It’s possible this could be a Great Debate.
But, carry on.
Alan Toffler described “Future Shock” Future Shock - Wikipedia
as—… society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock he popularized the term “information overload.”
Trumpers, in contrast scorn information & knowledge. They do not read new information, they skim it to find things that confirm their extant beliefs. They view knowledge as a trick that elites use to keep them from power.
Is Future Shock (the phenomenon) a major cause of the Trumper movement?
I’m not sure if Future Shock is the correct model. Toffler was focusing mostly on technological change and people’s feeling of helplessness in the face of it. But AFAIK he was still viewing free speech and the empowerment of the common person as good things, and regretting their erosion. He focused on information overload, but still through conventional channels (with some aggregation/filtering/moderation through mass media – mostly a top-down model).
Some form of “social media”, where the common person could speak to the world, may have been predicted a long time ago; but I don’t think anybody in the 1980s predicted that the ability for every citizen to speak their mind could lead to a weakening of the entire top-down media infrastructure, to the undermining of truth itself and to social sabotage for political ends.
“Future Shock” just sounds to me like “Old people are baffled by the world of young people”, which is a statement that has been true for as long as there have been people. See also “the Singularity”.
Although social media as it exists today wasn’t (to my knowledge) really predicted before the 1990s, the problem isn’t individual citizens “speak[ing] their mind” but deliberate manipulators of public opinion who can harness and utilize social media in the guise of popular opinion. In traditional news media you have essentially two sources of information: ‘official’ announcements from press agents, public relations flacks, regulatory agencies, politicians, et cetera, which are typically some kind of (often readily evident) manipulation of ‘truth’; and unofficial ‘off the record’ source, original and derived research by journalists, et cetera, which are generally more factual. A notional third element are opinion pieces, ‘letters to the editor’, self-published/promoted books and films, et cetera, but with a few notable exceptions like the ‘Red Scares’ or Carson’s Silent Spring these have had little influence because they were more or less self-reinforcing ideas only absorbed by the small segment of the public primed and receptive to the message.
What has happened with the advent of ubiquitous social media is that ideas can be presented and seemingly spontaneously reinforced (either by deliberate repetition of ‘bots and supplicants, or propagated through memetic appeal) and flow rapidly through the public knowledge space. The veracity of this information is not checked and in fact much of what is communicated in social media is heavily biased if not completely fabricated but because there is no gating and often little or no attribution there are really no consequences for disseminating disinformation. This is being used by intentional bad actors to appeal to news ‘consumers’ at a base level, and unless a consumer is being deliberately incredulous about information delivered by such channels they are essentially helpless in the tidal flood of misinformation.
The “top-down media infrastructure” has always been a fragile thing, dependent as much on personalities as journalistic integrity, and never quite as good as discerning truth from the official pravda as it would like you to believe. (Hello, New York Times!) It’s viability was largely dependent upon their being only so many channels of information such that a true balkanization of information sources didn’t happen, and because most traditional news outlets got their information from the same feed there wasn’t a lot of variation or competition between outlets unless you got down into the weeds of off-label news sources and self-published investigative journalists. Now that you can get ‘news’ from any of a vast array of sources, and can pick and choose which version of ‘truthiness’ you want to allow in your diet, you can be directly manipulated by targeted propaganda instead of a general campaign of mostly-identical news and official sources.
Have you read Toffler’ book? Because for better or worse, it is far more than that. Toffler’s focus was really on the economics of what he termed a “super-industrial society” (essentially post-industrial), in which people become essentially dissociated from their communities, traditional vocational associations, familial connections, et cetera. For all that Toffler gets wrong in the details of his prognostications, the central theme of the book was essentially correct; people are overloaded with changing ideas, new (and often deliberately obscured) products and services that they are told they need, demographic and vocational shifts that challenge their sense of social constancy and economic stability, and so forth.
Now, societies have certainly undergone massive demographic and social shifts in the past, often due to warfare, famine, epidemic disease, social persecution, et cetera, often resulting in displacement and diaspora. The difference with this kind of change is that it is ubiquitous and there is nowhere to escape. The current (and mostly manufactured) outrage over ‘wokism’, for instance—which is just fundamentally recognizing the social variations that have existed throughout human societies since the tribal era—has no escape in the modern world because even if you move to a place where such views are widely disdained, you are still inundated with images of ‘woke’ celebrities and politicians, and presented with the array of diversity that was never seen in the previous era where ‘interracial’ relationships were banned on television by official decree and homosexuality was formally defined as a mental illness. There is no escaping this ‘future’ and it is indeed disorienting insofar as it contradicts everything that traditional society has held as norms.
