Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock, where he introduced the idea that too much rapid change could leave people feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and disconnected. He called it “future shock” — and honestly, reading it today feels almost eerie with how accurate he was.
Toffler believed we were moving from an industrial society to a “super-industrial” one, where everything would change faster than people could handle. The book was a huge hit at the time, selling over six million copies, but what’s crazy is how much of what he talked about feels even more true in 2025. Some examples:
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Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.
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Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.
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Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.
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Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.
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Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.
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Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you’ve ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.
Toffler also talked about the “death of permanence” — not just products, but relationships, jobs, even identities becoming temporary and interchangeable. He warned it would cause “shattering stress and disorientation.” Looking around at the rising rates of anxiety, depression, and burnout today, it’s hard not to see what he meant.
I think about this book a lot when I read about some of the sick things happening today. Is this a warped perspective?
It’s not really so much the rapidness of the changes, but what is rapidly changing that worries me.
If we were rapidly moving towards progress, I’d be fine. But we are rapidly going fucking backwards here in the states.
I’m absolutely shocked at how racist the future got.
Was the past not racist?
Nobody’s suggesting it wasn’t. But a lot of us have lived our whole lives with the idea that racism was generally frowned upon by most and that it was naturally dying out. I don’t think many of us could have predicted how readily it would come roaring back, along with god damn nazis, FFS.
i’m in my early 40s. back when i was a kid - even in the southern US - there was a clear message that racism was on its way out. tons of sitcoms even did special episodes about it! (/s) And because media was so controlled back then (ie you couldn’t just post something to the internet), a lot of people actually blelieved it. i know that i did as a kid who didn’t know any better.
Is this similar to violent crime? A lot of right wingers bemoan the increasing amount of violence in “blue states and cities”. Except, almost by any way you can measure it, violent crime has been on the decrease for years now. Is racism becoming worse, or are you just becoming more aware of it?
I think it depends where you place the starting point. It’s certainly less racist than the 1800s, or even the 1940s. But if you only measure your own lifetime (so call it starting at the early 1980s), I think it did dip in the late 90s, and stayed in the dip until about 2008. Then it came soaring back to 1980s levels.
And now it feels like it’s rising, being used as a tool of fascism.
Serious question: if someone claimed deaths by smoking are up or down, there’s stats we could rely on to tell if that’s the truth or not. How do we tell the amount of racism in 2025? What statistic or statistics are indicative of racism?
I use general reactions of society. If you see things like protests, societial movements, riots, demonstrations, ect, it may not be an exact number, but in general if people are mad enough to take to the streets, we know those issues are on the rise.
And if everything is mostly calm, you know those issues aren’t the dominant issues of the day.
It also is harder because the internet has changed society. Now issues can grow and gain exposure to a global audience instantly. So it’s no longer grassroots movements. Thats what made the million man march so impressive. A million black men, marching in suits, because they knew if they didn’t dress up they would be mocked as thugs, all without the media to help them, all organized this way exclusively through word of mouth. And they had a million men march with them.
It wouldn’t be so impressive today. Now you can just post a thing online, the whole world sees it. Nobody gives a shit about clothing, and the march would be a petition online. And nobody would care.
nobody would care
Information Overload. The march doesn’t matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we’ve started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn’t matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it’s just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of “staying up to date” when it’s impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn’t matter because there’s a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there’s a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it’s back up by the time you check and you should’ve bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won’t be temporary.
Just spitballing, but you could track it by number of hate crimes? There’s the issue that the United States notoriously underreports hate crimes, so you might not be able to find accurate numbers, but I think that’s the best hard statistic you could find for racism
Hmm, that’s an interesting one. As a hypothetical, it feels possible to have a world that is crime free, but still has racism, so I see a possible hole. I guess another thing that will complicate it is that the definition of hate crime has evolved over the years.
The only real change was how open those assholes felt they could be. Doubt they increased or declined at all. They just got platformed.
Same here. Grew up deep in the South. Kids got in trouble for racist talk in public school.
i want to say i don’t know what changed, but the only thing that changed is that the government they hate said it’s fine to hate again. stupid isn’t even the word
Yes it absolutely was. And while we seemed for a while to have been on a trajectory where it was decreasing steadily, that sure changed quickly.
