the-third-wave-dies-at-87/2016/06/29/0d63748c-3e09-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html, accessed August 10, 2021.

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Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000; Al From, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Michael Kazin, What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022); Iwan Morgan, “Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and the New Democratic Economics,” Historical Journal 47 (2004), 1015–1039; Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 43.Kruse and Zelizer, Fault Lines, 232; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019). 44.President William Jefferson Clinton, “2000 State of the Union Address,” January 27, 2000, reprinted in the New York Times, January 28, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/28/us/state-union-president-clinton-state-union-strongest-it-has-ever-been.html, accessed July 14, 2020. 45.O’Mara, The Code; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 46.Alvin and Heidi Toffler had outlined their theory of the three waves in their bestselling 1980 book, Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). Alvin Toffler had risen to prominence with his previous book Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 47.Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/futureinsights/fi1.2magnacarta.html, accessed July 29, 2021. 48.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” 49.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.”

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See Jill Leovy, “Alvin Toffler, Author of 1970 Bestseller ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-alvin-toffler-20160629-snap-story.html, accessed July 29, 2021; Kenneth Schneider, “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/books/alvin-toffler-author-of-future-shock-dies-at-87.html, accessed July 29, 2021; David Henry, “Alvin Toffler, Author of BestSelling ‘Future Shock’ and ‘The Third Wave,’ Dies at 87,” Washington Post, June 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/alvin-toffler-author-of-bestselling-future-shock-and-the-third-wave-dies-at-87/2016/06/29/0d63748c-3e09-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html, accessed August 10, 2021. See also Toffler’s interview with Kevin Kelly, “Anticipatory Democracy,” Wired, July 1, 1996, https://kk.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Alvin-Toffier.pdf, accessed August 10, 2021. 50.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” See also Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), Part IV. 51.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” 52.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

.–1880s) Chapter 3: “Fatface Is Real” Chapter 4: If At First You Don’t Succeed (1956–1991) Chapter 5: A Disturbing Proposal Chapter 6: The Snooper Bowl (2001) Chapter 7: The Supercomputer Under the Bed Chapter 8: The Only Guy Who Saw It Coming (2006–2008) Chapter 9: Death to Smartcheckr Part II: Technical Sweetness Chapter 10: The Line Google Wouldn’t Cross (2009–2011) Chapter 11: Finding Mr. Right Chapter 12: The Watchdog Barks (2011–2012) Chapter 13: Going Viral Chapter 14: “You Know What’s Really Creepy?” (2011–2019) Chapter 15: Caught in a Dragnet Chapter 16: Read All About It Part III: Future Shock Chapter 17: “Why the Fuck Am I Here?” (2020) Chapter 18: A Different Reason to Wear a Mask Chapter 19: I Have a Complaint Chapter 20: The Darkest Impulses Chapter 21: Code Red (or, Floyd Abrams V. the ACLU) Chapter 22: The Future Is Unevenly Distributed Chapter 23: A Rickety Surveillance State Chapter 24: Fighting Back Chapter 25: Tech Issues Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Notes Index About the Author _145052146_ Prologue THE TIP IN NOVEMBER 2019, I had just become a reporter at The New York Times when I got a tip that seemed too outrageous to be true: A mysterious company called Clearview AI claimed it could identify just about anyone based only on a snapshot of their face.

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Borthwick was taken aback, both by the Facebook photos the tool surfaced of him and by all the data on him the company had scraped without his permission. He declined to invest and later deleted his Facebook accounts. “You freaked the hell out of this guy,” a mutual friend told Ton-That. Ton-That dismissed the reaction as “future shock.” “It’s too much at once, and people can’t process it,” he said. Schwartz and Ton-That didn’t just demo the future for Scalzo; they gave it to him free of charge. It was part of the investment pitch: “Here’s the app. Go use it.” * * * — SCALZO WAS ONE of many backers, potential investors, and friends of the company to get free access to the private superpower, with no conditions set for how it could be wielded.

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We were on the cusp of a world in which our faces would be indelibly linked to our online dossiers, a link that would make it impossible to ever escape our pasts. That terrified people, so much so that the norm-violating company seemed on the brink of destruction, its onslaught on privacy too dramatic to ignore. But then a greater threat appeared and turned the tide away from privacy once again: A pandemic hit. PART III FUTURE SHOCK Chapter 17 “WHY THE FUCK AM I HERE?” (2020) On a Thursday afternoon in January 2020, the day before Hoan Ton-That and I met for the interview at WeWork, Melissa Williams got a call on her cell phone. It was an officer from the Detroit Police Department. He was calling about her husband, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Criminals were simply Warwick Ashford (6 Oct 2010), “ISSE 2010: Police Are Playing Catch-Up as Criminals Embrace IT,” Computer Weekly. Stephen Pritchard (2 Jun 2011), “Vulnerabilities: Battle Is Joined on Two Fronts,” Financial Times. position of the interior Carl von Clausewitz (1832), On War. Alvin Toffler wrote Alvin Toffler (1970), Future Shock, Random House. People learn how Michael Anissimov (2004), “Future Shock Level Analysis,” AcceleratingFuture.com. new type of grifter David Maurer (1940), The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, Bobbs Merrill. Other cities followed J.L. Lyman (1964), “The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829: An Analysis of Certain Events Influencing the Passage and Character of the Metropolitan Police Act in England,” The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, & Police Science, 55:141–54.

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This is an intrinsic condition of the problem, for all the reasons we just talked about. The security gap cannot be eliminated. The security gap is also greater in periods of rapid technological change, as society struggles to manage the broader social changes as well as quickly adapting defectors do. In 1970, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote about future shock, the psychological and social problems that result from people being forced to absorb too much technological change too quickly. His estimates about how much technological change people could deal with were way too low—the rate of technological change in the second decade of the 21st century is much faster than the seventh decade of the 20th—but his basic ideas are sound.

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His estimates about how much technological change people could deal with were way too low—the rate of technological change in the second decade of the 21st century is much faster than the seventh decade of the 20th—but his basic ideas are sound. People learn how to cope with new technologies at their own pace, some more easily than others. And groups of people move more slowly than some of their members. Defectors are not inherently less susceptible to future shock than society at large, but the more successful ones are. Successful defectors are always going to be able to outpace the average capability of society. Again, look at Figure 15, the bottom this time. In a period of rapid change, technology increases faster, so the curve climbs higher in the same period of time than in the earlier figures.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “technology is neither good nor bad”: Eric Schatzberg and Lee Vinsel, “Kranzberg’s First and Second Laws,” Technology’s Stories 6, no. 4 (Dec. 2018), technologystories.org/​first-and-second-laws/; Rinkesh D, “Kranzberg’s Laws of Technology—Understanding Interaction of Society and Technology,” AIC-IIITH, aic.iiit.ac.in/​kranzbergs-laws-of-technology-understanding-interaction-of-society-and-technology/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “future shock” and “adaptive breakdown”: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Times of tumult and chaos: George Prochnik, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Other Press, 2016), 247–48. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT fossil fuel consumption: ipcc.ch/​report/​ar6/​syr/​downloads/​report/​IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf.

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These developments have created a vertiginous moment that has exposed our interdependent world’s profound vulnerabilities. Growing cracks appear in the post–World War II order and the ever-accelerating pace of social and technological change have created what Alvin Toffler described, five decades ago, as “future shock” and “adaptive breakdown.” But times of turmoil can also provide an opening for a reboot—for reassessing our priorities and operating principles. New ideas are more likely to gain traction during such periods, and newcomers are increasingly welcomed in once cloistered fields. In the early twenty-first century, outsiders are already revolutionizing science and medicine, while artists from once marginalized groups—including immigrants, African Americans, and women—are redefining literature, theater, music, and painting.

DeFi and the Future of Finance
by Campbell R. Harvey , Ashwin Ramachandran , Joey Santoro , Vitalik Buterin and Fred Ehrsam
Published 23 Aug 2021

NOTES 1. Alan White, “David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,” Credit Slips: A Discussion on Credit, Finance, and Bankruptcy, June 18, 2020, https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2020/06/david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html. 2. Ibid. See also Euromoney. 2001. “Forex Goes into Future Shock.” (October), https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2001/EuromoneyOct01.pdf. 3. PayPal, founded as Confinity in 1998, did not begin offering a payments function until it merged with X.com in 2000. 4. Other examples include Cash App, Braintree, Venmo, and Robinhood. 5. C. R. Harvey, “The History of Digital Money,” 2020, https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/697_2020/Public_Presentations_697/History_of_Digital_Money_2020_697.pdf. 6.

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“Rising Bank Concentration,” Staff Paper 594, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (March). Available at https://doi.org/10.21034/sr.594 Ellis, Steve, Ari Juels, and Sergey Nazarov. 2017. “Chainlink: A Decentralized Oracle Network.” Working paper (September 4). Available at https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper Euromoney . 2001. “Forex Goes into Future Shock.” (October). Available at https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Media/2001/EuromoneyOct01.pdf Haber, Stuart, and Scott Stornetta. 1991. “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.” Journal of Cryptology (January). Available at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/BF00196791 Nakamoto, Satoshi. 2008. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” https://bitcoin.org Narayan, Amber, Roy Van der Weide, Alexandru Cojocaru, Christoph Lakner, Silvia Redaelli, Daniel Mahler, Rakesh Ramasubbaiah, and Stefan Thewissen. 2018.

You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up
by Annabelle Gurwitch
Published 31 Aug 2010

A Saab Story 3. A Tale of Two Kitties 4. 28 Days Later 5. Hungry Like the Wolf 6. The Years of Living Sleeplessly 7. The Eighteen-Year Plan 8. Back to the Pussy 9. Slouching Toward Cooperstown 10. They’re Not Our Fathers’ Fathers-in-Law 11. I’m OK, You’re the Problem 12. Anything Goes 13. Future Shock Spouse 14. The State of Our Union Acknowledgments Introduction “Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.” —CALVIN TRILLIN He Says When I was twelve, my sixth-grade English class went on a field trip to see Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

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* Gong Tianxiu of Beichuan, China, not only sawed her own leg off, she also drank her own blood to remain hydrated after her husband died in their collapsed house in the earthquake of 2008. Driven by what she said was a “mother’s love” for her son, she was determined to stay alive so that her child would have at least one parent. 13 • • • • Future Shock Spouse “Ye who enter here leave all hope behind.” —DANTE’S INFERNO The average life span for most people in the Western world has increased by thirty years over the last century. People are getting married later, but “till death do us part” still seems like an awfully long run. We find that phrase daunting.

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That gives us approximately 860,148,106 minutes together if we stay together that long—and the truth is the odds are against us. Many people, including futurist Alvin Toffler, have pointed to the fact that marriage as an institution doesn’t make sense anymore. In his seminal and startlingly still-relevant book, Future Shock, written back in 1978, he predicted that in the future it will be more appropriate for us to have numerous careers and multiple marriages that will reflect the enormous personal transformations one can have given our longer life spans.* I myself had a “starter marriage,” and according to Toffler’s paradigm, in a very short time from now, Jeff and I should be ready to trade each other in for new spouses with whom to head off into the new directions in our lives.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World
by Timothy Cresswell
Published 21 May 2006

But in order that there may be any permanence and progress in society the individuals who compose it must be located . . .”39 This strand of thinking about mobility as a pathological threat to society became a consistent thread in American social commentary. In 1970 the popular sociologist Alvin Toffler wrote the hugely successful Future Shock in which he prepared the citizens of the world for a future world of runaway mobility.40 Here he describes a world in which everything is accelerating. Science, technology, and culture were all speeding up. In many ways this was George Beard nearly one hundred years later—Toffler appears to be breathlessly describing a late-twentieth-century version of neurasthenia.

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In many ways his book prefigures the writings of Augé, Virilio, and others.45 It certainly mirrors the concerns about the threats to place that pervade the writings of humanistic geographers in the 1970s and 1980s. Toffler seems excited by this new mobile world. He provides the reader with a flood of facts and figure about the frequency and velocity of mobility undertaken by the new nomads. Its purpose is to diagnose a pathology—future shock—a sense of disorientation and overload that modern man needs to react to quickly. The prevalence of mobility in modern life is, to Toffler, most definitely a problem. In this sense, his anxieties sit snugly beside those of his sociological forebears at the Chicago School. Indeed, mobility presents itself as a problem in many of the sociological texts of the twentieth century such as William Whyte’s The Organization Man and the Lynds’ Middletown.46 Sedentarism Made Material If the metaphysics of sedentarism were limited to the internal scribblings of geographers, sociologists, and cultural theorists, it could be considered harmless enough.

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Robert Park, “The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections Upon the Relation between Mentality and Locomotion,” in The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment, ed. Robert Park and Ernest Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 156–60, 159. 40. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 41. Ibid., 35. 42. Ibid., 75. 43. Ibid., 77. 44. Ibid., 90. 45. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London; New York: Verso, 1995); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, Semiotext(e) (New York: Columbia University, 1986). 46.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg
Published 8 Dec 2015

Brunner uses the computer’s ability to combine ultrafast communication and data processing to transform the nature of democracy, making government something that resembles a cross between online polls and a casino, with its collation of human responses and betting odds. The book’s title is a reference to Alvin Toffler’s stodgy 1970 work of futurology, Future Shock. While Toffler has proved pretty well universally wrong when it comes to the real world, his ideas were much followed at the time and proved a great inspiration for fiction writers. In this case the concept is built on the Delphi method, originated by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. In the original Delphi process a series of individuals were given a decision to make, or questions to answer.

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Lenat section, “From 2001 to 2001: Common Sense and the Mind of HAL” in David G. Stork (ed.), Hal’s Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 193–94. The novel featuring a Delphi-based government is John Brunner, Shockwave Rider (London: Dent, 1975). The work of futurology that inspired Shockwave Rider is Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London: Pan Books, 1970). 18. NEVER-ENDING STORY Information on space elevators and the difficulties in constructing them from Brian Clegg, Final Frontier (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), pp. 61–65. INDEX The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book.

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See also rocket belts attempts at bird emulation for Iron Man and flying cars flying saucers Forbidden Planet force fields and shields Faraday and holograms and in reality The Forever War (Haldeman) Fort, Charles Foundation series (Asimov) The Fountains of Paradise (Clarke) Frankenstein (Shelley) Die Frau im Mond Future Shock (Toffler) Gabor, Dennis Galaxy Quest Galileo gaming. See computer games genetic engineering. See also DNA George 3 geostationary satellites Gernsback, Hugo Gibson, William gliders Godwin, Francis Godzilla (fictional character) Goldfinger Google Translate Goostman, Eugene Goostman chatbot Gould, Gordon Graham, Harold gravity.

Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years
by Richard Watson
Published 1 Jan 2008

Presumably by then most readers will have forgotten about this book entirely or time will have healed any mental wounds created by misjudged ideas or incorrect dates. Having said that, a few years ago I serendipitously stopped in the middle of nowhere in the English coastal county of Suffolk. Opposite me was an old church that had been turned into a secondhand bookshop. I walked in for no particular reason and ended up buying a first edition of Future Shock from 1970 for 50p, as well as, for the same price, another book called Originality that was written in 1917 about the year 2000. You just never know. Ironically, it is often easier to make predictions about the distant future than next month or next year because it can take a long time for patterns to emerge or new ideas to replace old habits and conventions.

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However, loyalty to corporations will dwindle and it will be very much a case of promiscuous workers moving to wherever the best opportunities lie. The trend of reverse migration will also intensify, with people in countries such as the US moving back to those such as India because the opportunities are better “at home”. However, the biggest future shock will be the lack of workers due to declining fertility rates in almost every nation. Hence the war for talent — attracting and retaining the best people — will become even more critical until robotics and AI solve the problem. Accelerating technological change We will see more employee tagging and surveillance in the future.

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Seidensticker, Bob (2006) Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change, Berrett-Koehler. Shapiro, Robert (2008) Futurecast 2020, Profile. Sharper, Thomas (1917) Originality, T Werner Laurie. Taylor, Jim, and Wacker, Watts (1997) The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next, Harper Collins. Toffler, Alvin (1970) Future Shock, Random House. Williams, Robyn (2007) Future Perfect, Allen & Unwin. Sources 309 Risk and risk management Aon Analytics (2009) Global Risk Management Survey, Aon Analytics. Bernstein, Peter L (1996) Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, John Wiley & Sons. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007) The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Allen Lane.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

However, they hesitate to share the data if they feel a company might misuse the information, sell it to other companies, or inundate them with junk mail and spam.24 Now, Net Gen consumers are taking the next step and becoming producers, cocreating products and services with companies. Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumer” in his 1970s book Future Shock.25 I called it “prosumption” a decade ago.26 I can see it happening now, as the Internet transforms itself from a platform for presenting information to a place where you can collaborate and where individuals can organize themselves into new communities. In the Web 2.0, new communities are being formed in social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, and these communities are starting to go into production.

