Future Shock

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Future shocks are rapid advancements that severely disrupt society.

In 1977, media prophet Marshall McLuhan discussed CIA and FBI surveillance, and then spun it into one of the most mind-bending comments on identity in the digital age that is quite profound. Excerpt clip:

McLuhan: Yes because we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. Then no matter what part of the world we are in we can put them under surveillance. It has become one of the main occupations of mankind just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on and invading privacy. The invading privacy in fact just ignoring that it's a everybody has become porous, they got to let the light and the message go right through us. And by the way at this moment right we are on the air and we at on the air we do not have any physical body when you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body you're just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body you're a discarded being. You have a very different relation to the world around you and this I think has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their private identity.

Mike McManus: So that's what this is doing to me?

McLuhan: Yes. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being masked man. By the way one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia and so revivals on all hands in every phase of life today. Revivals of clothing of dances of music of shows of everything. We live by the revival it tells us who we are or where.

Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles heel. It's our weak point. We will buy anything if it see it got a good hard sell tied to it. What now briefly is this thing called media ecology it means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out to buttress one medium with another.

Full interview






If you’re interested in the concepts discussed here, "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler is a fantastic book by the way, he perfectly encapsulates on the page 50 years ago much of what we experience today:



Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler - PDF copy, 580 pages


Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is where it's at."


Excerpt from his book:

Intro para:

This is a book about what happens to people when they are overwhelmed by change. It is about the ways in which we adapt—or fail to adapt—to the future. Much has been written about the future. Yet, for the most part, books about the world to come sound a harsh metallic note. These pages, by contrast, concern themselves with the "soft" or human side of tomorrow. Moreover, they concern themselves with the steps by which we are likely to reach tomorrow. They deal with common, everyday matters—the products we buy and discard, the places we leave behind, the corporations we inhabit, the people who pass at an ever faster clip through our lives. The future of friendship and family life is probed. Strange new subcultures and life styles are investigated, along with an array of other subjects from politics and playgrounds to skydiving and sex.

Page 11-12:

Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease.

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps men, in fact most travelers, have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not.

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard
to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.

Alot of what Toffler wrote about is summarized in this Orson Welles Future Shock Documentary (1972):

[F2d5thCav]

"They" say quantum computing will defeat all known existing crypto.

That should be fun, sure to generate some chaos.

Cheers