Eh, I’m not surprised. I’m more surprised at how comfortable with people being racist in public.
Same thing I think when I see Magats wearing that red cap.
Well counterpoint look at LGBTQ rights in the 70s.
Pretty bad, but things started improving in the 80s, through to the 00s, when it started getting worse, and now it’s all shit again and getting worse. And when it’s over, we have to dig ourselves out of the shitty bigot hole again.
Compared to 1970? Trump is making it worse but it’s not that bad yet.
Edit for the downvoters.
You kids have no idea how racist America was in the 1970’s.
1974, Boston:
https://segregationinamerica.eji.org/report/how-segregation-survived.html
Nope. The 1970s were better than the 60s, and worse than the 80s. And the 90s were better still. The early 2000s were even better… but here we are certainly backtracking from where things had been going.
But I didn’t say that the 70’s were worse than the 1960’s!!!
I said the 1970’s were worse than today.
Compared to
We’re in agreement. My “nope” was directed at your question. The rest of my comment was illustrating why I’m shocked at how racist things have become. Because the trend was to improve until recently.
I always feel like these posts are written by ChatGPT when I see multiple — in the text.
I’ll never forgive OpenAI for making the unordered list a reason to complain about content.
I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.
See the above sentence for an example
There are dozens of us that know how to type en- and em-dashes! Dozens I say!
I mean, I see the point, but chat GPT got it from somewhere. That somewhere being people writing like that.
I think that the use of em-dashes specifically is a result of either the preprocessing of the training data or postprocessing of the generated text. I doubt that the material the models are trained on (i.e. Reddit) contains more em-dashes that hyphens in the position of sentence breaks.
But it definitely gets the use of dash as sentence break from people writing like that. If you ask ChatGPT in another language, whose users don’t generally use dashes, e.g. Slovak, it won’t use then as much.
I didn’t see you at the – convention in Munich last year…
Its so weird to me that some people don’t even know what the hell an en or em dash is. In Spanish we use them to express dialogue in books so everybody has at least heard of it
Probably just that. As an ESL, I never encountered or taught about em dash. I would use semicolons they way OP uses those weid longer dashes. Probably the em dash is better / more “proper” way.
Does ChatGPT incorrectly put spaces around the em dash, too? There should be no spaces around an em dash—that’s a clue that implies a human writer.
And, em dashes and en dashes are great—they should be used more often.
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I used a tool online to validate it.
There is no reliable tool to detect AI content. A few months ago someone tried to do a “gotcha” on some of my content, citing AI generation by use of some “AI detector”. However, I ran some of their posts on LinkedIn through the same tool and it came up as 80% likely to be AI generated.
He vehemently denied using any AI at all — and was pretty annoyed to have the tool turned back against him.
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Err, did you read your own link? This wasn’t a deliberate “watermark”. It was a training error that resulted in some odd characters being inserted. This was a training defect that was fixed, not some sort of plagarism countermeasure. These marks were present for only a short time and only on a subset of OpenAI models.
Nah bro, we’re suffering from Late Stage Capitalism and Christo-facism.
This isn’t a bug this is a feature of the US. It’s always been intended to be this way. The mid 20th century was the outlier.
Here’s the Futureshock documentary I was show in high-school around 1982 for anyone interested https://youtu.be/fkUwXenBokU
I think some people are, but not everyone. But the people most prone to that future shock are the older, wealthier generations, and they’re using their wealth and positions of power to take out their confusion and fear on everyone else that still sees that the world has room for improvement.
If you leave your phone at home for one day, take a walk, get some coffee, meet a friend - but don’t use your phone, schedule in advance and tell them you’ll be phone-less, etc. You’ll find yourself feeling way less overwhelmed by a lot of these things. Phones keep us constantly aware of the changes around us. They make it seem like the world is whirring around much faster than it is. Basically, I guess, I’m suggesting “touch grass”. But I do think phones, in particular, are the worst for making us crash out like this.
The everything is already awful enough without us having to carry around a device that connects us to all the awful everywhere we go.