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Patent No. 6820062 (issued November 16, 2004). 16 Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business (Free Press, 2003). 17 “The Net Generation: A Strategic Investigation,” Syndicated Research Project, nGenera, 2008 (survey of 1,750 respondents aged thirteen to twenty-nine, September–October, 2006). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 David Richards, “Free Illegal Music Beats iTunes,” SmartHouse, November 30, 2005, www.smarthouse.com.au. 21 “The Net Generation: A Strategic Investigation,” Syndicated Research Project, nGenera, 2008 (survey of 1,750 respondents aged thirteen to twenty-nine, September–October 2006). 22 Mary Madden and Amanda Lennart, “Pew Internet Project Data Memo,” Pew Internet and American Life Project, July 31, 2003. 23 Frank Rose, “And Now, a Word from Our Customers,” Wired 14, no. 12, December 2006. 24 “The Net Generation: A Strategic Investigation,” Syndicated Research Project, nGenera, 2008 (survey of 1,750 respondents aged thirteen to twenty-nine, September–October 2006). 25 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Bantam Books, 1971). 26 Don Tapscott, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (McGraw-Hill, 1995). 27 “The Net Generation: A Strategic Investigation,” Syndicated Research Project, nGenera, 2008 (survey of 1,750 respondents aged thirteen to twenty-nine, September–October 2006). 28 Ibid. 29 Steve Hamm and Ian Rowley, “Speed Demons,” BusinessWeek, March 27, 2006. 30 Jena McGregor, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek , April 24, 2006

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Ellis Island E-mail Embodied experience Emotional context Encyclopaedia Britannica Enron Entertainment, Net Geners and Epinions E*Trade EVDB evite Evolution “Evolution” (video) Evolving rule systems Executive system Expert reading brain eyePROXY Facebook civic networks and identity setup on politician’s pages on self-portraits on The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World Facial expressions Fake, Caterina Farley, Jim Fast ForWard program 50 Cent Flexibility practicums Flexible Bodies (Martin) Flexible self Flexible workplaces Flextime Flickr Focault, Michel Folksonomy Foreman, Richard Fortune 500, 43things.com Fox Fragmented self Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Lessig) Freedom Free speech activism Freudian psychology Friedman, Bruce Friedman, Milton Friedman, Thomas Friendship Friendster Froogle Fuhrmann, August Full Spectrum Warrior (video game) Functional magnetic resonance imaging Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability Funicello, Annette Future content “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” (Davidson and Goldberg) Future Shock (Toffler) Galen Game-based learning Gawker Generalizations Generation gap Genetics GeoCities Gergen, Kenneth German Ideology (Marx) Get-out-the-vote efforts (GOTV) Gillmor, Dan Gladwell, Malcolm GM Gmail Goal-oriented behaviors Goldberg, David Theo Good (magazine) Google brain while using interpreting results from measurement in search strategies and shopping search engine on Web 2.0 and Wikia and Google Maps Google Mobile Application Googleplex Gore, Al Gorman, Michael GOTV.

The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Published 3 Sep 2012

And waits. His whole fucking life seems to consist of conversations like this. He’s read some hilariously naïve accounts of life in the soi-disant “Information Age” about “Future Shock,” all those dim ancestors trying to make sense of their rapidly changing world. They fretted about the “singularity”—the point at which human history goes nonlinear and unpredictable and the world ceases to have any rhyme or reason. Future shock indeed—try living in the fucking singularity, and having your world inverted six times before breakfast. “Well, that’s it. I can do it in vitro or in situ, up to you.” “Do it?”

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Even if they had been physically built, rather than merely rendered, these monumental buildings wouldn’t be remotely impressive compared to the cloud itself: but they were all designed to testify to the power and grandeur of their pre-singularity creators, in a manner that is deeply reassuring to a future-shocked primate trying to face up to overwhelming neighbors. And the neighbors are overwhelming. The embassy is embedded within the fragment of the pan-galactic inter-cloud hosted by the repurposed remains of Io, and the aliens aren’t going to let anyone forget it: beyond the embassy compound lies a remarkably realistic-looking re-creation of the moon’s icy, sulfurous surface.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

THIS NEW AGE of instant gratification—the sudden and seamless materialization of online merchandise, mobilized by automated delivery—is the second big story of this book. It’s a challenging prospect to make sense of. As we have seen, the way we shop has changed many times. But nothing in our past experience has prepared us for the size and suddenness of this shift. This is the stuff of future shock—that psychological state of “shattering stress and disorientation” that futurist Alvin Toffler described arising from “too much change in too short a period of time.” Many of us are already struggling to keep up. I’m old enough to remember life before e-commerce, before credit cards for kids, and even before package tracking.

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That Should Be Keeping Retailers Up at Night,” CNBC, March 19, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/19/heres-why-retailers-should-be-scared-of-amazon-dominating-e-commerce.html. 118its share is growing: “Top 10 US Companies, Ranked by Retail Ecommerce Sales Share, 2018 (% of US Retail Ecommerce Sales),” eMarketer, July 17, 2018, https://www.emarketer.com/Chart/Top-10-US-Companies-Ranked-by-Retail-Ecommerce-Sales-Share-2018-of-US-retail-ecommerce-sales/220521. 118Amazon is worth more than three times: Erica Pandey, “On the Mind of Every Retail CEO: The Amazon Threat,” Axios, September 19, 2018, https://www.axios.com/amazon-strategy-shopify-flipkart-macys-code-commerce-1e1a5fae-75b0-4a68-b308-9ca1a539437d.html. 118Alibaba has a similar market share: “2019: China to Surpass US.” 118half of all parcel shipments in the US: Tim Laseter, Andrew Tipping, and Fred Duiven, “The Rise of the Last-Mile Exchange,” Strategy + Business, July 30, 2018, https://www.strategy-business.com/article/The-Rise-of-the-Last-Mile-Exchange. 119Alibaba delivered one billion shipments: Lisa Lacy, “Alibaba Rings Up $30.8 Billion on Singles Day 2018,” Adweek, November 11, 2018, https://www.adweek.com/digital/alibaba-rings-up-30-8-billion-on-singles-day-2018/. 119million-person courier team: Rita Liao, “Alibaba and Amazon Move Over, We Visited JD’s Connected Grocery Store in China,” TechCrunch, November 15, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/15/jd-7fresh-supermarket/. 119spent more than $20 billion on shipping: Alana Semuels, “Free Shipping Isn’t Hurting Amazon,” The Atlantic, April 27, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/free-shipping-isnt-hurting-amazon/559052/. 11910 percent of its total take: Daphne Howland, “Amazon Captured 44% of US Online Sales Last Year,” Retail Dive, January 4, 2018, https://www.retaildive.com/news/amazon-captured-44-of-us-online-sales-last-year/514044/. 119same-day delivery is still very limited: Julian Allen, Maja Piecyk, and Marzena Piotrowska, An Analysis of the Same-Day Delivery Market and Operations in the UK, Technical Report CUED/C-SRF/TR012 (Westminster, UK: University of Westminster, November 2018), 10. 119consumers will expect all deliveries: McKinsey & Company, An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility (McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, October 2016), 3. 120“too much change in too short a period of time”: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 120receives five deliveries each week, twice as many: N. McGuckin and A. Fucci, Summary of Travel Trends: 2017 National Household Travel Survey, Report No. FHWA-PL-18-019 (Washington, DC: Federal Highway Administration, July 2018), 100. 121schlepp stuff into the surrounding territory: Joann Muller, “One Big Thing: The Rise of Driverless Delivery,” Axios, November 28, 2018, https://www.axios.com/autonomous-vehicles-could-be-used-for-deliveries-3fb12a24-3e66-4d8b-b678-a2fbb47d05cb.html. 121By 2020 fully two-thirds will be: Laseter et al., “The Rise of the Last-Mile Exchange.” 122more than twice as many shipments: Laseter et al., “The Rise of the Last-Mile Exchange.” 122exhausted racers mustered what energy they could: Dan Peterson, “Why Are Marathons 26.2 Miles Long?”

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“self-driving,” 38 early self-steering schemes, 5–6 modern-day myths about future, xv–xvi scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 self-driving shoes, 52, 53 three big stories of the driverless revolution, 16–20, 187–88, 238, 248, 253 see also financialization of mobility; materialization; self-driving vehicle research; specialization driving as coming-of-age story, 21–22 cruise control and, 24–25, 26 decline in teen driving, 22–23 distracted driving, 25, 28–29, 32–33 drinking and, 24 graduated licensing, 23 drones, 40, 127, 246–47 EasyMile, 60, 103–4, 104 Ebee, 129 e-commerce, 17, 117, 118–19, 120 see also Amazon; continuous delivery Edgar, John, 247 electrification and automation as symbiotic technologies, 54–55 electronic tolling, 169–72 Endeavor space shuttle, 74 English Civil War, 161 e-Palette, 125, 142 EUREF, 129 Evans, Alex, 116 éX-Driver (anime series), 149–50 Facebook, 67 fear of intelligent automobiles, 39, 43, 45 FedEx, 27, 130 “fifth-generation” (5G) wireless grid, 42 financial crisis of 2007–2008, 7, 164, 182 financialization, general, 163–64 financialization of mobility curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23 electronic tolling, 169–72 monetization of vehicle owner data, 32 overview, 17, 163–65, 244 realignment of money and power, 181–83 see also congestion pricing first mile, 60 fleet learning, 37 Florida Automated Vehicles Summit, 55 Ford, Henry, 12 Ford Motor Company, 12, 32, 58, 218–19, 231, 233 forecasting vs. predicting the future, 13 free roads, end of, 163, 165 free transfer in transit system, 89, 90, 91 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 153, 154, 236 Frost, Robert, 249 fulfillment centers and distribution centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158, 196n fulfillment zone, 187, 188, 196–99, 198–99 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 future car of the 1950s, 50–52, 51 Future of Humanity Institute, 238 future shock, 120 Gao Lufeng, 65 Gates, Bill, 237–38 General Motors (GM) AVs tested in San Francisco, xv disengagements by Chevy Bolts, 41 Futurama (1939 World’s Fair), 5 in-car surveillance and driver monitoring, 32 Super Cruise, 29 Gensler, 191 ghost cars, 27 ghost Main Street businesses, 140–42 ghost restaurants, 139–40, 197 ghost road, defined, xvi Gibson, Mel, 28 Gibson, William, 10, 245 GitHub, 248 Glaeser, Edward, 130, 206 Goldsmith, Stephen, 222 Google ambitions, 183 Android operating system, 7 busing of workers, 100 self-driving car project, xiv–xv, 7, 8, 35, 84, 133, 230 and vehicular specialization, 54 Waze acquired by, 87 see also Waymo Gould, Jay, 180 GPS tracks, 35 Grab, 177 graduated licensing, 23 Green Summit, 139 guardian angels, 246–47 Hackett, Jim, 32 Hawking, Stephen, 237–38 Heppner, Henning, 129 Herron, Ron, 74 Hidalgo, Anne, 220 highwaymen (England’s East Midlands), 161 Hitachi, 67, 79 HopSkipDrive, 95 horsecars, 174–75 houses, increased size of, 116 human intelligence tasks (HITs), 41 IBM, 36 Icebox, 243–44 IDEO, 125 IKEA, 72–73 Image of the City, The (Lynch), 228–30 immutable objects, 49 Impellitteri, Vincent, 165 Induct, 103, 104 infill housing, 204, 253–55 informal transit, 99–100, 106 Inrix, 9 Intel, 8, 35 “Introducing the self-driving bicycle in the Netherlands,” 62 Intuit, 125 Jacobs, Jane, 57, 228 JD.com, 118, 119, 137 Jelbi MaaS app (Berlin), 109, 110, 216 Jevons paradox, 144–45 Jevons, William Stanley, 143–44, 145 just-in-time inventory approaches, 157 Ju, Wendy, 40 Kalanick, Travis, 140, 179 Kamen, Dean, 62 Keller, David H., 84–85, 94 Keolis, 104 Khashoggi, Jamal Ahmad, 178 Khosrowshahi, Dara, 98, 179 Kia, 31 Kim, Sangbae, 46 King, David, 132, 247 King, Steven, 42 kipple, defined, 142–43 Kitchen United, 139 Kiva Systems, 136, 137 Kiwibots, 57 Knightley’s (Wichita, KS), 192 Koch, Charles and David, 40 Kohlhase, Janet, 130, 206 Kohn Pedersen Fox, 209, 211 Koolhaas, Rem, 206 KPMG, 117, 218 Kurzweil, Ray, 234 Ladd, Brian, 80 last mile continuous delivery and, 121–29 conveyors and, 124–25 cost savings, 130 driverless shuttles, 60, 123n falling costs and demand, 130–32, 131 in food delivery, 140, 147 freight AVs, 125–26, 130 Hannah school buses, 127 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130, 217 origin of term, 122 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 term use in shipping, 123n legibility, 229–30, 231 Legible London, 230 Leonhardt, David, 8–9 Les Vergers Ecoquartier (Switzerland), 202 Levandowski, Anthony, 40, 68 Levy, Frank, 150, 151, 152 lidar, 34–35 Ligier Group, 103 Lime Bike, 67 “Living Machine, The” (Keller), 83–85, 94, 237 loss aversion, 50 Lowe’s, 116 Lufa Farms, 147 Luks, George, 174 Lyft competition with Uber, 177–78, 179 initial public offering, 97, 177 market cap, 97 number of vehicles, 10 relationship with transit, 215 specialization and variety of rides, 95, 96 subscriptions, 244 taxibots, 97 traffic congestion and, 168 Lynch, Kevin, 228–30 MaaS.

Mending the Net: Toward Universal Basic Incomes
by Chris Oestereich
Published 20 Oct 2016

Without active mobilization to anticipate and head off such attempts, such programs could be expected to proliferate, so I would aim for an explicit denial of any such instruments, and a ferocious defense of that denial. With that in place, a stiff regulatory approval process could vet any instruments that were subsequently cooked up. A cushion for future shocks Recessions tend to hit people unevenly. Some squeeze through relatively unaffected. Some muddle through when they might otherwise move on to better opportunities. Some lose their jobs, settling for lower-paying ones or getting by thanks to social safety nets. Some fall through the cracks. Basic incomes would provide a bit of financial padding for future downturns.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

Bayer Laboratories recently confirmed Ioannidis’s hypothesis. They could not replicate about two-thirds of the positive findings claimed in medical journals when they attempted the experiments themselves.40 Big Data will produce progress—eventually. How quickly it does, and whether we regress in the meantime, will depend on us. Why the Future Shocks Us Biologically, we are not very different from our ancestors. But some stone-age strengths have become information-age weaknesses. Human beings do not have very many natural defenses. We are not all that fast, and we are not all that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor.

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The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information.41 And yet that is only about one one-millionth of the information that IBM says is now produced in the world each day. So we have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember. Alvin Toffler, writing in the book Future Shock in 1970, predicted some of the consequences of what he called “information overload.” He thought our defense mechanism would be to simplify the world in ways that confirmed our biases, even as the world itself was growing more diverse and more complex.42 Our biological instincts are not always very well adapted to the information-rich modern world.

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Now those different religious ideas could be testified to with more information, more conviction, more “proof”—and less tolerance for dissenting opinion. The same phenomenon seems to be occurring today. Political partisanship began to increase very rapidly in the United States beginning at about the time that Tofller wrote Future Shock and it may be accelerating even faster with the advent of the Internet.43 These partisan beliefs can upset the equation in which more information will bring us closer to the truth. A recent study in Nature found that the more informed that strong political partisans were about global warming, the less they agreed with one another.44 Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

Chapter 5: Like explaining Shakespeare to a dog Chapter 6: Invisibly small and magical Chapter 7: The biggest, baddest kid on the block Chapter 8: A constant and complete intercourse Part 3: EARTH Chapter 9: World leaders still don’t get it Chapter 10: Here comes the sun (and it’s alright) Chapter 11: The black phantom Chapter 12: A little bit of a bloody big amount Chapter 13: The President is busy Part 4: RE-BOOT Chapter 14: Making a road where there isn’t one Chapter 15: Future shock Chapter 16: So what’s next? Further reading and notes Acknowledgements Index PART 1 MAN CHAPTER 1 The world’s most dangerous idea Getting older is no problem. You just have to live long enough. GROUCHO MARX I’m on a train to Oxford wondering how long I am going to live.

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John believes we’re ‘moving into a world of constant flux, rather than a world of basically slow, punctuated evolution. If you take this to the extreme, it says nearly every social and technical and business infrastructure we have can’t survive.’ Well, we are near the end of the book. What did you expect? CHAPTER 15 Future shock When you are through changing, you are through. BRUCE BARTON The Industrial Revolution changed everything. It changed the way we organised society, the way we educated ourselves, the idea of work and the way we did business. We built an infrastructure the like of which had never been seen before.

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It all seems to be coming too fast. I’m almost expecting that by the time I walk out of John’s office I’ll find the world already transformed into some futuristic society that I’ve no idea how to operate in. Perhaps I have the first mild onset of a phenomenon identified by sociologist Alvin Toffler – ‘future shock’ – which can be summarised as too much changing too quickly for you to get your head around. Part of the re-boot, then, is finding a way to deal with change as the norm and not the exception, realizing that society, having enjoyed a period of relative stability since the Industrial Revolution is, in my lifetime, going to see a radical shift.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

I know one person (Win McCormack) who was taking part in think tanks at the time, and he told me that all the Ivy League schools in America were organizing, “what are we going to do when all the jobs are gone, and the working class is thrown out of work.” The Player Piano scenario felt quite imminent at that time. Then around 1971 or 1972 you get things like Future Shock by Alvin Toffler coming out which gives public voice to all this; Toffler makes an argument about what he calls “accelerative thrust,” that the speed at which technological change is happening is geometrical: the number of new patents, energy use, and so forth (Toffler 1970). For instance, if you look at the speed at which the fastest person can travel, for example at that time, and it did seem to be increasing at such a rate that it was reasonable to assume that by now, we should be exploring other solar systems.