Toffler was also largely right about the cause and effects of transitory vocations, migration into and between urban centers, et cetera. Institutions that were once held as fundamental are now under (often justified) constant attack or are undermined by their own inflexibility in the face of shifting social norms. In the past, societal shifts have been from one set of institutions to another—from Catholic to Anglican or Protestant, from Tsars to Bolsheviks, from slavery to peonage—often without much real change, or when radical change occurred it resulted in wholesale collapse of a society and generational trauma. But in Future Shock, the implicit premise is that such change is now constantly occurring without any means of coming to a new equilibrium, and so there are no trusted institutions or new social norms to follow, and thus people are in constant uncertainty about their status or ability to fit into society.
What Toffler—and most other prognosticators—have gotten wrong is the assumption of what a “post-industrial society” would look like. In fact, while the developed world sort-of fits the description of post-industrial and certainly post-agrarian, we have mostly just outsourced industrial activity to the developing world rather than to put the means of production into the hands of the everyday person. For all of the enthusiasm for being a “Maker” and in additive manufacturing, most people would have no idea how to make a chair, or milk a cow, or tan a hide, much less be able to understand and recreate the complex chain of manufacture of even simple technological materials and products such as aluminum cans or glass windows. What this outsourcing has gotten us is access to incredibly cheap labor and sufficient distance from ‘externalities’ of pollution and overuse of scarce resources such that the typical consumer doesn’t have to know or care how many thousands of gallons of fresh water went into making a pair of cotton jeans or the harsh life of Chinese worker assembling the smartphone that they will buy and then replace every year or two. In fact, our society is anything but post-industrial, and his incredibly dependent upon an underclass of labor that is mostly hidden from view like the Morlocks of Wells’ The Time Machine, and to the extent that we are observing a societal discord from social media it is that such media gives us insight into this divide between producer and consumer.
Some of us were still in school in 1970 when it came out and we were assigned to watch the following TV documentaries, Serious TV Panel Discussions and debate it in class. It was quite the conversation topic at the time, although I had far more important pimples in my immediate future to care much.
In 1970 was still very much only distant rumblings, and much of the actual technological advance, economic reorganisation and direct impact on society hit hardest a few decades later. Future Shock’s audience had almost a generation to see it coming true, but they’ve had another whole generation to live it as well.
I could see an argument where the sorts of people Trump appealed to have pretty much been busy paying attention elsewhere until the future was on them, and then spent the next generation blaming a war, politicians, Madonna, 3G etc etc, and being further marginalised while they maintained their denial and lack of understanding of what was happening all around them. What Trump did was to give them one more misdirected opportunity to retain their sandcastle as the tide comes in by giving them licence to vocalise their impotent anger, but with presidential backing, and a naive hope he could or wanted to change anything.
On this model these are the late adopters and laggards. They may see the future coming, they may even understand what is happening but they lack agency through their own inertia, poverty, lack of education, disregard to become part of it, and can resist it, but only by taking lower paid, technologically marginalised, obsolescent jobs, and feeling beseiged.
Yes, it sucks to be them and their grasping at Trump-shaped straws is no surprise. The important thing to not forget is that the rest of us were luckier but how did we reach out to them to soften or deflect the impact? These people are angry at the future but also the way capitalism and the rest of us have let them collide with it.
Reading Marx on alienation and Karl Polanyi on the Great Transformation would help one reflect on whether capitalism were at the root of the problems Toffler identifies
I’m not sure that Marx’s theory of alienation is really applicable. Marx was addressing the commodification of labor and disassociation of the worker to ownership of production which was the domain of the wealthy land/factory owner class. To the extent that is true in a highly industrialized society, the application to our current situation where the issues are less about the means of production—which have been sufficiently divorced from most livelihoods both in terms of vocational and geographic distance—than the control of economic ‘markets’ which are largely driven by speculative investment and innuendo. While it is true that there is a vast economic divide between what might be termed the ‘middle class’ but should more properly thought of as the ‘donor class’ (as in, it is their wealth and effort that keeps the functional economy going while their investment in retirement funds, residential real estate, and excessive discretionary spending on credit is what creates most of the ‘real’ wealth that is used by poorly regulated financial ‘investment’ institutions to make speculative investments) and the “1%-ers”, the reality is that for the most part the latter don’t really own any real means of production, either; instead, they are invested in corporate hedge funds, collateralized debt instruments, and personal or business real estate holdings whose value is entirely dependent upon a vibrant economy with low inflation.