This made me think when was the last time I left my home without a phone and I would have to go all the way back before Nokias got popular in my country, shit these days I don’t even go to the bathroom without my phone. I hate the feeling of constantly being available to others, I hate pings and phone calls. I think I’ll buy a dedicated media player for music and audio books, and just carry a dumb phone with me that can only do calls and messages the next time I want to go out for a stroll.
When I go running the phone stays gone. It forces you to be present where you are. Very freeing.
Future Shock is pretty spot on with it’s predictions. Reading it convinced me to try and take things slower, and to spend less time on the phone, on the internet, which helped. Then covid came along, and pushed me right back into information overload…
Interesting points, maybe a book I’ll have to give a read to. I’ve long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we’re seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.
Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don’t just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.
Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don’t build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.
Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.
Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren’t looking at the many nuances and merits, you’re abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.
I’ve wondered if this is where we’ve seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone’s worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?
I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.
Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I’m really curious.
Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren’t as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.
I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.
The root of so many of our problems is we have the firmware from a prehistoric primate up in our head but we have to live in an environment that on the geological scale is more or less brand new. With the rate of change STILL increasing, natural evolution will never enable us to “catch up”. It’s only going to get worse from here on in, at least until the Singularity, when we can just hope that the AI overlords let us live our our days in a little human “reservation” while it keeps on rolling…
Fascism Shock, too.
Totally.
Thinks are obsolete before you even know they exist, or so it feels. But maybe it’s just the information highway making us taking in so much information 24/7. I mean where are the solar powered self driving cars?
“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”
Gibson?
Hacked it!
Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if I’m ready to die in my 30s. Any genuine humane reasoning for living is quickly denied.
Carousel!
Very cool idea!
Tho I think people from 70s would very much still choose 2025 living over 70s. People really underestimate how much better we have now.
Especially if you take a look at the whole world outside of US bubble. You think people in Asia and Africa yearn for 70s? You think people in Easrten Europe has any fondness of Soviet occupation? Future shock is shockingly great in their eyes.
I think the more apt issue here is simply the fact that US empire is falling as this shock does not replicate everywhere so clearly it’s not universal. Most places benefited greatly from information flow and imo it’s a very clear net gain.
Future Shock isn’t about the 70s or any decade being “better.” It’s about the effects of rapidly changing technology not that technology shouldn’t change.
Yeah but OP clearly implies that rapidly changing world is a bad thing when it doesn’t seem to be in most measurable metrics.
Tho I think people from 70s would very much still choose 2025 living over 70s. People really underestimate how much better we have now.
Couldn’t I yearn for a time that has neither the bad points of 1970 and none of the bad points from 2025? Not everything was worse in the 1970s, and not everything was better, either.
Sure the same way I yearn for Middle Earth then.
If you take at least half of a reasonable utilitarian position then 70s don’t stand a chance no matter how you look at it. Everything is literally better now except nostalgic bullshit like “housing was cheaper if I was white american” and “I couldn’t doomscroll” sort of nonsense. Absolute drivel.
I don’t find it too hard to indicate some things that were actually better in the 1970s:
- Consumer goods and appliances were typically more reliable and designed to be repaired
- Less additives in the food supply
- Obesity was less of a problem
- College education was more affordable with an entry level job
- Children had more freedom (would roam the neighborhood for hours unsupervised)
- Less surveilance
I can make all these points without saying “1970 was better in every way than 2025”. Why does it have to be all-or-nothing? Can’t some things have been better then and not worse?
He didn’t really “predict” any of it though just as Gordon Moore didn’t “predict” that computers are going to get faster.
Extrapolation from existing data might be a better term. What you cite already existed in 1970, if in lesser amounts than today.
He didn’t really “predict” any of it though just as Gordon Moore didn’t “predict” that computers are going to get faster.
You’re right: Gordon Moore did not “predict” that computers would “get faster”. He stated that the numbers of transistors on a chip would continue to double every two years. It’s only semi-recently that this has started to peter out.
I guess you’re not happy with usage of the word “predict”? There were plenty of people who weren’t Alvin Toffler that used the same data in the 1970s and drew the opposite conclusions. Do you disagree with what Alvin says or are you just trivializing what he wrote because it seems obvious to you?