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M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930). In Essays in Persuasion. New York: Harcourt Brace. Sahlins, M. (1972/2017). Stone Age Economics. Reprint. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge Classics. Sirota, D. (2006, June 26). Mr Obama Goes to Washington. Nation. Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House. Vonnegut, K. (1952). Player Piano. New York: Delacorte Press. 17 Automation and Working Time in the UK Rachel Kay Why Discuss Working Time? Working time has recently arisen as a contentious topic in the UK media, particularly following the Trades Union Congress’ proposal that we should aim to instate a four-day week by the end of the century.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

Singer, September 19, 2006. 165 “Any sufficiently advanced technology” Arthur Charles Clarke, Profiles of the Future, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 21. 165 a magic box that killed almost a thousand spear-armed warriors John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun, Johns Hopkins paperback ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 89. 165 what analysts call “Future Shock” Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 165 “Thereseemsastrongtendency”TimothyHornyak, as quoted in Mark Jacob, “Japan’s Robots Stride into Future,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 2006, 7. 166 “stems from the fact that doomsday scenarios” H. R. Everett, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 20, 2006. 166 “To be realistic, it’s going to be” Andrew Bridges, “Scientists Aim to Duplicate Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak,” LiveScience.com, May 25, 2006 (cited May 25, 2006); available at http://www.livescience.com/scienceoffiction/060525_invisible_cloak.html 166 “And I have no idea” Rod Brooks, interview, Peter W.

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But he had a magic box that killed almost a thousand spear-armed warriors by spitting out death faster than they ever imagined possible, the machine gun. New technologies often can seem not merely incomprehensible, but unimaginable. Science fiction, though, allows us to jump that divide. It helps to take the shock out of what analysts call “Future Shock.” By allowing us to imagine the unimaginable, it helps prepare us for the future, including even in war. This preparation extends beyond future expectations; science fiction creates a frame of reference that shapes our hopes and fears about the future, as well as how we reflect on the ethics of some new technology.

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paper presented at the IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interaction, Okayama, Japan, September 20-22, 2004; Peter H. Kahn et al., “What is a Human?” Interaction Studies 8, no. 3 (2007). 405 “Humans are stupid” Daniel Wilson, interview, Peter W. Singer, October 19, 2006. 405 “There will be people” Salamander Davoudi, “Future Shock as Study Backs Rights for Robots in a PC world,” Financial Times, December 21, 2006, 1. 406 “the right to use all necessary means” Anthony D’Amato, “International Law, Cybernetics, and Cyberspace,” Naval War College International Law Studies 76 (2006): 62. 407 The interpretation of robot rights Charles J.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Given the possibilities arising from the Third Disruption, with the emergence of extreme supply in information, labour, energy and resources, it should be viewed not only as an idea adequate to our time but impossible before now. FALC does not underpin the trends of the Third Disruption – it is their conclusion. If we want it. Future Shock 1858 However people respond to the word ‘communism’, the word is associated with one person in particular – Karl Marx. It was he who claimed to see the contours of a new world at the precise moment industrial capitalism burned at its brightest. That is not to say Marx was unique in thinking capitalism would end, nor that it would transition to something else.

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The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All. Profile Books, 2016. ‘The Experience Curve’. Economist, 14 September 2009. From Crisis to Utopia Levy, Steven. ‘Hackers at 30: “Hackers” and “Information Wants to Be Free”’. Wired, 21 November 2014. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Penguin, 1993. 3. What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? Future Shock 1858 Cyert, Richard M. and David C. Mowery, eds. Technology and Employment: Innovation and Growth in the US Economy. National Academy of Sciences, 1987. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Penguin, 1993. Communism: A World beyond Scarcity Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 3. Penguin Books, 1993. Marx, Karl.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

“Most of the benefits of technological change are passed on to consumers rather than captured by producers,” he concluded. Like it or not, change is inevitable—but it doesn’t have to be wholly unexpected. In their book Future Shock, the futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler wrote that “change is the only constant,” and “to survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.” Those words were originally published in 1970. The pace of change has only accelerated since then. Everyone should have the opportunity to learn how blitzscaling works, because it is already impacting their lives.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Schwartz, Art of the Long View, 97. 32. Warshall, “Informed Heart,” 3; McIntire quoted ibid., 3; Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 96; Michael quoted in Warshall, “Informed Heart,” 3. 33. Warshall, “Informed Heart,” 6. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Schwartz, and Brand, 1989 GBN Scenario Book, 1; Einstein, “Think Tank Helps Prevent Future Shock.” [ 284 ] N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 3 _ 2 0 2 36. Hoyt quoted in Stipp, “Stewart Brand,” 172. 37. Stipp, “Stewart Brand,” 172; Mauceli and Portante quoted ibid. 38. Kelly, interview, July 27, 2001. 39. “Cyberpunk Era”; Kadrey, “Cyberpunk 101 Reading List”; “Virtual Reality”; Dyson, “Groupware,” 105 –7; Brand, “Sticking Your Head In Cyberspace”; Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement.” 40.

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The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Ehrlich, Paul R. “CoEvolution and the Biology of Communities.” CoEvolution Quarterly 1 (Spring 1974): 40 – 44. Ehrlich, Paul R., and Richard W. Holm. The Process of Evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Einstein, David. “Think Tank Helps Prevent Future Shock.” San Francisco Chronicle, June 10, 1995, D1. Ellis, David, Rachel Oldridge, and Ana Vasconcelos. “Community and Virtual Community.” In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, edited by Blaise Cronin, 145 – 86. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2004. Elmer-DeWitt, Phillip. “Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T.”

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Fortune, September 5, 1994. Theall, Donald F. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2001. Thrift, Nigel. “‘It’s the Romance Not the Finance That Makes Business Worth Pursuing’: Disclosing a New Market Culture.” Economy and Society 30, no. 4 (2001): 412 –32. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. ———. The Third Wave. New York: Morrow, 1980. Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern Art. New York: Viking Press, 1965. ———. “In the Outlaw Area.” New Yorker, January 8, 1966. Tung, Chung C. “The ‘Personal Computer’: A Fully Programmable Pocket Calculator.”

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

The British journalist Michael Wood, citing the revival of the popular music of the fifties, the commercial appeal of movies about World War II, and the saturation of the airwaves with historical dramas—"Upstairs, -116- Downstairs," "The Pallisers," "The Forsyte Saga"—declared, "The disease, if it is a disease, has suddenly become universal." The nostalgic "climate," he said, indicated a "general abdication, an actual desertion from the present." Alvin Toffler advanced a similar view in his Future Shock. The transition from industrial society to "postindustrial" society, according to Toffler, left people disoriented and confused. Unable to face the future, all too many sought refuge in the past. "Reversionists" like Barry Goldwater and George Wallace "yearned for the simple, ordered society of the small town," while the left developed its own version of the "politics of nostalgia," based on "bucolic romanticism," an "exaggerated veneration of pre-technological societies," and an "exaggerated contempt for science and technology."

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According to Fred Davis, a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego, the "nostalgia wave of the seventies" represented a response to the "massive identity dislocations" of the sixties. "Rarely in history has the common man had his fundamental ... convictions ... so challenged, disrupted, and shaken." Nostalgic "reactions" had always followed "periods of severe cultural discontinuity," but they performed a useful purpose by cushioning future shock. "Collective nostalgia acts to restore ... a sense of sociohistoric continuity," Davis argued. It "allows time for needed change to be assimilated" and provides "meaningful links to the past." "Nostalgic sentiment ... cultivates a sense of history." But a sense of history, as we have seen, is exactly what the nostalgic -117- attitude fails to cultivate.

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Dudden, "Nostalgia and the American," Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1961): 515-30; Fred Davis, "Nostalgia, Identity, and the Current Nostalgia Wave,"Journal of Popular Culture II (1977): 4I4-24; "The Great Nostalgia Kick," U.S. News & World Report, 22 March 1982, 57; -537- Gerald Clarke, "The Meaning of Nostalgia," Time, 3 May 1971, 77; Michael Wood, "Nostalgia or Never," New Society 30 (7 Nov. 1974): 343-47; Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970); Peter Clecak, America's Search for the Ideal Self (1983); "Nostalgia," Newsweek, 28 Dec. 1970, 34-38; Frank Heath, "Nostalgia Shock," Saturday Review, 29 May 1971, 18; "Why the Craze for the 'Good Old Days'?" U.S. News & World Report, I2 Nov. 1973, 72; Howard F. Stein, "American Nostalgia," Columbia Forum, n.s. 3 (summer 1974): 20-23; Richard Hasbany, "Irene: Considering the Nostalgic Sensibility," Journal of Popular Culture 9 (spring 1976): 816-26; Roy McMullen, "That Rose-Colored Rearview Mirror," Saturday Review, 2 Oct. 1976, 22-23; "There's Gold in That Nostalgia," Newsweek, II Oct. 1976, 49-50; "Packing Up the Past," Good Housekeeping, Nov. 1979, 94ff.; Robert Rubens, "The Backward Glance: A Contemporary Taste for Nostalgia," Contemporary Review (London) 239 (Sept.

Extraterrestrial Civilizations
by Isaac Asimov
Published 2 Jan 1979

Then, too, while the frozen astronauts are in suspended animation and, as a result, do not age, and are not aware of the passage of time, this is not true for the people back home who sent them off (unless the entire population of the planet undergoes freezing, which we may dismiss as ridiculous). This means that, exactly as in the case of time dilatation, the astronauts will return generations later and will experience a profound “future shock.” In fact, even in the case of immortality, there would be difficulties. We might assume that if the astronauts are immortal, then the general population of the planet is immortal as well and that after the long trip the astronauts will return to report to the very people who sent them off long ages ago.

…

The expense would still be enormous, but it would be far less than that involved in sending human beings. We can indulge in greater acceleration, eliminate life-support systems for either living or frozen astronauts, and feel no concern for the psychological welfare of astronauts. Nor need we fear future shock, since there would be no particular reason for an automatic probe to return—and even if it did, it would not matter to it that generations had passed. We can imagine advanced civilizations sending out very advanced probes, but surely there must come a point of diminishing returns. The more elaborate the probe, the more difficult and uncertain its maintenance would have to be.

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Nov 2010

Only this time, instead of an enduring myth to elevate these ideas to laws, we need to rely on a purpose and on values as real and powerful as the science and logic our machines are using in their own evolutionary ascent. The strategies we have developed to cope with new mediating technologies in the past will no longer serve us—however similar in shape the computing revolution may appear to previous reckonings with future shock. For instance, the unease pondering what it might mean to have some of our thinking done out of body by an external device is arguably just a computer-era version of the challenges to self-image or “proprioception” posed by industrial machinery. The industrial age challenged us to rethink the limits of the human body: Where does my body end and the tool begin?

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again
by Richard Horton
Published 31 May 2020

After the West African Ebola virus disease outbreak of 2015, politicians and policymakers understood the need to build health services that could absorb, withstand and learn from external shocks while retaining their fundamental functions and adapting and transforming to soften the impacts of future shocks. The idea of resilience is still only that – an idea. What does a resilient health system or resilient health service mean in practice? There are some obvious headline elements: adequate financing; a sufficiently large and skilled health workforce; accurate information to guide a response; transparent and accountable leadership; good supplies of essential medicines and health technologies; and the surge capacity to provide additional health services when needed while maintaining everyday clinical care.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Kraft Foods, Mondelēz International, Bank of America, General Mills, Sony, 21st Century Fox, Johnson & Johnson, and CVS were just some of the advertisers who put their agency business up for review. Mandel’s kickbacks speech was a spur for the reviews, but it was hardly the only one. Indeed, its timing was exquisitely awful because advertisers were already being buffeted by change, facing disruptive forces in practically every sector of their business. As Alvin Toffler wrote in Future Shock, any industry bombarded by menacing changes endures “the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.” MediaLink brands itself as a neutral Switzerland, positioned comfortably in the middle, which is an odd definition of neutrality since MediaLink often represents all sides at a negotiating table.

…

: Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion (Vaynerchuk), 88 customized communications, 147–48 Czeisler, Margaret, 180–82 D’Arcy, Mark, 127 data, 33–34, 147–49, 155–69 addressable advertising and, 160–61 computer analysis of, 46 consumer empowerment and, 46–47 customized communications and, 147–48 digital frenemies collection and use of, 33 Facebook/Google refusal to share, 123–24, 126, 134–35, 149 facial expression databases, 161 Foursquare and, 155–57 GroupM and, 147–54 IBM and, 209–12 identity theft risks and, 163–64 MediaLink’s agency review process and, 20–21 opt in versus opt out, 154, 156, 157–58 privacy issues and, 33, 153–54, 157–58, 160, 163–69 programmatic advertising (See programmatic advertising) SocialCode and, 161–63 sources of, 148–49 Datalogix, 214–15 data mining tools, 33 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 42 DDB Worldwide, 253 Della Femina, Jerry, 40, 106, 143–44 Deloitte, 209, 213, 254 Dentsu, 10, 241 agency reviews and, 22 brand identity of, 100–101 revenues of, 100 Desmond, Laura, 15 deterministic model, 95 Deutsch, Donny, 305 digital fraud, 77–78, 265–66 direct consumer relationships, brand development of, 270–71 Disney ESPN, 192–93 streaming service of, 321–22 21st Century Fox purchased by, 335 Distil Networks digital fraud study, 77 Doctor, Ken, 315 Dogsled Enterprises, 8 Dollar Shave Club, 285 Donny (TV show), 305 DoubleClick, 33, 110–11, 276 Dove Hair, 80 Droga, David, 330–31 Droga5, 330–31 Dunham, John, 213 Dynamic Ads, 128 Ebiquity, 18 Economist, The, 325 Edelman, 80–81, 216–18, 307–8 Edelman, Richard, 80–81, 216–17, 218 Eisenhower, Dwight, 41 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 163 El Pollo Loco, 56–58 email, ads delivered by, 37 emotions, and advertising, 183, 184–85, 186 empathy, value of, 95–96 Empire (TV series), 136, 305 End of Advertising, The (Essex), 310 Equifax, 164 ESPN, 192–93 Essex, Andrew, 310 European Union Google investigation and fining, 326 privacy legislation, 311 Everson, Carolyn, 46, 70, 119–23, 127, 179, 272, 323–25, 335 at CES 2016, 227–28 childhood and education of, 120, 121 Client Council meetings organized by, 132–36 as consultant at Arthur Andersen, 120–121 executive positions of, 121 on gender equality, 233 hired at Facebook, 121–22 Kassan and, 119–20, 122–23 on limitations of machines, 275–76 mobile/mobile video ads and, 128–29, 179 on targeted advertising, 132 Everson, Douglas, 121, 122 Facebook, 1, 33, 46, 95, 117, 123–37, 197, 215, 323–26, 324 advertising revenues of, 23, 130 Atlas, 33, 111 at CES, 227–28 Client Council meetings at, 132–36 as competitor of ad agencies, 124–31 criticisms of Facebook ads, 136 data, refusal to share, 123–24, 126, 134–35, 149, 265 data collection, 158–59 as digital duopoly with Google, 124–25 Dynamic Ads of, 128 government reviews of privacy protections of, 326 hires human reviewers to screen content, 277 initial ambivalence to advertising of, 130 Kassan’s view of, 124 measurement mistakes made by, 271–73, 323, 324 mistrust of, and continuing mistakes and problems in 2017, 323–25 mobile/mobile video and, 128–29, 179 opportunistic business model of, 129–30 original program offerings, expansion of, 322 Sorrell’s view of, 101, 117, 123–24, 127 talent poaching by, 127 targeted advertising and, 131–33 threat to advertising and marketing industry posed by, 299–300 Facebook Effect, The (Kirkpatrick), 130 facial expression databases, 161 Faida, Till, 173–74 Falcone, Cristiana, 114–15, 329 false or deceptive advertising, 168 Farmer, Michael, 44 Fearless Girl (statue), 309–10 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 169 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 168, 178, 326 fee-based compensation system, 45 15% commission system, 27, 39, 44, 45 Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin-Syn), 188 Financial Times, 313 Finucane, Anne, 76, 91–92, 97, 127–28, 129, 297 Fishbein, Samantha, 220–22 Fishman, Rob, 236, 307 Fleet Financial, 91–92 Foursquare, 155–57 The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google (Galloway), 236 Fox, 136, 305, 306 Franken, Al, 156 fraud, and digital advertising, 77–78, 265–66 Friedland, Jonathan, 177 Future Shock (Toffler), 14 Gallagher, Bernard, 120 Galloway, Scott, 236 Garfield, Bob, 185 Garland Communications, 105–6 gender equality, 232–33 General Electric (GE), 83–86, 177 Breakthrough series sponsorship by, 84, 305 as content creator, 84, 219 Disruption Lab, 84 humanizing AI and, 266–67 multiple agencies, use of, 85–86 Podcast Theater, 85 shifting brand ID to that of cool digital company, 83–85 “What’s the Matter with Owen?”