Polanyi has much more relevance insofar as his focus was on how economies are a function of the society in which they operate (and vice versa), and that the concept of ‘self-regulating markets’ hinges on the question of regulating to what value or function. It has become in vogue for self-described progressives (including those who would ascribe to themselves the label of “Marxist” despite the historical reality of the failure of that particular socioeconomic philosophy in practice essentially everywhere it has been applied) to attack capitalism in any form as a root of evil, but in fact even highly socialized societies have some element of the acquisition and application of capital at their core because the concentration of wealth is the only practical way to build large systems of industry. Stripping away the ideology and the formal state ownership of industry in the former Soviet Union and it really doesn’t look much different from a functional standpoint than any marginally functional ‘capitalist’ economy save for the massive mismatch between production and demand; you still had an uberclass of ‘factory owners’ who derived their wealth and status from operating industry even if their advancement was through Communist party instead of school fraternities and familial connections, and as time went on the divisions became worse.
To the extent that the political problems in the United States are the result of economics, they are that we’ve effectively destroyed traditional vocations such as independent farming, semi-skilled craft labor, et cetera in pursuit of corporatized ‘efficiency’ without replacing those jobs with anything else, and on top of that have encouraged two generations of students that they should take out a lifetime’s worth of irrevocable debt in order to obtain a four year college degree in whatever area they could pass in, the debt of which funds future speculation but leaves tens of millions in a perpetual cycle of servicing interest. In other words, unregulated market manipulation predicated on the instilled ignorance of consumers.
Toffler didn’t address any of this because he predated these particular trends, and his concern was more about a constant if not accelerating rate of change that would never come to new equilibrium, and in that he was correct although not necessary for the specific causes he identifies in the book. It is even worse than those issues, though; if the projections of the impacts of climate change come to pass, and especially if they do so on an accelerated schedule driven by unexpected feedback mechanisms, there won’t even be fundamental security or stability anywhere. Climate-driving disruptions of trade, production, and agriculture will have long-reaching impacts that the current system of globalized security for trade—a legacy of the Cold War—will have impacts regardless of where you live or how wealthy you are. Even the extremely wealthy can only insulate themselves so much.
I think it would be spot on if Toffler had based his book on sociological change rather than technological. Many of the MAGA crowd are technically proficient but what they fear is the world they grew up in disappearing. It used to be any white guy could get a job straight out of high school and support a family and retire. Used to be that he didn’t have to compete against women and minorities in the workplace. Used to be that he never heard about people who didn’t pray like he did or love the “appropriate” gender. Freaks the fuck out of them so they prefer fascism to pluralism.
Not counting high school jobs, I entered the workforce almost 30 year ago in 1994. As a white guy with a high school diploma, I couldn’t get a job straight out of high school that would have allowed me to support a family and retire. And I’ve had to compete against women and minorities my entire life. In 1998, in Dallas, Texas, two of my coworkers were Muslim women who borrowed an unsued conferance room to say their daily prayers (and for some reason it really chapped the hide of one of my coworkers).
The America you’re talking about didn’t exist thirty years ago. It might not have existed 40-50 years ago. I’m not sure that’s the cause of any future shock.
It is “gesundes Vollksempfinden”-bigotry: misogyny, racism, homophobia, whatever; take your pick.
They want someone to “hurt the right people”.
There is nothing more to this “movement”.
Hateful little people emboldened by a “leader” that tells them it’s ok to hate everybody different to them. A story as old as time.
There is no appealing to these people, they like people like Trump, le Penn, Bolsenaro, Orban; who “tell it like it is”. The only path forward is to enthuse all others to vote for somebody else.
Trying to pick their brain to find their “reasoning” is a fools game.
The Trumper movement is about identity politics, not about technology.
Want the Trumper movement summed up? In the late 1970s, about 81% of Americans identified as white christians. The other 19% of Americans were non-white or not christian.
As of 2022, that number is closer to 40%. The other 60% of Americans are non-christian or not white. Whites only make up about 60% of the country at this point, and about 1/3 of them are not christians. White christians are technically a minority group now, down from 81% just a few decades ago.
Its really about that. That plus feminism, Islam, etc.
I don’t think Trumpism has anything to do with economic shocks. In fact I think one of the best predictors of which counties sent white people to the capitol on January 6th was how fast the non-white population was growing in that county. The faster the growth of non-whites, the more likely whites were to try to overthrow the government.
