Future Shock

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Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

° ° ° ° ° ° 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, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

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

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

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

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

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

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

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

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

(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

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

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

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

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

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

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

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

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

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

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

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

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

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

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

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

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

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

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).

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

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.

…

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.

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

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, collateralized debt obligation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, initial coin offering, Jane Street, margin call, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, non-fungible token, passive income, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, rent-seeking, RFID, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, smart contracts, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

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

Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Donald Trump, Donner party, Exxon Valdez, Future Shock, Joan Didion, Mahatma Gandhi, open immigration, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Yogi Berra

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

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

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

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

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

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

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

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

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, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

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

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

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

Abraham Maslow, basic income, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, Future Shock, Overton Window, profit motive, rent-seeking, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, universal basic income

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

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

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

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

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

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

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

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

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.

…

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

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

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, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

“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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

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

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, complexity theory, delayed gratification, desegregation, disinformation, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Future Shock, gentrification, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, scientific management, scientific worldview, sexual politics, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, War on Poverty, work culture , young professional

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

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

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.

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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

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

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

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

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.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

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.”

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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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

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.

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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.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

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.

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., 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?”

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

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.

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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.

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

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

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.

Understanding Sponsored Search: Core Elements of Keyword Advertising by Jim Jansen

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, bounce rate, business intelligence, butterfly effect, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, data science, en.wikipedia.org, first-price auction, folksonomy, Future Shock, information asymmetry, information retrieval, intangible asset, inventory management, life extension, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine translation, megacity, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, PageRank, place-making, power law, price mechanism, psychological pricing, random walk, Schrödinger's Cat, sealed-bid auction, search costs, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sentiment analysis, social bookmarking, social web, software as a service, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the market place, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

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].

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“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.

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

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."

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

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.

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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

Brexit referendum, delayed gratification, Filter Bubble, framing effect, Future Shock, Hans Rosling, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, race to the bottom, Rutger Bregman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, yellow journalism

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, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

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

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

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

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

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.

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

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

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.

…

., 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.

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

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

• 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.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

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.

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

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?

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

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, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

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.

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Alvin Toffler, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, cloud computing, conceptual framework, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information retrieval, information security, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, PageRank, performance metric, phenotype, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, union organizing, women in the workforce, work culture , yellow journalism

.), 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.

Home: Why Public Housing Is the Answer by Eoin Ó Broin

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, financial deregulation, Future Shock, global macro, housing crisis, Housing First, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, low interest rates, mortgage debt, negative equity, open economy, passive investing, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, the built environment

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

blue-collar work, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, Easter island, Future Shock, Honoré de Balzac, John Snow's cholera map, mass immigration, medical residency, placebo effect, publish or perish, Rubik’s Cube, selection bias, stem cell, the scientific method

“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.

Blood Music by Greg Bear

Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Future Shock, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley

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, Andrés Solimano

banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, currency peg, declining real wages, disintermediation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, income inequality, income per capita, labor-force participation, land reform, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open economy, pension reform, price stability, rent-seeking, school vouchers, seigniorage, trade liberalization, women in the workforce

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.

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

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.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

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!

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

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

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

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

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

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

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

‘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?

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

centre right, death from overwork, Future Shock, game design, transaction costs

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.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

Alistair Cooke, commoditize, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, full employment, Future Shock, Herbert Marcuse, invention of agriculture, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics

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.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

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.

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation by Sophie Pedder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, ghettoisation, growth hacking, haute couture, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, mittelstand, new economy, post-industrial society, public intellectual, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, urban planning, éminence grise

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.

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

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, bonus culture, book value, BRICs, business cycle, collaborative consumption, diversification, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Future Shock, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mortgage debt, negative equity, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, passive income, pensions crisis, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, smart cities, stocks for the long run, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

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.

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

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

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

Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Cal Newport, capital asset pricing model, commodity super cycle, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, currency risk, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, iterative process, loss aversion, low interest rates, market friction, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, oil shock, passive investing, prediction markets, publication bias, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, transaction costs, TSMC, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

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.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

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 Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

"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?

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

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

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

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

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

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

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).

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch

Abraham Maslow, classic study, cuban missile crisis, delayed gratification, desegregation, feminist movement, full employment, Future Shock, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, impulse control, Induced demand, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Marshall McLuhan, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, means of production, Norman Mailer, planned obsolescence, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, road to serfdom, scientific management, Scientific racism, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, yellow journalism

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.

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

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

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

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

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.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, call centre, chief data officer, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Future Shock, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, knowledge worker, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, medical residency, Neil Armstrong, performance metric, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, éminence grise

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.

Planet Ponzi by Mitch Feierstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, government statistician, high net worth, High speed trading, illegal immigration, income inequality, interest rate swap, invention of agriculture, junk bonds, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mega-rich, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, tail risk, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, value at risk, yield curve

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

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

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.

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bretton Woods, call centre, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, demographic dividend, digital divide, dual-use technology, energy security, financial independence, friendly fire, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, informal economy, job-hopping, Kickstarter, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, new economy, plutocrats, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

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.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

disinformation, Drosophila, failed state, Future Shock, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pneumatic tube, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

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?

Eternity by Greg Bear

Future Shock, index card, life extension, machine translation, white flight, white picket fence

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.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

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.

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Future Shock, Gordon Gekko, independent contractor, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, risk tolerance, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, sealed-bid auction, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, éminence grise

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.

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

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.

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

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.

The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Donald Trump, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, quantum entanglement, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, wage slave, War on Poverty, working poor, young professional

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.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game