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

Star Trek featured several that proved to be not so outlandish: the indispensable handheld communicators have become today’s smartphones, the personal access display device is now our tablet, and a universal translator exists, of which there are several apps to choose. Edward Bellamy’s enigmatically titled 1887 book Looking Backward predicted debit and credit cards, and 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined forms of social media, though nothing on the scale that we currently have. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock gripped readers in the 1970s as it predicted the exponential change destined to shake our society, and issued a warning: “In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future.” This future would create “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

…

See Financial Planning Association FPGA. See Field-programmable gat arrays France, 160 money in, 161 Fraud, 159, 215, 270 Fugger, Ryan, 41 Fuld, Richard Jr., 5 Full clients, 226 Fundamental analysis, 171–184 Funding mechanisms for, 220 of startups, 250–252 Fund-raising, xv, 252, 256 Funds, 239, 245 Fungibility, 47 Future Shock (Toffler), xxi Futures, 142–143 GABI. See Global Advisors Limited Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 28–29 Garzik, Jeff, 213 Gawker, 22 GBTC symbol, 232–234, 243, 246 ETF and, 234–235 NAV for, 234 GDAX. See Global Digital Asset Exchange GDP. See Gross domestic product Gemini, 128, 220, 236, 238 Geography miners and, 193–194 services and, 220 GHz.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

Susskind, R. and Susskind, D. (2017) The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tegmark, M. (2017) Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, London: Allen Lane. Templeton, J. (1993) 16 Rules for Investment Success, San Mateo: Franklin Templeton Distributors, Inc. Toffler, A. (1970) Future Shock, New York: Penguin Random House. Van Parijs, P. and Vanderborght, Y. (2017) Basic Income, Cambridge: Harvard University Press Mass. Voltaire (1759) Candide, Reprint 1991, New York: Dover Publications. Wilde, O. (1888) The Remarkable Rocket, Reprint 2017 London: Sovereign Publishing. Williams, T. (2003) A History of Invention from Stone Axes to Silicon Chips, London: Time Warner.

…

Robinson, Ed Tech Now, January 20, 2012. 21 Quoted in Seldon (2018). 22 Michael Gove speech at the BETT Show 2012, available at https:/​/​www.​gov.​uk/​government/​speeches/​michael-gove-speech-at-the-bett-show-2012 23 Bootle, R. (2012) The Trouble with Markets: Saving Capitalism from Itself, London: Nicholas Brealey. 24 Caplan, B. (2018) The Case Against Education, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 25 Ibid. 26 Quoted by Foroohar, R. in the Financial Times, November 12, 2018. 27 Quoted in Seldon and Abidoye (2018). 28 For a discussion of this, and other educational issues, see Chao Jr., R. (2017) Educating for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, University World News, No. 482 November 10, http:/​/​www.​universityworldnews.​com/​article.​php?​story=​20171107123728676 and Brown-Martin, G. 2017, op. cit. 29 Toffler, A. (1970) Future Shock, New York: Penguin Random House. 30 Carr, N. (2010) The Shallows, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 31 Brockman, J. (2015), pp. 26–7. 32 Autor, D. (2015) Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3). Chapter 9 1 Leonhard, G. (2016), p. 49. 2 This parody of synthetic logic has wide applicability.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising
by Jim Jansen
Published 25 Jul 2011

In Perceiving, Acting and Knowing, R. Shaw and J. Bransford, Eds. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Jansen, B. J. and Spink, A. 2003. “An Analysis of Web Information Seeking and Use: Documents Retrieved Versus Documents Viewed.” In 4th International Conference on Internet Computing, Las Vegas, NV, pp. 65–69. Toffler, A. 1970. Future Shock. New York: Random House. Johnson, C. H. 2009. Google’s Economic Impact United States 2009. Mountain View, CA: Google. Word cloud generated by Wordle 2 Modeling the Process of Sponsored Search This is an opening shot of changing the search engines from white pages to yellow pages. Bill Gross, 1998 as quoted in: Sullivan, D., The Search Engine Report [1].

…

“Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” In Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, M. Greenberger, Ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, pp. 37–72. [14] Schwab, V. O. 1962. How to Write a Good Advertisement: A Short Course in Copywriting. Chatsworth, CA: Wilshire. [15] Toffler, A. 1970. Future Shock. New York: Random House. [16] Simon, H. 1981. The Sciences of the Artificial, 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [17] Ghose, A. and Yang, S. 2008. “Analyzing Search Engine Advertising: Firm Behavior and Cross-Selling in Electronic Markets.” In 17th World Wide Web Conference Beijing, China, pp. 219–225. [18] Ghose, A. and Yang, S. 2008.

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation
by Richard Bookstaber
Published 5 Apr 2007

The demand that fueled the mania instead came from merchants and the working class—bricklayers, plumbers, and other tradesmen; clergymen and lawyers—who had only secondhand knowledge of rare bulbs, and who conflated the values of the ordinary and the extraordinary. What is more, most of the demand was not based on the bulbs themselves, but on a trading frenzy that adopted them as its currency. The florists and traders who bid the prices up to such absurd levels had little or no interest in owning or cultivating the tulips. FUTURES SHOCK, 1635 The speculative fervor was fueled by the development of a forward market for tulips in 1635. The flowers could not be disturbed and delivered until 175 ccc_demon_165-206_ch09.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 176 A DEMON OF OUR OWN DESIGN the spring, so bulbs were traded for future delivery.

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Senate hearings, 129–130 Epstein, Sheldon, 46–47, 49 index-amortizing swap, 116 Equity trading profitability, 71–75 proprietary reliance, 73–74 European Monetary System currency crisis (1992), 3 Event risk, 248–249 Factor exposures, 202 Fair value basis, 29 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 113 Federal Reserve policy shifts, 85 rate hike, impact, 53 Feduniak, Bob, 42, 52 Feuerstein, Donald, 196 Financial instability, aspects, 3–4 Financial markets, 224–225 Financial risk, 256–257 Fisher, Andy, 59, 80 Fixed income focus, 251–252 Fixed income research (FIR), 8–9, 43–44 Flood, Gene, 190 Franklin, Mark, 97 Free-floating anxiety, 235 Frictionless markets, 209 FrontPoint Partners, 204, 205 FTSE Index, 117 Fundamental data, 166 Furu, example, 233–235 Futures market, 17–19 Futures shock (1635), 175–177 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 16 Gamma, problems, 24–25 General Electric (GE), 41–42 Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), 135 Geographic regions, classification, 246 Global Crossing, restatements/liability, 135 Godel, Kurt, 222–224, 227–228 Gold, Jeremy, 8–9 Goldman Sachs acquisition, 75 public offering, delay, 109 Goldstein, Ramy, 116–118 Gracie family, 258–259 Gracie, Gastao, 258 Greenhill, Bob, 73 Greenmail, taxation, 13–14 Gross Domestic Product (GDP), 3–4 Growth bias, 202 Grubman, Jack, 128–130, 134 MCI/BT involvement, 69–71 nursery school admissions, 131–132 Gutfreund, John, 62–63, 105, 195–197 resignation, 199 Haghani, Victor, 102–104, 110, 112 Hall, Andy, 63–67 Hawkins, Greg, 51 Hedgefundedness, 243–244 Hedge funds, 165, 207, 214–215, 243 classification, problem, 245 classification, 245–246 control, 252–253 defining, 245 economic service, 219 existence, question, 244 regulation, 247–250 Heisenberg, Werner, 223–228 Hilibrand, Larry, 79, 110, 113 Human error, 149 272 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 273 INDEX Kaplan, Joel, 44–45 Kaplanis, Costas, 63, 79 Kidder, Peabody, 39–42 Knowledge, limits, 221–230 Krasker, Bill, 86 Liquidity basics, 213–220 complexity, relationship, 145 demand, 26, 191 hedge fund classification, 246 history, 217–218 impact, 212–213 needs, 183 providers, 213–215 role, 215–220 squeeze, prospects, 105 suppliers, 22, 192–193 supply, price elasticity, 94–95 transparency, 226 Liquidity crisis cycle, 93–94 prevention, 94–95 providing, hedge funds (impact), 214–215 Long-range forecasting, 228 London Exchange, Rothschild visit, 90 London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) government rates, parity, 57 higher-yielding LIBOR bond, 57 LIBOR-denominated debt, 56 Long-dated call options, 57 Long-Distance Discount Service (LDDS), acquisitions, 70 Long/short equity hedge funds, 200–205 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) capital reserves, assumption, 106–108 collapse, 93 decision point, 110 disaster, 57, 60, 92–93, 100, 145 hedge fund debacle/crisis, 1–3 leverage cycle, 97 liquidity risk, 107–108 losses, 108–111 management, initiation, 195–200 market price positions, feedback, 112 market risks, modeling/monitoring, 111–112 problems, public knowledge, 104–105 repurchase agreement, problem, 104 risk arbitrage position, 107 risk burden, 108 Long-term rates, short-term rates (interaction), 47 Loops, usage/impact, 45 Loosely coupled system, 157 Lorenz, Edward, 227–229 deterministic systems, 229–230 Langsam, Joe, 232, 236–237 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 223, 225 Lead-lag strategy, 193–194 Leeson, Nick (impact), 38–39 Leibowitz, Marty, 8, 51, 53 Leland, Hayne, 10 Leverage, 244 amount, reduction, 260 crisis, occurrence, 111–113 regulations, imposition, 248 Levin, Carl, 130 Lewis, Michael, 52 Liquidation ability, 93 Mack, John, 28, 29, 35, 37 trader emulation, 35 Macro data, usage, 166–167 Macro strategies, 202 Maeda, Mitsuyo, 258 Margin-induced sale, 94 Market aberrations, opportunities, 122 breakdown, reaction, 146 crises, worsening (aspects), 3–4 cycle, basis, 169 decline, respite, 23–24 exponential growth, 17 Illiquidity, cost, 217–218 Index-amortizing swap, 46–48 Information flow, process, 210 implications, derivation, 170–171 overload, 220–230 Information-based trading, 166 Information Technology (IT), support function, 185–186 Initial public offerings (IPOs), 72 creation, 173–174 issuance, amount, 178–179 Innovation, positive effects, 255–256 INSEAD, 66 Intangibles, 137–138 Interactive complexity, 154–157 Interest only (IO), 55 Interest rate, 84–85, 87 International Monetary Fund (IMF) package, 103 Internet bubble, 179–181 businesses, virtual nature, 172 stocks, run-up (1998), 178 Interrelated markets, complexity (by-product), 143 Intraday price movement, 183 Inventory service, 71 Investment buyers, scare, 22 coverage, 249–250 investor behavior, 203–204 strategy, 247 type, classification, 246 Investors, irrational behavior, 203–204 Irrational markets, impact, 180–181 Iverson, Keith, 48 Iverson, Ken Japan, liquidity, 39 Japanese swap spread strategy/profit, 100 Jenkinson, Robert Banks, 89–90 Jett, Joe, 39–41 Jiu Jitsu Academy, 258 Jones, Paul Tudor, 165 Junk bonds, 71 273 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 274 INDEX Market (Continued) failures, safeguards, 239–240 illiquidity, portfolio insurance by-product, 14 innovation, 11–12 makers, problem, 191–192 regulation, 146–154 risk, paradox, 1 volatility, 5, 25 vulnerability, 224–225 Market bubbles, 168–174 Market-to-book ratio, 138 Marx, Karl, 250 Marxist backward market, exploitation, 250 Material adverse change clause, 65 Maughan, Deryck, 59, 73–77 MCI Communications British Telecom (BT), merger/trade, 63–64, 67, 128 conclusion, 74 EPS, decline, 70 renegotiation, willingness, 67–68 stock, decline, 64 Mean-reversion analysis, 190 Mechanical failure, 149 Mercury Asset Management, 196 Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advice/underwriting, 33 Meriwether, John, 52, 100, 197 resignation, 199 Merrill Lynch, 42 Merton, Robert, 9, 207 Metallgesellschaft Refining and Marketing (MGRM), oil price risk (offloading), 37–38 Mexican Brady bond/Eurobond spread, 107 Mexican peso crisis (1994), 3 Miller, Heidi, 78–80, 140 Modigliani, Franco, 208–209 Money flows, 167 Morgan Stanley APL, usage, 44–45 Dean Witter, merger, 75 IT department, 43 portfolio insurance, 10–12 risk arbitrage department, 15 risk manager, 42 Morgan Stanley Asset Management (MSAM), 11 Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM), 205 Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), 54–56, 213 Mortgage market, 35, 54–55, 102 Mortgages, opportunities, 35 Mozer, Paul, 195–198 Munger, Charlie, 62, 99, 101, 197–198 Myojin, Sugar, 59, 63, 78–79 Natural catastrophe, 257 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) specialists, impact, 20–21 stock sale, 13 Noncash exchanges, 40 Norman Conquest, 215 Norris, Floyd (editorial), 91–92 O’Brien, John, 10 One-off events, 249 Opportunistic strategies birth/death cycle, 252 history, 251 Optimal behavior, mathematical framework, 237–240 Options, stripping, 117 Option theory, 24 Orange County, bankruptcy, 38 Organizational dysfunction, 134–136 Pacioli, Luca, 136–137 Pairwise stock trades, 187 Palmedo, Peter, 17, 28–29 Paloma Partners Management Company, 42 Pandit, Vikram, 12 Parets, Andy, 63–69 Parkhurst, Charlie, 85 Partnership model, 37 Perfect market paradigm, 209–210 imperfections, 210–212 liquidity, degree, 212–213 Phibro, Salomon acquisition, 66 Physical processes, modeling, 229 Platt, Bob, 7–8 Portfolio insurance, 10–15 market crash, 22 Portfolio managers, loss (risk), 204–205 Position disclosure, problems, 225 transparency, increase (financial market regulator advocacy), 225 Preference shares, illiquidity, 115 Price convergence, 121–122 Primal risk, 235–237 knowledge, limits, 230–232 Primogeniture, 215–220 implications, 216–217 objective, impact, 216 Principal only (PO), 54–55 Principia Mathematica (Russell), 221–223 Procter & Gamble, losses, 38 Program trading, absence, 24–25 Protest bids, 195–196 Quants, 8–9, 82–84 Quantum Fund, 180–181 Quattrone, Frank, 72 Rational man approach, 231 Real assets, valuation, 137–138 Real-world risk, 237–238 Reed, John, 127 Relative strength index (RSI), 190 Relative value trades, 101–102 Rhoades, Loeb, 125 RISC workstations, 191 Risk control, 220 knowledge, absence, 231–232 management, 36 nature, variation, 249 reduction, 185 progress/refinement, impact, 4 tactical usage, 200 274 bindex.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 275 INDEX Risk arbitrage, 15–16, 65, 71 Risk Architecture, 126 Risk-controlled relative value trading, 102–103 Risk-management structure, 238 Robertson, Julian, 165, 179–182 Rosenbluth, Jeff, 59, 83 Rosenfeld, Eric, 51, 79, 86 Rothschild, Nathan, 88–89 trading strategy, 90–93 Waterloo, relationship, 89–90 Rubinstein, Mark, 10 Russell, Bertrand, 221–223 Russia default, 103–104 Russian short-term bonds, 103 Salomon Brothers arbitrage units, 73–74, 80–82 closure, 88–89 tracking error, problems, 86–89 competition, 60–61 fixed income trading floor, 82 Japanese unit, 56–62 July Fourth massacre, 86–89 mortgage position, loss, 55–56 organization, trader involvement, 73 risk arbitrage group, mortgage position, 80–81 Travelers purchase, 77 Salomon North, 81, 100, 199 Salomon Smith Barney convergence trades, 120–124 proprietary trading, reduction, 92 risk management committee, 98–101 risk measuring/monitoring, 126 Travelers, interaction, 125 U.S. fixed income arbitrage group, 91–93 U.S.

Singularity Sky
by Stross, Charles
Published 28 Oct 2003

The UN system, at least after the Singularity and the adoption of the planetary uncon-stitution—" He snorted. "Once, the fringe anarchists used to think the UN was some kind of quasi-fascist world government. Back in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when strong government was in fashion because the whole planetary civilization was suffering from future shock, because it was approaching a Singularity. After that passed, though—well, there weren't a lot of viable authoritarian governments left, and the more rigid they were, the less well they could deal with the aftereffects of losing nine-tenths of their populations overnight. Oh, and the cornucopiae: it can't be pleasant to run a central bank and wake up one morning to discover ninety percent of your taxpayers are gone and the rest think money is obsolete."

…

Our first priority is survival; my second priority is linking up with the people I've come here to visit, and getting back to civilization comes third on the list. With me so far? Because there are no civil authorities right now, not the kind you expect. They've just been dumped on by about a thousand years of progress in less than a month, and if your local curator's still sitting at his desk, he's probably catatonic from future shock. This planetary civilization has transcended. It is an ex-colony; it has ceased to be. About the only people who can cope with this level of change are your dissidents, and I'm not that optimistic about them, either. Right now, we are your best hope of survival, and you'd better not forget it."

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

Lastly, resilience emerges out of a system’s ability to endure and bounce back from stress, like a jelly that wobbles on a plate without losing its form, or a spider’s web that survives a storm. Equilibrium economics became fixated on maximising efficiency and so overlooked the vulnerability that it can bring, as we will see in the next chapter. Building diversity and redundancy into economic structures enhances the economy’s resilience, making it far more effective in adapting to future shocks and pressures. Getting ethical There is one further important consequence of recognising the economy’s inherent complexity and it concerns the ethics of economic policymaking. Ethics are at the core of other professions, such as medicine, that combine the uncertainty inherent in intervening in a complex system (like the human body) with having responsibility for significant impacts upon other people’s lives.

…

Brander, L. and Schuyt, K. (2010) ‘Benefits transfer: the economic value of the world’s wetlands’, TEEBcase available at TEEBweb.org, and Centre for Food Security (2015); ‘Sustainable pollination services for UK crops’, University of Reading, available at: https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/food-security/CFS_Case_Studies_-_Sustainable_Pollination_Services.pdf 22. Toffler, A. (1970) Future Shock. London: Pan Books, pp. 374–5. 23. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin. p. 7. 24. Thorpe, S., Fize, D. and Marlot, C. (6 June 1996) ‘Speed of processing in the human visual system’, Nature 381, pp. 520–522 25. Kringelbach, M. (2008) The Pleasure Center: Trust Your Animal Instincts.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

Long before the average American had any experience of computers, they were the stuff of dystopic science fiction movies and “This does not compute!” jokes on Saturday-morning cartoons. Until well into the Reagan era, typefaces like Gemini (1965), Amelia (1967), Computer (1968), Data 70 (1970), and Orbit-B (1972) imparted a “Space Age” look to books of technological prediction, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock (1970), for instance. Those fonts were all patterned on E13B, designed by engineers at Stanford and General Electric in the mid-1950s for magnetic-ink check-reading machines. That an Eisenhower-era innovation looked like “futuristic” technology for three decades was a sign of complacency. Despite their long advent, the extent of change wrought by computers in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s caught by surprise everyone but a few well-connected industrial and financial titans.

…

Windsor (2013), 222, 228, 230 SWIFT, 192 Taft, Robert, 96–97 Target, 191, 224 taxation, 102–106, 110, 111, 138, 177, 196–197, 204–207, 210, 223 estate taxes, 223 Tea Party (movement), 96, 233–239, 264 technology (general), 132–139, 190–201 television, 38–39, 79, 81, 133 Tet Offensive, 72, 74, 75 Thailand, 181 Thaler, Richard, 213–215 Nudge, 213–216 Theoharis, Jeanne, 268 Thernstrom, Stephan, 160 Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), 157 Thirteenth Amendment, 5 Time magazine, 127 tobacco companies, 211 Toffler, Alvin Future Shock, 132 Toobin, Jeffrey, 260 Total Recall (film), 135–136 Totenberg, Nina, 225 Trilling, Lionel, 96, 97 The Liberal Imagination, 96 Trow, George W. S., 270 truckers, 97–98 Truman, Harry S, 40–41, 70 Truman Show, The (film), 136 Trump, Donald, 127, 279 Tubman, Harriet, 153 Turner, Christopher, 48 Turner, Ted, 163, 170, 208 TV Guide, 38 Tversky, Amos, 212 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 135 Twain, Mark, 153 Tylenol, 224 typewriters, 112 U2, 151 Ukraine, 181 Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, 149 United Nations, 26, 71, 163 U.S.

You Are What You Read
by Jodie Jackson
Published 3 Apr 2019

When the dogs heard the bell, they got a light shock. The dogs became conditioned to anticipate an unavoidable shock when the bell rang, and they did. In the second part of the experiment, the dogs were able to avoid such a fate as they had the option to free themselves. Once the first shock was received, they were free to avoid future shocks by jumping over a low wall to safety. There were two groups of dogs in the second experiment: ones who had participated in the first experiment and ones who had not. Interestingly, the dogs who had not been conditioned to believe this shock was unavoidable in the previous experiment hot-footed it over the wall as soon as they felt the shock to avoid repeating the unpleasant experience.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

That includes telling companies where they can invest. European Union officials talk of “strategic autonomy.” In both Japan and Britain similar moves are being made, especially to protect the economy from the Chinese.13 A new industrial policy is being forged around the idea of resilience—the need to build up capacity to deal with future shocks. Much better to order companies to store protective equipment and vaccines than rely on a global market that can easily be overwhelmed. Meanwhile the killing of George Floyd coupled with the far higher death rates for minorities and the poor from Covid has given a boost to the idea that society needs to be “leveled up,” especially when it comes to racial disparities.

The Unicorn's Secret
by Steven Levy
Published 6 Oct 2016

Papers circulated on topics like hypernumbers, thermodynamic systems of economics, zero-point energy, and Russian experiments in planting hallucinations in one’s mind. Recipients were grateful. “One day we started getting clippings from a man we’d never known, knew nothing about, and they came in envelopes from the telephone company! The clips were wonderful,” says Future Shock author Alvin Toffler. Heidi Toffler, who works closely with her husband, was particularly impressed with information Einhorn circulated on Ilya Prigogine. It was the first the Tofflers heard of the Belgian physicist who was later to win the Nobel Prize. They followed up on it, and Alvin Toffler eventually wrote the preface to Prigogine’s classic, Order Out of Chaos.

…

And at a New Year’s Eve party attended by the Synergy people, someone came up to Ira, perhaps a few drinks too full, and said, “Ira, I bet you killed Holly.” But Ira was able to laugh it off. Nineteen seventy-eight was a good year for Ira Einhorn. The network was thriving, focusing surely on the worldwide interest in Tesla-style technology, release of semiofficial documents of UFO sightings, and future-shock accounts of computer conferencing. Ira himself became a player in the latter field as a key consultant for Infomedia, a company that ran a computer system called PLANET. Infomedia was headed by Einhorn’s friend Jacques Vallee. Ira traveled that year with a computer teletype terminal that he used to maintain asynchronous communication with fellow futurists around the world; at little provocation he would amaze onlookers with this display of electronic magic.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

He says it is hard for some companies to accept that the world is changing and their products might be obsolete – for example, German car manufacturers that have perfected the internal combustion engine having to switch to electric. Oppenheim admits it is hard to know how the effects of the coronavirus lockdowns of 2020 will play out. On the one hand, companies might try to be more resilient for future shocks and governments could prioritise green recovery programmes, but on the other, people could be desperate to get back to normal and won’t have the financial resources to worry about the long-term climate crisis. But he is inclined to view the massive behavioural shifts as an opportunity: ‘I tend to believe this is a period in which we will see accelerated creative destruction with winner and loser effects.

Schismatrix Plus
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Jan 1995

I mean, think what’s become of his normal human contemporaries.” I nodded. “Most of them have become Mechs.” Kulagin shook his head fractionally, staring at the screen. “I was born here in C-K. I don’t know that much about the old-style Mechs, but I do know that most of the first ones are dead. Outdated, crowded out. Driven over the edge by future shock. A lot of the first life-extension efforts failed, too, in very ugly ways.… Wellspring survived that, too, from some innate knack he has. Think of it, Hans. Here we sit, products of technologies so advanced that they’ve smashed society to bits. We trade with aliens. We can even hitchhike to the stars, if we pay the Investors’ fare.

…

Strange ideologies had bloomed in the hot-house atmosphere of the o’neills, and breakaway groups were common. Space was too vast to police. Pioneer elites burst forth, defying anyone to stop their pursuit of aberrant technologies. Quite suddenly the march of science had become an insane, headlong scramble. New sciences and technologies had shattered whole societies in waves of future shock. The shattered cultures coalesced into factions, so thoroughly alienated from one another that they were called humanity only for lack of a better term. The Shapers, for instance, had seized control of their own genetics, abandoning mankind in a burst of artificial evolution. Their rivals, the Mechanists, had replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

• They use leverage: Great traders use the tools at their disposal, one of which is leverage. The key is not to overdo it like so many on Wall Street did. • They cause worldwide panics: Trend followers do not generate trends or cause worldwide panics; they react to unexpected events. They have no crystal ball. Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time. Alvin Toffler 280 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets • They don’t invest, they just trade: Reality? The markets are for trading, not for investing.

…

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 12 (1999): 183–206. Thaler, Richard H. Saving, Fungibility, and Mental Accounts. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Winter 1990): 193–205. Tharp, Van K. Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. Thorp, Edward O. Beat the Dealer. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971. Tully, Shawn. Princeton’s Rich Commodity Scholars. Fortune, 9 (February 1981): 94. Tversky, Amos and Daniel Kahneman. Belief in the Law of Small Numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76 (1971): 105–110. Tzu, Sun. The Art of War. Boston and London: Shambhala, 1988. Ueland, Brenda.

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders
by Connie Bruck
Published 1 Jun 1989

Christian Andersen, who had lived through what he refers to as the “Bataan death march” on Wall Street in the early seventies, when he bounced from one failing firm to another, declared that he once had thought of getting his doctorate and teaching history; but now, in 1986, he said he felt he was making history. “We are the gentlemen who finance and create change,” Andersen declared. “When I read [Alvin] Toffler’s Future Shock, and he described this vortex of change that whirls around us, and it happens very fast in New York City, and slower in Des Moines, and even slower in the outback of Australia, the thing that was amazing to me was, when I looked at the funnel of that maelstrom, the vortex of that sits right in the middle of my desk.

…

Conoco, 134 consent decrees, 37, 120, 160, 279, 321 Considine, Frank, 105, 122–26, 135–136, 138, 140, 145, 147–48 owner-managers as viewed by, 263 Consolidated Cigar, 198 Continental, 173, 175 convertible debt, 28, 38, 152, 269 defined, 27 hybrid (“Western”), 69 corporate America: Milken’s transformation of, 14, 19 Milken’s views on, 12 Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience (Hickman), 11 corporations: below-investment-grade, 11, 45 investment-grade, defined, 27 mergers of, see junk bonds, junk-bond takeovers; takeovers rating of, 10–11, 27, 45 cosmetics business, 234–35 Coss, Lawrence, 290–92 coupons, on bonds, 73, 82 CPC International, 233 Crane, 97 Cranston, Alan, 258 credit cycle, Grant’s theory of, 268 Crown Zellerbach Corporation, 17, 208 Cuozzi, Howard, 279 Dahl, James, 116–17, 291, 311, 325, 334, 336–37 D’Amato, Alfonse M., 171, 259–60 Dan River, 161 Davis, Martin, 200, 294–95 Davis, Marvin, 145 Daylin Company, 39, 292, 326 DBL Americas Development Association, 353 Dean, James, 271 Dean Witter, 65 debt: convertible, see convertible debt in fall of 1986, 269 Grant’s views on, 266–68 preferred stock compared with, 265 refinancing of, 108–9, 250, 269, 290 senior, 45–46, 98, 123–24, 166 straight, 27, 28 subordinated, 45–46, 59, 123, 166, 246 tax law and, 263–64 Third World, 254–55, 353 debt-to-equity ratios, 262, 269, 310 “deep-discount” bonds (fallen angels), 27, 38, 44, 119, 346 de la Madrid Hurtado, Miguel, 353 De Laurentiis, Dino, 54 Delaware Chancery Court, 199, 225–27, 232 Delaware State Supreme Court, 218, 227 depreciation, 113, 172 deregulation, 91, 97, 171 Diamond Shamrock, 322 Dillon, Read and Company, 30 discount-bond mutual funds, 33 Walt Disney, 13, 107, 164, 167, 291 diversification, 46, 199, 251–53 divestitures: Law’s views on, 263 Revlon and, 210, 211, 231 Dole, Robert, 258–59 Dominick and Dominick, 43 Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette (DLJ), Inc., 164, 169, 251, 253, 334 Dorchester Government Securities, 82, 300, 312 Dorfman, Dan, 257 Dove, Guy, III, 132, 279–80, 282, 284, 327 Drapkin, Donald, 135, 136 Revlon battle and, 194, 196, 199, 208, 215, 218, 220, 222, 225–26, 234, 237–39 salary of, 237–38 Drexel, Francis, 26 Drexel, Morgan and Company, 26 Drexel and Company, 26 Drexel Burnham, 30–40, 42–48 bonus pool at, 43–44 cultural clash at, 42 finance department changes at, 43–44 “high-value-added” course of, 46 medium-sized company growth and, 42–43 Milken’s firm within the firm at, 32–33 self-image problem of, 42 “Shearson Mafia” at, 43 Drexel Burnham Lambert: annual report of (1985), 255 Beverly Hills headquarters of, 80 Beverly Hills Savings suit against, 116–17 bonuses paid by, 247–48 California branch opened by, 50–53 charter of, 206 Chinese wall of, 306–8 client concerns and, 65, 67, 163, 177 commitment letters used by, 107, 165–66, 182 corporate finance group of, 48–49, 63–69, 88, 98, 247, 250, 298, 302, 307 corporate finance investment partnership in, 68, 299–300 creativity of, 135 default on “highly confident” letter of, 182 ebbing power of, 333–43 “equitize” slogan at, 269 equity of, 66–67, 69–70, 246, 288–289, 306, 314 in financial scandals, 254–55 formation of, 48 franchise arrangement of, 10–11 globalization of, 243–44, 251–52 Gobhai as consultant for, 62–66, 100–101, 163, 176, 245, 296, 299, 344 as god, 244–48 Green Tree lawsuit against, 291, 292 growth of, 80, 246–47 “highly confident” letter of, 101, 106–7, 166, 167, 182, 221, 250, 251, 290, 304, 344 high-yield mutual fund of, see HITS imitators of, 248, 275 internecine rivalries in, 88, 299–301, 340–41 “Joseph doctrine” of, 170, 171 LBO group of, 100, 163 market share of, 248 medium-size companies and, 13, 49, 347–50, 357, 358 merchant banking of, 66, 248, 249–50 Milken’s title at, 84 1983 junk offerings of, 78–80 Political Action Committee of, 259 political influence of, 258–60, 264–65 principal-mindedness of, 59, 66, 67 profits of, 19, 51, 64, 80, 98, 231, 247–48 public company debate and, 69 public-relations compaign of (1987), 348–50 side deals of, 74 Special Planning Committee of, 74 stability of, 269–70 stock of, 69–70, 206, 247, 253 Third World debt project of, 254–255 3 (a) 9 deals of, 76–77, 135, 209, 331 Underwriting Assistance Committee (UAC) of, 72, 131, 235, 304–7, 351 underwriting default rate of, 77 “war chests” of, 19, 117, 163, 164, 169, 180, 185, 202 as well-rounded firm, 251–52, 253 whatever-it-takes-to-win credo of, 341 World Trade Center headquarters of, 252, 333 yin/yang of Milken operation in, 57 Drexel Firestone, 23–24, 27–31, 43, 51, 271 Drexel Harriman Ripley, 24–27 decline of, 26–27 lineage of, 26 securities-delivery system of, 25–26 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1979), 11–12 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1983), 95 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1984), 206 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1985), see Predators’ Ball (1985) Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1986), 182–83, 257–59, 291, 302 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference (1987), 328 Dreyfus and Company, 151, 156 Dunmore Partners Ltd., 81 Duval, Albert, 156–58 DWG, 122–23, 124, 139 Eagleton, Thomas F., 171 Eckel, Lee, 259 Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 97 Economist, 270–71 Edersheim, Maurits, 87 EGM Partners, 300 EJ Associates, 81 Encino, Calif., 53–54, 80 encounter groups (T-groups), 62 Engel, Donald, 15, 18, 116, 117, 123, 125, 135, 183 forced resignation of, 15, 337–39, 340–42 in Japan, 243 Joseph’s reinstatement of, 338–42 Posner and, 121, 123, 338, 340 Prime Capital Associates and, 231–32 Revlon battle and, 208, 218, 220, 230, 231–32 Englewood Partners, 328 Enterprise Fund, 89 entertainment, 16, 60, 230 equity, 45, 66–67, 69–70, 156, 325 in Beatrice buyout, 250 of Drexel, 66–67, 69–70, 246, 288–289, 306, 314 Icahn’s views on, 163 in leveraged buyouts, 99, 107, 108 in National Can deal, 107, 108 Perelman’s views on, 236 in Phillips deal, 167 preferred stock as, 265 of Revlon, 216, 221, 225 risk and, 131 tax law and, 263 equity buyers, bond buyers vs., 73 ESB, 96 Evans Products, 124, 125, 128, 139 exchange offers, 66, 309–10, 312, 346 carrot-and-stick vs. buy-back, 76 registered, 75 in Revlon battle, 216–17, 224–25, 226, 228 unregistered, 75–77, 124 Executive Life, 167, 280 Exxon, 272 fallen angels (“deep-discount bonds”), 27, 38, 44, 119, 346 Farley, William, 14, 109, 135, 163, 201 Farley Industries, 17 Far West Financial Services, 168 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 72 Federal Election Campaign Act, 259 Federal Home Loan Bank Board, 92, 115, 280 Federal Reserve, 37, 211, 212, 215, 264–65, 266 Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Company, 115–16 FGIC (Financial Guarantee Insurance Company), 283 Fidelity, 47 FIFI (First Investors Fund for Income), 33, 46–47, 56 Financial Corporation of America, 131 Financial Corporation of Santa Barbara, 343 Financial Guarantee Insurance Company (FGIC), 283 Finneran, Gerald, 353 Finsbury, 277–78 Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 27, 30 First Boston Corporation, 30, 95, 248, 250, 253, 325 First City Financial, 168 First City Properties, 168 First Executive, 83, 89–90, 92–94, 124, 272, 276, 277, 281, 311 Atlantic Capital compared with, 280 First Investors Asset Management, 94, 277 First Investors Fund for Income (FIFI), 33, 46–47, 56 First Oak Financial Corporation, 280 First Stratford, 93, 281 Fischbach, 321–24, 352 Fitzpatrick, Dennis, 115 Flagstaff, 110, 111, 112, 160 “flexible balance sheet,” 75 Flight Transportation, 72–73, 306 Flom, Joseph, 101, 122, 157, 196, 206, 208, 226 Fomon, Robert, 41 food business, 109–11 Forbes, 58, 70, 124, 155, 209, 270, 272–73, 322 Ford Motor Company, 42 Forstmann, Theodore, 222, 226 Forstmann Little and Company, 99, 219–28, 231 Fortune, 335–36 14D documents, 133 Foxfield (Icahn estate), 189, 190 Fraidin, Stephen, 319 Frates, Joseph, 195 Frates group, 195–96 fraud, 72, 199–200 Freeman, Robert, 328–29 Freilich, Joseph, 151, 152, 153, 156 Freund, James, 106, 182 Friday, John, 43 Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson, 317 Friedland, Joel, 15 Fruehauf bonds, 345 Fuqua Industries, 44 Fuss, Albert, 214, 277 Future Shock (Toffler), 246 futures market, 251 Gable, Clark, 53 GAF, 181, 213, 233, 245, 275–76, 287–88 Wickes compared with, 295 Galef, Andrew, 265 gambling operations, 58–60 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 357 Gardiner, Nancy, 236 Gam-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act (1982), 91 Garrison Capital Corporation, 280, 284 Gateway Advisers, 83 GBL (Groupe Bruxelles Lambert S.A.), 206, 323 Gebauer, Antonio, 254–55 Gelson’s (Encino supermarket), 53 Geneen, Harold, 194–95, 220, 239 General Electric, 256 General Felt Industries, 79 General Foods, 48, 221 General Motors, 94, 96 Gentry, Grant, 202–3, 220 Germaine Monteil, 234 Getty, Ann, 236 Getty Oil, 164 Giant (movie), 271 Gibson Greetings deal, 99 Gillette Company, 234, 333 Gittis, Howard, 197, 202, 212, 214–215, 224, 232, 237 Glaser, Donald, 128–29 Glass-Steagall Act (1934), 26 Gleacher, Eric, 101, 208–9, 217 GLJ (Milken investment partnership), 81, 82 Gluck, Henry, 308 Glucksman, Lewis, 48 Gobhai, Cavas, 62–66, 100–101, 149, 163, 176, 245, 296, 299, 344 Goldberg, Arthur, 112–14, 118 Golden Nugget, 17, 58–60, 83, 168 Golding, Faith, 196, 198, 201, 202 Golding Family, 198 Goldman Sachs, 26, 30, 42, 49, 65, 69, 152, 248, 251, 252, 253, 318, 334, 335 earnings of, 247 in financial scandals, 254–55 mergers and acquisitions and, 95, 98, 200, 206, 231 Goldsmith, Jerry, 152, 153 Goldsmith, Sir James, 14, 17, 149, 205 Good, Daniel, 128, 140 Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, 251, 334 Goren, Alexander, 113, 160–61 Grant, James, 266–68 Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, 266 Great American, 36 Great American Management and Investment (GAMI), 305 great ideas, as “born bad,” 63 Great Lakes International, 118 Greenhill, Robert, 210, 220 greenmail, 18, 109, 118, 257, 263–264, 291 Icahn’s use of, 18, 109, 156, 157, 161–64, 169, 173–74 use of term, 155–56 Green Tree Acceptance, 290–91, 292, 326 Groupe Bruxelles Lambert S.A.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

It was like a huge amusement park going out of control.” I was only fifteen at the end of the 1960s, but it really was like that, even though not the entire park was haywire, and some astoundingly great new attractions (civil rights, expanded social welfare, feminism, and environmentalism) were being built at the same time. Future Shock, published in the summer of 1970, became one of the bestselling books of the decade. “This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change,” wrote the authors, whose lecture in Omaha I excitedly attended at fifteen, “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by submitting them to too much change in too short a time,” the “roaring current of change…so powerful today that it overturns institutions [and] shifts our values.”

…

Free Men and Free Markets. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1965. Tobin, James. “On the Efficiency of the Financial System.” Lloyds Bank Review 153 (1984). Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. 1835–40; New York: Library of America, 2012. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. Turney, Shad, et al. “Waiting for Trump: The Move to the Right of White Working-Class Men, 1968–2016.” California Journal of Politics and Policy, 2017. Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952. Waterhouse, Benjamin C. Lobbying America: The Politics of Business from Nixon to NAFTA.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Another fascinating 1980s automation book, this time about Japan and its culture of relentless factory roboticization. You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane (2019). A great primer, written by a prominent AI researcher, and one of the only books about machine learning that has ever made me laugh. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970). The book that kicked off the futurist craze, and still one of the best examples of writing about the psychological effects of technological change. The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener (1950). An examination of the morality of machines, written by one of my all-time favorite technological thinkers.

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology
by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel
Published 30 Sep 2007

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock — he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents.

…

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: they’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

This virtual self could evolve into an android self when the technology becomes ready. See Raymond Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005).Kurzweil’s work has captured the public imagination. A small sample of attention to the singularity in the media includes “Future Shock—Robots,” Daily Show with Jon Stewart, August 24, 2006, www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-august-23-2006/future -shock-robots (accessed August 10, 2010); the IEEE Spectrum’s special issue The Singularity: A Special Report, June 3, 2008; James Temple, “Singularity Taps Students’ Technology Ideas,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 28, 2009, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else
by Steve Lohr
Published 10 Mar 2015

The supply of data races ahead, while the ability to use it lags badly. To see the data paradox writ large, let’s return to the intensive care ward at the Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. The term “information overload” dates back at least to the 1960s, and the futurist Alvin Toffler popularized the phrase in his 1970 best seller Future Shock. Yet it seems a quaint understatement to Dr. Timothy Buchman as he surveys the twenty-room intensive care unit, where the hundreds of electronic medical devices are throwing off 160,000 data points a second. In the glassed-in rooms, there is so much medical machinery, so many respirators, pumps, kidney machines, and monitors for every vital sign and major organ, that it can be hard to see the patient.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021

By 22 February 2021, a year after the Diamond Princess episode, there had been 28 million confirmed cases in the US and more than 500,000 deaths. In 2016, following the record Ebola epidemic in West Africa, the World Health Organization decided it needed a strategy and preparedness plan, to guide research activities in the event of future shocks. Four of us – WHO assistant director general Marie-Paule Kieny; Ana-Maria Henao-Restrepo, a WHO specialist in vaccines; Mike Ryan, director of the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme; and me – set up something called the WHO R&D Blueprint, that would bring together scientists, public health specialists and regulators in an emergency to fast-track research into diagnostics, treatments and vaccines.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

In his 1962 book, The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States, he introduced the notion of the knowledge industry, by which he meant education, research and development, mass media, information technologies, and information services. He calculated that in 1959, it accounted for almost a third of US GDP, which he felt qualified the US as an information society. Alvin Toffler, author of the visionary books Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1980), argued that the post-industrial society has arrived when the majority of workers are doing brain work rather than personally manipulating physical resources – in other words when they are part of the service sector. Services grew to 50% of US GDP shortly before 1940,[viii] and they first employed the majority of working Americans around 1950.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer
by Eoin Ó Broin
Published 5 May 2019

Public housing, whether provided by Government, Approved Housing Bodies, cooperatives or community land trusts not only meets individual housing need but provides a much-needed buffer to the impact of market shocks on the overall housing system. The larger the public housing sector the greater the buffer. While there are a range of other policy interventions that are required to avoid or limit the impact of future shocks (some of which will be discussed below) the expansion of public housing on a scale not seen in the history of the State is the single most important, both to meet the growing demand for appropriate, secure and affordable housing and to protect our system in a way that policy makers, market operators and politicians failed to do during the Celtic Tiger era.

Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 17 Sep 2018

“They said it was a phantom shock,” Flood said.* “But no one can tell me it wasn’t related to the defibrillator. I’ve been shocked enough times to know what it was.” Flood’s defibrillator was adjusted to make it less sensitive to arrhythmias, but she continued to feel nervous, increasing the likelihood of future shocks. She stopped going to work and hired a full-time driver. She stopped going out with friends or singing in the church choir and eventually resigned from the school board. She had tickets to The Lion King on Broadway but didn’t use them because she was afraid of getting shocked during the performance.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
by Safiya Umoja Noble
Published 8 Jan 2018

Sue (Eds.), The Myth of Racial Color Blindness: Manifestations, Dynamics, and Impact, 175–190. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Tippman, S. (2015, July 14). Google Accidentally Reveals Data on “Right to Be Forgotten” Requests. Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com. Toffler, A. (1970). Future Shock. New York: Random House. Toffler, A. (1980). The Third Wave. New York: Morrow. Treitler, V. (1998). Racial Categories Matter Because Racial Hierarchies Matter: A Commentary. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21(5), 959–968. Treitler, V. (2013). The Ethnic Project: Transforming Racial Fiction into Ethnic Factions.

Blood Music
by Greg Bear
Published 19 May 2014

He cleared away the dining table instead. That night, unable to sleep, Edward looked down on Gail from his sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what he knew was real, and what wasn’t. I’m a doctor, he told himself. A technical, scientific profession. Supposed to be immune to things like future shock. Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy. How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? He grinned in the dark, and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything Edward—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.

Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity
by Paul Ely Beckerman and Andrés Solimano
Published 30 Apr 2002

But the current crisis has placed boys in particular at risk because of the expectation that they work and contribute to family income. The relationship between boys’ education and vulnerability is noteworthy. On the one hand, boys’ exit from school and entry into the labor market makes them more vulnerable to future shocks (by reducing their human capital). On the other hand, mobilizing sons to work in the labor market represents a key strategy for families to cope with negative welfare shocks. In terms of the health consequences of crisis, the incidence of teenage pregnancy, short birth spacing, and high fertility—which are related to inadequate health services—places women at risk of maternal mortality and morbidity.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

Using the Present to Forecast the Future For an excellent introduction to forecasting, read the first chapter of Martin Raymond, The Trend Forecaster’s Handbook (London: Lawrence King, 2010). I have Martin Raymond to thank for introducing me to the field of forecasting, and teaching me a great deal of what I know about it. For good examples of forecasting from the past, take a look at two prescient texts: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), and Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). CHAPTER TWO The Original Mad Men and the Job of Creating Desire To understand where the ideas came from that influenced the original Mad Men – people like Edward Bernays and Earnest Elmo Calkins and Christine Frederick – read Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: Macmillan, 1916); Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Unwin, 1903); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: H Liveright, 1928, IG Publishing, 2005 edition); Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Liveright, 1923); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Stuart Ewen, PR!

Smarter Investing
by Tim Hale
Published 2 Sep 2014

Serendipitously, such a process forces you to take money out of assets that have performed well and to reinvest them in less well performing assets in a disciplined, non-forecast-based manner. This avoids emotive decisions about the ‘value’ of markets, and may potentially result in a rebalancing bonus over time. Be prepared for the emotional impact of the portfolio you own. Get to know it. Understand just how big its potential falls may be. Desensitise yourself to future shocks as much as you can. Table 5.2 The importance of process Good outcome Bad outcome Good process Deserved success Bad break Bad process Dumb luck Poetic justice Source: Russo and Schoemaker (2002) 5.6 Wise words to leave you with Perhaps reflect a while on these wise words written by Charles D.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands: Martin Lindstrom, Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (New York: Crown Business, 2010), p. 12. 34. discovered that product placement: Ibid., p .14. 35. no discernible way’: Ibid., p. 126. 36. At the tail end of the twentieth century: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1984), p. 221. 37. It’s how Starbuck’s: Matthew Dollinger, “Starbucks, ‘The Third Place,’ and Creating the Ultimate Customer Experience,” Fast Company, June 11, 2008. 38. were at the Advertising Research Foundation: B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), p. 255. 39.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

Michael wanted to add ten million frequent flyer points to his account: "I want to fly to the South Pole, first class, Saudi Airlines, with a sleeper seat, and Reuben Kincaid sleep goggles made of passenger pigeon breast feathers." * * * Across the street from our house, these little kids were having a tiny garage sale: a single, spine-worn copy of Cosmopolitan, two filthy Big Bird toys, a paperback of Future Shock, and a cowboy boot remover. It was so depressing - and eerily similar to Susan's joke about Russian garage sales. Karla said, "Susan's right. The Russians'll never catch up." Ethan, over for a visit, said, "Au contraire, pal, they'll probably outlap us shortly." * * * Dusty was barfing all over the office sink when I came in this morning.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

Indeed, something I have long admired about long-distance activists is that they take this pushback for granted, accepting it as part and parcel of being one of those who “push the human race forward.”2 But, however much we may expect to encounter different views, it can be disconcerting, even shocking sometimes, to grasp how differently other people understand the future—if they think about and understand it at all. FUTURE SHOCKS Here is a very personal case in point. I was having an animated discussion, back in the 1980s, with a colleague who was at least twice my age—a conversation that has often resurfaced in memory. He was David Layton,3 an extraordinary man who had founded a highly successful industrial relations company, Incomes Data Services (IDS), and then gone on to found Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, with environmental pioneer Max Nicholson as managing editor and myself as founding editor.

The Best of Best New SF
by Gardner R. Dozois
Published 1 Jan 2005

I cleared away the table instead. That night, unable to sleep, I looked down on Gail in bed from my sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what I knew was real, and what wasn’t. I’m a doctor, I told myself. A technical, scientific profession. I’m supposed to be immune to things like future shock. Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy. How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? I grinned in the dark and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything I – or Vergil – could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.

…

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything. There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents.

…

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of presingularity mythology: they’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.

Gnomon
by Nick Harkaway
Published 18 Oct 2017

‘He got into biotech because he wanted to make a goldfish in his team’s football colours. He does the design work here on our system and outsources the experimental stuff.’ All of which was possible, it seemed, though I had had no idea. When did that happen? I said that perhaps I was suffering from future shock, and Annie replied wryly that the term ‘future shock’ was itself nearly fifty years old. ‘Although Rousseau complained about something very similar in 1778.’ I recognised the absent tone: this was something she said often, to meetings and conferences, to journalists asking whether the world was changing too fast. All the same: how was this all happening, under my nose, and I was just carrying on?

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 28 Mar 2011

As I mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter, keeping track of our predictions is not something that comes naturally to us: We make lots of predictions, but rarely check back to see how often we got them right. But keeping track of performance is possibly the most important activity of all—because only then can you learn how accurately it is possible to predict, and therefore how much weight you should put on the predictions you make.12 FUTURE SHOCK No matter how carefully you adhere to this advice, a serious limitation with all prediction methods is that they are only reliable to the extent that the same kind of events will happen in the future as happened in the past, and with the same average frequency.13 In regular times, for example, credit card companies may be able to do a pretty good job of predicting default rates.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

Tausk, Viktor, "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia," in Robert FJiess, ed., The Psycho- A nalytic Reader. New Yark: International Universities Press, 1967. Thurow, Lester C., "The Distribution of Wealth and Earn- ings." Public Interest Economics Newsletter, December 1975, pp. 2-3. Toffier, Alvin, Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. Wald, Carol and Judith Papachristou, Myth America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1975. Waldman, Anne, Fast Speaking Woman. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975. 370 BIBLIOGRAPHY Waters, Frank, Book of the Hopi. New York: Viking, 1963. Willett, John, ed., Brecht on Theatre.

Ninefox Gambit
by Yoon Ha Lee
Published 13 Jun 2016

The Guardian “Haley weaves two tales into a tight, compelling narrative. Champion of Mars is a thriller, an unnatural mystery and a strange sort of love story. Highly entertaining and original, and well worth a look.” Starburst Magazine www.solarisbooks.com THE FUTURE IS OURSELVES The world is rapidly changing. We surf future-shock every day, as the progress of technology races ever on. Increasingly we are asking: how do we change to live in the world to come? Whether it’s climate change, inundated coastlines and drowned cities; the cramped confines of a tin can hurtling through space to the outer reaches of our Solar System; or the rush of being uploaded into cyberspace, our minds and bodies are going to have to drastically alter.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

We go along with those who consider it a good sign, at the time of this writing, that there are “green shoots” of recovery, and that forecasters are talking about growth of GDP sometime in the near future. It would be far worse if people were gloomier. But the Animal Spirits view of confidence, both overconfidence and underconfidence, makes us wary. It tells us that we do not know what lies ahead. And now should be the time when we are making plans for what happens if there are future shocks: if there are future Lehman Brothers, future massive declines in the stock market, yet more unanticipated bankruptcies. In the United States, for example, we fear that neither the Congress nor the Obama administration is now readying the public for the possible necessity of further stimulus packages, or for further dramatic action by the Federal Reserve to support credit markets if that should become necessary.

Beyond Diversification: What Every Investor Needs to Know About Asset Allocation
by Sebastien Page
Published 4 Nov 2020

Despite these complications, the approach is quite useful because it allows investors to specify shocks or a combination of shocks that may not have happened before but that may be possible given current conditions. The propagation framework allows the investor to express views on a limited number of factors. There is no crystal ball. To the extent an investor lacks insights about possible future shocks, the framework will be of little help. The banker who told me that no one could have predicted the spread moves that occurred during the 2008 crisis wouldn’t have gained much insight from the framework unless someone identified the risk of a significant jump in structured credit spreads. The logic is circular.

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely
by Andrew Craig
Published 6 Sep 2015

Super Trader: Make Consistent Profits in Good and Bad Markets. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. Tharp, Van K. Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. Thiel, Peter A., and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Virgin Books, 2015. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1971. ———. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981. Turk, James, and John A. Rubino. The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets.

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation
by Sophie Pedder
Published 20 Jun 2018

Other Northern Europeans too have their doubts about what Mark Rutte, the Dutch liberal prime minister, has called deeper integration and other ideas ‘coming from France’. It may be easier in the short run to make progress on less controversial elements designed to protect the currency area from future shocks, such as the transformation of the eurozone bail-out fund into a proper European Monetary Fund, as well as some form of common investment vehicle. Far more difficult will be winning Germany round to a substantial eurozone budget, which Macron would like to be worth ‘several points of GDP’, let alone a finance minister or parliament for the currency area.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 22 Dec 2005

His research has been published in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Modern China, China Quarterly, and Journal of Democracy and includes such articles as “China’s Governance Crisis,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002); “Re-Balancing United States–China Relations,” Carnegie Policy Brief No. 13 (2002); and “Future Shock: The WTO and Political Change in China,” Carnegie Policy Brief No. 3 (2001). His op-eds have appeared in The Financial Times, The New York Times, Asian Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and other major newspapers. Dr. Pei received his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1991.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Published 1 Jan 1978

Futurology, in its infatuation with a technological Utopia in the offing (so different from a genuine concern for posterity), cannot see what is under its nose. Devoid of historical perspective, it has no way of recognizing the future when the future has become the here and now. Those who pride themselves on facing "future shock without fear retreat from the scariest thought of all: that social stagnation is not just a hypothetical possibility but a reality, which already has us in its grip. Indeed the prolongevity movement (together with futurology in general) itself reflects the stagnant character of late capitalist culture.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

By surrendering my natural rhythms to the immediacy of my networks, I am optimizing myself and my thinking to my technologies rather than the other way around. I feel as though I am speeding up when I am actually becoming less productive, less thoughtful, and less capable of asserting any agency over the world in which I live. The result is something akin to future shock. Except that in our era, it’s more of a present shock. I try to look at the positive: Our Internet-enabled emphasis on the present may have liberated us from the twentieth century’s dangerously compelling ideological narratives. No one—well, hardly anyone—can still be persuaded that brutal means are justified by mythological ends.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

"Gotta work together, y'know," Stanley booms, his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!" The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this book. To regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake. As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary converse, the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after wave of incoming computer illiterates. How will those currently enjoying America's digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic frontier be another Land of Opportunity—or an armed and monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the locked doors of our houses of justice?

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
by Peter Robison
Published 29 Nov 2021

John, James’s son and Sandy’s successor, tried to connect with employees, but he came off as patronizing. He recorded videotapes quarterly and sent them to the company’s 113,000 employees, or “teammates,” as Mr. Mac had always preferred to call them. The bearded, bespectacled Princeton graduate would offer advice about responding to change, quoting from books like Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. He cautioned his charges to avoid “petty competition, jealousy, and fear of losing turf.” In one of the videotapes he told a story about a gardener he’d spotted on the grounds of the St. Louis campus using a rake that was missing most of its tines: “Obviously, this person was not being very productive,” he sniffed.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
by Tim Flannery
Published 10 Jan 2001

YADOWSUN BOODHOO, President of the World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology, World Meteorological Organization Bulletin, 2003 The governments of both the US and Australia say they refuse to ratify Kyoto because of prohibitive cost. A strong economy, they believe, offers the best insurance against all future shocks, and both are hesitant to do anything that might slow economic growth. You might think that this would have precipitated a careful analysis of the costs of ratification versus non-ratification. Nothing of the sort has in fact occurred. Instead, wildly varying estimates have been produced by an array of special interest groups, and it is these that have informed the debate.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

Zuckerman, “The Problems and Promise of Hierarchy: Voice Rights and the Firm” (unpublished manuscript, November 11, 2014), https://ssrn.com/abstract=2523245. 4. Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004). 5. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970); Warren Bennis, The Temporary Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Henry Mintzberg, The Structuring of Organizations: A Synthesis of the Research (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979). 6. Valve Corporation, Valve: Handbook for New Employees (Bellevue, WA: Valve Corporation, 2012).

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Aria Bendix, “Activists Say Alphabet’s Planned Neighborhood in Toronto Shows All the Warning Signs of Amazon HQ2-Style Breakup,” Business Insider, April 14, 2019. 28. Marco Chown Oved, “Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans Massive Expansion to Waterfront Vision,” Toronto Star, February 14, 2019. 29. Anna Nicolaou, “Future Shock: Inside Google’s Smart City,” Financial Times, March 22, 2019. 30. Ryan Gallagher, “Google Dragonfly,” Intercept, March 27, 2019. 31. Shannon Vavra, “Declassified Cable Estimates 10,000 Killed at Tiananmen Square,” Axios, December 24, 2017. 32. Matt Sheehan, “How Google Took On China—and Lost,” MIT Technology Review, December 18, 2018. 33.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

The nature of the glut: Information overload in postwar America. History of the Human Sciences, 30(1), 32–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116686016; Schick, A. G., Gordon, L. A., & Haka, S. (1990). Information overload: A temporal approach. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 15(3), 199–220; Toffler, A. (1984). Future shock. Bantam. James Grier Miller … proposed dealing with information overload: Heterick, R. C. J. (1998). Educom: A Retrospective. Educom Review, 33(5), 42–47. Retrieved from https://www.educause.edu/ir/library/html/erm/erm98/erm9853.html “Every second, on average, around 6,000 tweets are tweeted”: Twitter Usage Statistics.

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms and the Corruption of Justice
by David Enrich
Published 5 Oct 2022

• seventeen did: Bernard Ascher, “The Threat to U.S. Lawyers from Competition by Multidisciplinary Practices,” American Antitrust Institute Working Paper, November 2006, 16. • at least a billion dollars: Regan and Rohrer, 3. • rivaled the auto sector: Brill, 30. • did so with gusto: James F. Fitzpatrick, “Legal Future Shock: The Role of Larger Law Firms by the End of the Century,” Indiana Law Journal, Summer 1989. • The number of recruiting firms: Galanter and Palay, 54. • “can create immense risks”: Fitzpatrick, 1989. • “Growth changes the character”: Galanter and Palay, 3. • more than 1,300 billable hours: Bruck and Canter, 2008

Planet Ponzi
by Mitch Feierstein
Published 2 Feb 2012

In 1790 Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the new United States, wrote that the country’s public debt, incurred as a result of war, was ‘the price of liberty.’1 He was perfectly correct. He also, however, made it clear that to incur debt was an emergency response to an emergency situation. In ordinary times, no government should seek to take on debt. On the contrary, during times of peace and prosperity it makes sense to pay down past debt as a protection against future shocks, creating room for maneuver. Indeed, it’s not even clear that a peacetime government has any moral authority to incur debt. On what basis can one generation choose to saddle its successor with a financial burden? In times of safety and prosperity, government debt should either be close to zero or moving toward that level.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Rather than looking to taxpayers to pick up the tab for big disasters, insurers would charge differential premiums (higher for those closest to hurricane zones), laying off the risk of another Katrina by reinsuring the risk through the government.86 But there is another way. Insurance and welfare are not the only way of buying protection against future shocks. The smart way to do it is by being hedged. Everyone today has heard of hedge funds like Kenneth C. Griffin’s Chicago-based Citadel. As founder of the Citadel Investment Group, now one of the twenty biggest hedge funds in the world, Griffin currently manages around $16 billion in assets. Among them are many so-called distressed assets, which Griffin picks up from failed companies like Enron for knock-down prices.

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes
by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne
Published 5 Sep 2007

Hidden right in front of us are powerful counterintuitive trends that can be used to drive a new business, run a campaign, start a movement, or guide your investment strategy. Even though these trends are staring us in the face, we often don’t really see them. Trend Spotters in Context I am part of a proud line of trend-spotters. Alvin Toffler, who wrote the Future Shock series, and John Naisbitt, who wrote Megatrends, were some of the first thinkers in the modern era to look at the huge, changing world of human behavior and try to make some sense of it with facts and data. They got it right that the Information Age would change everything. But one thing in particular that it changed was the nature of looking at trends themselves.

Eternity
by Greg Bear
Published 2 Jan 1988

His innards still curled at the memory of the experience. What would Karen have thought, from her less Western perspective? 94 GREG BEAR Born in China of parents defected from England, her capacity for wonders might be increased by a different attitude toward reality. At least, she had never seemed quite as culture-shocked, future-shocked, as Lanier had felt. She had accepted the inevitable and undeniable with calmness and pragmatism. Lanier knuckled his closed eyes and turned over, trying to find elusive sleep. Now that he could not possibly see her, he realized he missed Karen. Even with the hidden bitterness of their last few years together, they shared something with her when they were together: a common link with the past.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 32. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&. 33. Sarah Kessler, “The Sharing Economy Is Dead and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it#1. 34. “Prosumers” is a term invented by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1980). In The Digital Economy (1994) Don Tapscott developed the concept and notion of “prosumption.” 35. Interview with Robin Chase, September 2, 2015. 36. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9437095. 37. This scenario was originally explained by Don Tapscott in “The Transparent Burger,” Wired, March 2004; http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/start.html?

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

The poll of 15,000 people nationwide was conducted in 2005 by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies for IBN-CNN news channel. CHAPTER 4 1. Quoted in Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian, p. 159. 2. Dr. Tupkary said some of the terms and ideas had been borrowed from Alvin Toffler, the American futurologist, whose books The Third Wave and Future Shock were widely read in the 1970s and 1980s. 3. Readers interested in the Harappans have much from which to choose. They could start with Romila Thapar’s Early India, A. Ghosh’s The City in Early Historical India, F. Braudel, A History of Early Civilisations, or A. L. Basham’s The Wonder That Was India. 4.

Iron Sunrise
by Stross, Charles
Published 28 Oct 2004

Old Earth in the twenty-fourth century wasn’t home to the oldest human civilizations. Not even close. For this paradoxical fact, most people blamed the Eschaton. The Eschaton — the strongly superhuman AI product of a technological singularity that rippled through the quantum computing networks of the late twenty-first century — didn’t like sharing a planet with ten billion future-shocked primates. When it bootstrapped itself to weakly godlike intelligence it deported most of them to other planets, through wormholes generated by means human scientists still could not fathom even centuries later. Not that they’d had much time to analyze its methods in the immediate aftermath — most people had been too busy trying to survive the rigors of the depopulation-induced economic crash.

King of Capital: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
by David Carey
Published 7 Feb 2012

Lee Partners: Vyvyan Tenorio, “It Could Have Been Worse,” Deal, Jan. 7, 2010; Vyvyan Tenorio, “The Fallen,” Deal, Feb. 19, 2009. 16 Forstmann Little: Tiffany Kary and Don Jeffrey, “Citadel Broadcasting Can Use Cash During Bankruptcy,” Bloomberg News, Dec. 21, 2009. 17 In Britain, Terra Firma Capital Partners: Devin Leonard, “Battle of the Bands: Citigroup Is up Next,” NYT, Feb. 6, 2010. 18 The deals done: David Carey, “Buyouts and Banks,” Deal, Nov. 30, 2008. 19 The rescue of Washington Mutual: Geraldine Fabrikant, “WaMu Tarnishes Star Equity Firm,” NYT, Sept. 27, 2008. 20 Executives at two other: Background interviews. 21 One of Blackstone’s coinvestors: SVG Capital plc Interim Report 2009, 13. 22 TXU, the record-breaking buyout: David Carey, “Future Shock,” Deal, Nov. 24, 2009; Jenny Anderson and Julie Creswell, “For Buyout Kingpins, the TXU Utility Deal Gets Tricky,” NYT, Feb. 27, 2010. 23 A $900 million mortgage debt fund: Peter Lattman, Randall Smith, and Jenny Strasburg, “Carlyle Fund in Free Fall as Its Banks Get Nervous,” WSJ, Mar. 14, 2008; Henny Sender, “Leverage Levels a Fatal Flaw in Carlyle Fund,” Financial Times, Nov. 30, 2009; home page of Carlyle Capital, www.carlylecapitalcorp.com. 24 KKR Financial: KKR Financial Holdings LLC press releases, Sept. 24, 2007, and Mar. 31, 2008. 25 Apollo Investment Corporation: Apollo Investment Corporation Annual Report 2009, 24. 26 The steady profits: Craig Karmin and Susan Pulliam, “Big Investors Face Deeper Losses,” WSJ, Mar. 5, 2009. 27 “By December [2007]”: Background interview with an adviser to limited partners. 28 CalSTRS, was so cash-strapped: Karmin and Pulliam, “Big Investors”; background interviews with an adviser to limited partners and an executive at a private equity firm. 29 More than $800 billion: “The Leveraged Finance Maturity Cycle,” Credit Sights, Apr. 29, 2009; “Refinancing the Buyout Boom,” Fitch Ratings special report, Oct. 29, 2009; Mike Spector, “Moody’s Warns on Deluge of Debt,” WSJ, Feb. 1, 2010. 30 Peterson felt so badly: Confirmed in e-mail from Peter Peterson, Feb. 25, 2010, in response to a query. 31 That month the firm announced: Blackstone annual report for 2008, Mar. 3, 2009, 158. 32 Motorola’s cell phones were eclipsed: Freescale and Motorola annual reports. 33 “In every fund”: Stephen Schwarzman interview. 34 In early 2008: Freescale press release, Feb. 8, 2008; background interviews with two sources familiar with the change. 35 Chip sales … nose-dived: Freescale financial reports. 36 “The game on a deal”: Schwarzman interview. 37 Harry Macklowe: Jennifer S.

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

Kai-Fu and our team spent hours studying recently published research papers, conversing with experts, professionals, and thinkers involved with the AI industry, participating in the AI workshop hosted by the World Economic Forum, and visiting top AI tech companies, in order to ensure we had a comprehensive grasp of the technological and philosophical basis of AI development. The other challenge was imagining the human future. We wished to represent how individuals from disparate cultures and industries and with different identities would react to the future shock induced by AI. Subtle psychological details are difficult to infer through mere logic and rationalization. To help fill in the emotional portrait of the characters in our stories, we looked to history and drew inspiration from similar world-changing events that have occurred in the past. To stimulate our readers’ imagination and capacity to conceptualize alternative human conditions, we knew our stories must also spark empathy if we were to fully convey our vision and sentiment.

Rainbows End
by Vernor Vinge
Published 1 May 2006

Often the JITT was stuck in some diminished form of his/her new skill set… After the war, there was the legacy of the JITT-disabled veterans, and continuing abuse by foolish students everywhere. Poor Carlos. And just what is the Mysterious Stranger promising me? This had definitely been one of those future-shock days. Robert rolled down the window and felt the breeze sweep by. He was driving north on 1-15. All around was a dense suburbia much like the most built-up parts of twentieth-century California, except that here the houses were a little drabber and the shopping malls were more like warehouse districts.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

Lowe, “For Want of a Nail,” Analysis 40, no. 1 (1980): 50–52. 2. The term “adhocracy” comes from a very different context: management strategy. The term originated with the management scholars Warren G. Bennis and Philip E. Slater (The Temporary Society [New York: Harper and Row, 1964]) and was adopted by futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler (Alvin Toffler, Future Shock [New York: Bantam Books, 1970]). It was touted as a management strategy in the 1980s. (For example, see Robert H. Waterman, Adhocracy: The Power to Change [New York: W. W. Norton, 1993].) For a history of the term, see Timothy E. Dolan, “Revisiting Adhocracy: From Rhetorical Revisionism to Smart Mobs,” Journal of Futures Studies 15, no. 2 (2010): 33–50, http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/15-2/A03.pdf.

The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett Kobek
Published 15 Aug 2017

AUGUST 1992 Baby’s Birthday On my birthday, I invited Adeline to Limelight, knowing that she would refuse but asking anyway. She said no. I said fine. I made other arrangements, inviting Regina and Parker Brickley. The sacred anniversary of my advent fell on a night when Limelight was hosting Lord Michael’s Future Shock. A techno extravaganza with a bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Lots of people stayed far away, but I dug it. I thought it was beautiful how a bunch of fucked-up Staten Island Italians could come together, eat Ecstasy, and lose their machismo. Countless young men without their shirts, sweating and dancing and hugging, approximating love through the chemically mandated release of serotonin into their synapses.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

It could even exchange information with other machines by modem. His demo set off a storm of excitement in the Valley, which saw the makings of a brand-new industry. Public intellectuals, steeped in the countercultural excitement of the moment, announced the device as a step toward dismantling power structures and building a new society from the bottom up. Future Shock, a 1970 mega-bestseller, predicted a “technological revolution” empowering individuals above institutions. The sociologist Ted Nelson, a friend of Engelbart’s, wrote Computer Lib/Dream Machines, whose title (“Lib” short for liberation) and cover image of a single raised fist conveyed much of the message.

Eon
by Greg Bear
Published 2 Jan 1985

“We make sure that we travel in a group; we should never be separated,” he continued. “If we are, we protest—” “Hunger strike?” FaHey said. “Whatever works. It seems obvious to me that our hosts are not ogres, and it’s not likely we’ll be mistreated—dazzled a bit, perhaps, subjected to all kinds of future shock, but … We can handle that. We all survived our time on the Stone, so we can survive this. RightT” “Right,” Farley said, regarding Lanier with an expression of something more than respect for authority. Patricia glanced between them and put on what Lanier thought of as her sharp cheery look—a smile with an edge, her square eyes intense.

The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman
Published 1 Jan 2013

Khanna and his wife fashion themselves as successors to Alvin and Heidi Toffler, an earlier fast-talking tech-addled couple who thrived on selling cookie-cutter visions of the future one paperback, slogan, and consulting gig at a time. Today the Tofflers are best-known for inspiring some of Newt Gingrich’s most outlandish ideas as well as for popularizing the term “information overload”—a phenomenon which, as numerous scholars have shown, was hardly specific to 1970 (which is when Alvin Toffler mentioned it in Future Shock) and is probably as old as books themselves. To embrace the Tofflers as intellectual role models is to make a damning admission: that one is far more interested in inventing half-clever buzzwords than in trying to understand the messy reality that those buzzwords purport to describe. In a recent article in Foreign Policy on the Tofflers, the Khannas are unusually candid about what it is they admire about them: Need we say more [about this prediction]?

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

This book focuses on a rather unusual topic, and in general people who discuss unusual topics tend to be biased to use unusual methods, assumptions, and sources, and to draw unusual conclusions (Swami and Coles 2010). This correlation is biased, however, making opinions on odd topics overly odd and diverse, defended via an overly wide range of methods, sources, and assumptions. Today, there is a subculture of “cultural rebel futurists,” many of whom revel in “future shock” scenarios wherein today’s dominant cultural assumptions are visibly challenged by future behaviors. But while cultures can indeed make big net changes over time, they usually also work to find ways to see such changes as minimal and straightforward extensions of previous ways. That is, cultures try hard to assimilate and normalize their changes.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

When Peter Straub made out the check for his IBM Displaywriter, he remembers, “What excited me in the first place was the concept of being able to write on something like a television screen. I found that idea immensely appealing. I couldn’t exactly tell you why. It certainly smacked of the future.”7 Word processing on a personal computer must have seemed like future shock incarnate to any number of writers, Alvin Toffler’s widely read prognostications arriving humming, glowing, blinking on their desks in front of them. In this chapter we will look back to some of the first researchers and writers—working in close proximity to one another—who were in a position to glimpse that future, just beneath the surface of the glass.

Year's Best SF 15
by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer
Published 15 Aug 2010

Edison’s Frankenstein CHRIS ROBERSON Chris Roberson (www.chrisroberson.net) lives in Austin, Texas, and, with his wife and business partner, Allison Baker, runs the small press MonkeyBrain Books. He is an up-and-coming writer of fantasy and science fiction, with nine novels to his credit so far. His short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Interzone, Postscripts, and Subterranean, and in original anthologies such as Live Without a Net, Future-Shocks, and Forbidden Planets. He has so frequently been praised as a writer to watch that he remarks, “With all of these recommendations that people should watch me, I get the feeling I can’t be trusted.” His work has been nominated for awards for writing and he himself for his publishing and editing.

The Euro and the Battle of Ideas
by Markus K. Brunnermeier , Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau
Published 3 Aug 2016

Hence, a rule that limits ex ante the debt buildup, like the Stability and Growth Pact, helps to maintain a good reputation. In addition, maintaining credibility might require a government, under certain circumstances, to first renege on its existing debt, thereby getting rid of its legacy debt and improving resilience to future shocks. This is, for example, the case if a country suffers from debt-overhang problems. Delegation to Independent Institutions and a Game of Chicken Another way to mitigate the time-inconsistency problem to which elected policy makers, especially before elections, succumb is via a clever institutional design.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 15 Jan 2012

Lapham’s Quarterly, About Money 1 (2): 192–99. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Edited by R. Tiedeman. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Oxford: Blackwell. Legato, Frank. 1987. “Right Down to the Finest Detail.” Casino Gaming Magazine (October): 14–16. ———. 1998a. “Future Shock.” Strictly Slots (December): 98. ———. 1998b. “Weighing Anchor.” Strictly Slots (December): 74. ———. 2004. “The 20 Greatest Slot Innovations.” Strictly Slots (March), www.strictlyslots.com/archive/0403ss/SS0304_Innovative.pdf, accessed June 2007. ———. 2005a. “Penny Arcade.” Strictly Slots (June): 68–76. ———. 2005b.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

Its shelves were like the strata of an archaeological dig: each layer revealed more clues to Afghanistan’s overly eventful recent past. There were thick academic tomes on economics and sociology, in a variety of languages, brought in by the well-meaning development economists and missionary socialists of the 1960s and early 1970s. There were well-thumbed paperback best sellers—such as Alvin Tofflers portentous Future Shock, another artifact from my junior high years—in English, German, and French, left behind by the tourists and aid workers who had crowded into the country in the years when they were still welcome. There was a Communist-era propaganda pamphlet entitled CIA Agents Expose Their Crimes, published in 1984, in which captured rebels confessed to their sins against the state.

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism
by Steve Kornacki
Published 1 Oct 2018

And his work for Rockefeller, a liberal Republican from the Northeast, had put him in direct conflict with the party’s Goldwater-style conservatives. If anything, Gingrich’s politics were somewhere to the left of Flynt’s. The first Earth Day had been celebrated a few years earlier and he spoke approvingly of the new conservation movement. Invoking Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, a bestselling phenomenon of the early ’70s, he talked about technology and its potential to unleash vast societal disruption. There was no question racial politics were feeding the growth of the southern Republican Party, and even indirectly, it would benefit Gingrich. But it wasn’t just the end of Jim Crow that was transforming the South.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

TED, 2013 <https://www.ted.com/talks/skylar_tibbits_ the_emergence_of_4d_printing?language=en> (accessed 30 Nov. 2017). Time. ‘Meet the Robots Shipping Your Amazon Orders’. 1 Dec. 2014 <http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/> (accessed 30 Nov. 2017). Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by George Lawrence. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. Topol, Sarah A. ‘Attack of the Killer Robots’. BuzzFeed News, 26 Aug. 2016 <https://www.buzzfeed.com/sarahatopol/how-to-save-mankindfrom-the-new-breed-of-killer-robots?utm_term=.nm1GdWDBZ#. vaJzgW6va) (http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/World/2016/Aug19/367933-china-eyes-artificial-intelligence-for-new-cruise-missiles. ashx> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017).

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 19 Aug 2012

Lapham’s Quarterly, About Money 1 (2): 192–99. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991 [1974]. The Production of Space. Edited by R. Tiedeman. Translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Oxford: Blackwell. Legato, Frank. 1987. “Right Down to the Finest Detail.” Casino Gaming Magazine (October): 14–16. ———. 1998a. “Future Shock.” Strictly Slots (December): 98. ———. 1998b. “Weighing Anchor.” Strictly Slots (December): 74. ———. 2004. “The 20 Greatest Slot Innovations.” Strictly Slots (March), www.strictlyslots.com/archive/0403ss/SS0304_Innovative.pdf, accessed June 2007. ———. 2005a. “Penny Arcade.” Strictly Slots (June): 68–76. ———. 2005b.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

The Andromeda Strain, a hit in the new “disaster movie” genre, was about an apocalyptic virus brought down to earth by a fallen satellite. Dr. B. F. Skinner’s new bestseller, Beyond Freedom & Dignity—seven paperback printings in one year—asked, “If all of modern science and technology cannot significantly change man’s environment, can mankind be saved?” His solution: “We can no longer afford freedom.” Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler—seven printings in four months—said Americans were suffering a collective nervous breakdown: “In the neural system as now constituted there are, in all likelihood, inherent limits to the amount and speed of image processing that the individual can accomplish.” The public appetite for counsels of doom was bottomless.

…

“The rebirth of Israel”: Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth (New York: Bantam, 1971). “While you are reading these words”: Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1971). “If all of modern science and technology”: B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom & Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1971). “In the neural system as now constituted”: Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971). “There is a revolution coming”: Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam, 1971); “The Graying of The Greening of America,” Weekly Standard, December 19, 2005; Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990), 468.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

International Journal of Operations & Production Management 18, no. 1–2 (January 1998): 37–52. Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917. Thompson, Wilbur R. A Preface to Urban Economics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. ———. PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. Tomkins, J., N. Topham, J. Twomey, and R. Ward. “Noise versus Access: The Impact of an Airport in an Urban Property Market.” Urban Studies 35, no. 2 (1998): 243–56.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

According to a report published in 1980, economic development “involves a profound transformation of the entire economic and social structure” of a society, usually for the worse. Development was dislocating and disruptive, shattering “cultural identities” and leaving a trail of human wreckage behind it. One author, Alvin Toffler, coined a new phrase for its traumatic effects: “future shock.”*14 A new model of development was therefore needed, one that would lead not to “chaos” (meaning economic activity running beyond the control of government planners) but to stability as conceived by the late-liberal mind. In 1980, World Bank president Robert McNamara and former German Chancellor Willi Brandt assembled an Independent Commission on International Development Issues for UN Secretary Kurt Waldheim.† Although Paul Ehrlich’s dire predictions of twelve years earlier had failed to materialize, the commission’s mood had not improved: At the beginning of the 1980’s the world community faces much greater dangers than at any time since the Second World War.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Feynman), Recession Proof Graduate (Charlie Hoehn), Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy), The Martian (Andy Weir) Kamkar, Samy: Influence (Robert Cialdini) Kaskade: Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Ted Koppel) Kass, Sam: Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari), The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach), Plenty; Jerusalem; Plenty More (Yotam Ottolenghi), The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs (Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg), A History of World Agriculture (Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart) Kelly, Kevin: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Daniel Pink), So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Cal Newport), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), Future Shock (Alvin Toffler), Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (AnnaLee Saxenian), What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (John Markoff), The Qur’an, The Bible, The Essential Rumi; The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers (Yoel Hoffman), It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (Peter Walsh) Koppelman, Brian: What Makes Sammy Run?

The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East
by Andrew Scott Cooper
Published 8 Aug 2011

Schmidt made it clear that no greater challenge faced the West than high oil prices: “The economic problems are a greater threat to the West than the Soviet Union, the Middle East, or Southern Mediterranean problems. Giscard [d’Estaing, the president of France] and I both feel that the strongest country—the U.S.—must take the lead. It is a dramatic situation.” I SOMETIMES WONDER IF HE IS REALLY, NATURALLY A TOUGH GUY Future shock had already arrived in Iran in the form of an upsurge in religious-based political unrest and growing signs of economic crisis. By the summer of 1975 the world oil market was in a slump. Production was down from 84.9 million barrels a day to 64.9 million barrels a day. In the first half of the year Iran’s oil production slid 12 percent, to 5.4 million barrels a day from 6.2 million barrels.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

“Interactivity was using a paper teletype,” Chabay says, “and typing characters on a teletype and seeing it slowly chunk back, and the kind of educational use of computing that we all knew about at the time was drill and practice on teletypes where the teletype would print ‘3 + 5 =’ and then the student had to press a key, saying 8.” To then get a demo of the PLATO IV system was to experience Toffler’s Future Shock up close and personal. “To most people at the time,” Chabay says, “this stuff seemed like stuff from outer space. When you’d demonstrate this, people sort of didn’t believe you some of the time.” Children and teens, on the other hand, had no problem using the system. They took to it like ducks to water.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made
by Anne C. Heller
Published 27 Oct 2009

Rand never wrote about her indirect role in this achievement, but she did endorse Nixon in 1968, partly on the basis of his opposition to the draft. Perhaps the purest, least rhetorical, and hardest-hitting public statement of her views appeared in a March 1964 Playboy interview. With Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 would publish Future Shock, asking the questions, the text crackled with maverick intelligence. Explaining her choice of the dollar sign as an emblem in Atlas Shrugged and a trademark decoration on her person, she said, “As the symbol of the currency of a free country, [it] is the symbol of a free mind.” Asked whether she thought of the cross as a symbol of torture, as she had been quoted as saying, she replied, “I do regard the cross as the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the non-ideal. … That is torture.”

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

In 1997, a later version of the manifesto was released first onto the Internet and signed by hundreds of creative thinkers and then placed aboard the Cassini Huygens spacecraft. The activities of the first fully, explicitly, and exclusively transhumanist organization, Extropy Institute (ExI), shaped the intellectual and cultural movement of transhumanism starting in the late 1980s. Extropy magazine (subtitled “Vaccine for Future Shock” and then “The Journal of Transhumanist Thought”) was first published in 1988 by Max More and Tom W. Bell (the latter coined the term “extropy”). That publication, in its paper and online versions, presented ideas from numerous leading transhumanists, and included the 1990 essay “Transhumanism: Toward a Futurist Philosophy.”

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design
by Matthew Carmona , Tim Heath , Steve Tiesdell and Taner Oc
Published 15 Feb 2010

, The Planner, March, 11–15 Tibbalds Colbourne Karski Williams (TCKW) (1990) City Centre Design Strategy (Birmingham Urban Design Strategy) City of Birmingham, Birmingham Tibbalds Colbourne Karski Williams Monro (TCKWM) (1993) London's Urban Environmental Quality, London Planning Advisory Committee, Romford Tiesdell, S; Oc, T & Heath, T Revitalising Historic Urban Quarters, Architectural Press, Oxford Tiesdell, S; Oc, T & Heath, P (1995) Revitalising Historic Urban Quarters, Architectural Press, Oxford Tiesdell, S & Adams, D (2010) (editors) Urban Design in the Real Estate Development Process, Blackwell, Oxford Tiesdell, S & Adams, D (2004) Design matters: Major house builders and the design challenge of brownfield development contexts’, Journal of Urban Design, 9(1), 23–45 Tiesdell, S & Allmendinger, P (2005) Planning tools and markets: Towards an extended conceptualisation’, in Adams, D Watkins, C & White, M (2005) (editors) Planning, Public Policy and Property Markets, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 56–76 Tiesdell, S & Macfarlane, G (2007) The part and the whole: Implementing masterplans in Glasgow's New Gorbals, Journal of Urban Design 12(4), 407–433 Tiesdell, S & Oc, T (1998) Beyond fortress and panoptic cities – Towards a safer urban public realm’, Environment & Planning B: Planning & Design, 25, 639–655 Tiesdell, S & Slater, A-M (2006) Calling time: Managing activities in space and time in the evening/night-time economy, Planning Theory & Practice, 7(2), 137–157 Tiesdell, S (2002) New Urbanism and English residential design guidance, Journal of Urban Design, 7(3), 353–376 Toffler, A (1970) Future Shock, Random House, New York Tolley, R (2008) Walking and cycling: Easy wins for a sustainable transport policy? in Docherty, I & Shaw, J (2008) (editors) Traffic Jam: Ten Years of ‘Sustainable’ Transport in the UK, Policy Press, Bristol, 117–138 Tomsen, S (1997) A top night: Social protest, masculinity and the culture of drinking violence, British Journal of Criminology, 37(1), 90–102 Town, S & O'Toole, R (2005) Crime-friendly nieghbourhoods: How “New Urbanist” Planners Sacrifice Safety in the Name of “Openess” and “Accessibility” Reason, 36(9), 30–36 Trache, H (2001) Promoting urban design in development plans: Typo-morphological approaches in Montreuil, France, Urban Design International, 6(3/4), 157–172 Trancik, R (1986) Finding Lost Space: Theories of Urban Design, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York Tripp, HA (1942) Town Planning and Traffic, Arnold, London Tripp, HA (1938) Road Traffic and Its Control, Arnold, London Tschumi, B (1983) Sequences, Princeton Journal, 1, 29–32 Tuan, Y-F (1975) Place: An experiential perspective’, The Geographical Review, LXV (2), 151–165 Tugnutt, A & Robertson, M (1987) Making Townscape: A Contextual Approach to Building in an Urban Setting, Michell, London Tunbridge, J E (1998) The question of heritage in European cultural conflict, in Graham, B (editor) (1998) Modern Europe: Place, Culture, Identity, Arnold, London, 236–260 Turok I (2009) The distinctive city: Pitfalls in the pursuit of differential advantage, Environment & Planning A, 41(1), 13–30 U University of Reading (2001) Training for Urban Design, DETR, London Unwin, R (1909) Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to Artistic City Planning, T Fisher Unwin, London Urban Design Alliance (UDAL) (1997) The Urban Design Alliance Manifesto, UDAL, London Urban Design Alliance (2008) Capacitycheck: Urban Design Skills Appraisal, available at www.capacitycheck.co.uk Urban Design Associates (2003) The Urban Design Handbook, Techniques and Working Methods, WW Norton & Company, New York Urban Design Group (2008) Design and Access Statements Explained, Thomas Telford Publishing, London Urban Design Group (UDG) (1998a) Involving Local communities in urban design, promoting good practice, Urban Design Quarterly, Special Report 67, July, 15–38 Urban Design Group (UDG) (1998b) Urban Design Sourcebook, Urban Design Group, Oxon Urban Design Group (UDG) (1994) Urban Design Sourcebook, Urban Design Group, Oxon Urban Task Force (1999) Towards an Urban Renaissance, Urban Task Force, London Urban Villages Forum/English Partnerships (1999) Making Places: A Guide to Good Practice in Undertaking Mixed Development Schemes, Urban Villages Forum/English Partnerships, London Urban Villages Forum (1995) Economics of Urban Villages, Urban Villages Forum, London URBED (1997) The model sustainable urban neighbourhood?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

In addition to being tautological, the theory raises a number of other difficulties. To be sure, the intuition that lies behind the model (like that which lies behind marginal productivity theory) cannot be entirely wrong. All other things equal, a more patient society, or one that anticipates future shocks, will of course amass greater reserves and accumulate more capital. Similarly, if a society accumulates so much capital that the return on capital is persistently low, say, 1 percent a year (or in which all forms of wealth, including the property of the middle and lower classes, are taxed so that the net return is very low), then a significant proportion of property-owning individuals will seek to sell their homes and financial assets, thus decreasing the capital stock until the yield rises.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 10 Oct 2016

He had been at the Fed for just over a year, and like everybody there, he deferred to Greenspan’s record of success over almost two decades. Besides, as Geithner himself conceded, there were risks in being tough: even if the Fed’s forward guidance lulled traders into taking too much risk, it seemed perverse to address the problem of a potential future shock by shocking markets preemptively.60 As a result, nobody around Greenspan really challenged his thinking; and at successive FOMC meetings through the rest of the year, Greenspan persisted serenely with his “measured” strategy. Far from viewing the conundrum of low long rates as a problem to be fixed, he marveled at the smoothness with which monetary policy was operating.