Alvin Toffler

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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.” Alvin Toffler had been born to Jewish immigrants in New York in 1928 and was exposed across his childhood and adolescence to leftist ideas circulating in his extended family milieu.

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Four cyberspace enthusiasts—Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler—encased their IT vision in a manifesto, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” which they circulated in 1994. The title of the manifesto said it all: Cyberspace represented an opportunity to renew “the American Dream” and to adapt ancient and revered traditions of Anglo-American liberty for a new century. The manifesto was utopian in its conviction that the cybernetic revolution represented a chance to start the world anew and to free humanity from past shackles. Drawing on the work of the acclaimed futurist in their ranks, Alvin Toffler, it framed the revolution in terms of “Third Wave” innovation.46 The First Wave had made land and labor “the main ‘factors of production’; the Second Wave had ‘massified’ [labor] around machines and larger industries.

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

Reporting from the ground—particularly in the United States, Australia, the UK, Singapore, India, and China—have done much to shape this book. But I have taken inspiration also from thinking about what the great analysts of the past—Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Daniel Bell, Taichi Sakaiya, Alvin Toffler—would have made of the current situation. The future that appears on the horizon is not one that I desire for any country, or for my own children. This book is meant to rally those who cherish the independence, freedom, and possibilities for upward mobility that have been the hallmarks of liberal democracy over the past few centuries.

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This vision rests on a faith in—or an obsession with—technological determinism, in which new technology is our evolutionary successor.19 But is this what most people want the future to be? The Cultural Revolution What the tech oligarchs are already doing to control the culture should raise alarm. The IT revolution once appeared to be launching a more democratic era in communications, with the “de-massified media” that Alvin Toffler optimistically predicted. But what looked like a more diverse and open media world, where anyone could be a reporter or reach an audience, is turning into one where a very few companies control the information pipelines.20 Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults now get their news through Facebook or Google.21 Millennials in both the United States and the UK are almost three times as likely to get their information from these platforms as from print, television, or radio.22 The power of the tech oligarchy has grown at a time when print publishing and the firms that have dominated it are experiencing a secular and probably irreversible decline.

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After all, nearly 40 percent of private entrepreneurs also belong to the Communist Party.2 In the West, entrepreneurs have historically tended to be a force for liberalization and for limiting the power of entrenched aristocracies and clerical elites, since “commerce desires to be free,” in the words of the seventeenth-century Dutch economist Peter de la Court.3 By contrast, leading oligarchs in today’s tech and finance sectors are often inclined to support the heavy-handed “progressive” policies embraced by the dominant elements of the clerisy—as long as it doesn’t threaten their own fortunes.4 Thus the real cultural power lies in the “Brahmin left,” to use Thomas Piketty’s term.5 “Post-Economic Goals” Alvin Toffler predicted almost half a century ago that growing affluence would result in replacing the profit motive with more aesthetic goals, a quest for self-fulfillment, or unbridled hedonism. “Affluence serves as a base from which men begin to strive for post-economic goals,” he wrote.6 The “woke” values of the upper classes are an example of such “post-economic” goals.

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

In the 1970s, when cities like New York tried to tax companies and the rich, those taxpayers fled to lower tax locations. The downward spiral discussed in our introduction, where decline begets decline, seemed to foretell the future of cities. That is the backdrop for Alvin Toffler’s 1980 prognostication about the rise of telecommuting. Alvin Toffler and the Triumph of Telecommuting Alvin Toffler was a true scion of New York City. His father made furs, the products of the clothing industry that go back to the beaver pelts bought by the Dutch during the early seventeenth century. Toffler met his wife, Heidi, who deserves much of the credit for his writing, at New York University.

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more than 68 percent: Kneebone, “Job Sprawl Revisited: The Changing Geography of Metropolitan Employment.” garment sector: Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 41. 140,000 workers making women’s outerwear: Hum, “Mapping Global Production in New York City’s Garment Industry: The Role of Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Immigrant Economy.” 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.

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Schmidt, William H., and Richard T. Houang. “Curricular Coherence and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.” Educational Researcher 41, no. 8 (November 2012): 294–308. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12464517. Schneider, Keith. “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87.” The New York Times, June 29, 2016. www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/books/alvin-toffler-author-of-future-shock-dies-at-87.html. Schoen, Cathy, and Michelle M. Doty. “Inequities in Access to Medical Care in Five Countries: Findings from the 2001 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey.” Health Policy 67, no. 3 (March 2004): 309-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2003.09.006.

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

Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading." John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book." WALL STREET JOURNAL: "Explosive ... Brilliantly formulated." LONDON DAILY EXPRESS: "Alvin Toffler has sent something of a shock-wave through Western society." LE FIGARO: "The best study of our times that I know ... Of all the books that I have read in the last 20 years, it is by far the one that has taught me the most." THE TIMES OF INDIA: "To the elite ... who often get committed to age-old institutions or material goals alone, let Toffler's FUTURE SHOCK be a lesson and a warning."

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The book is more than a book, and it will do more than send reviewers raving ... It is a spectacular outcrop of a formidable, organized intellectual effort ... For the first time in history scientists are marrying the insights of artists, poets, dramatists, and novelists to statistical analysis and operational research. The two cultures have met and are being merged. Alvin Toffler is one of the first exhilarating, liberating results." CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: "Packed with ideas, explanations, constructive suggestions ... Revealing, exciting, encouraging, brilliant." NEWSWEEK: "In the risky business of social and cultural criticism, there appears an occasional book that manages—through some happy combination of accident and insight—to shape our perceptions of its times.

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NEWSWEEK: "In the risky business of social and cultural criticism, there appears an occasional book that manages—through some happy combination of accident and insight—to shape our perceptions of its times. One thinks of America in the 1950s, for example, largely in terms of David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society, while Michael Harrington's The Other America helped focus the concerns of the early 1960s. And now Alvin Toffler's immensely readable yet disquieting study may serve the same purpose for our own increasingly volatile world: even before reading the book, one is ready to acknowledge the point of the title—that we suffer from 'future shock.'" This low-priced Bantam Book has been completely reset in a type face designed for easy reading, and was printed from new plates.

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

The bulk of the other new rich either inherited their fortunes or are drawn from the ranks of the Russian oligarchs.24 The Favored .01 Percent Great wealth and high status, particularly at a young age, often persuade people that they know best about the future and about how society should be governed. “One needs imagination to confront a revolution,” observed Alvin Toffler.25 Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, a 37-year-old resident of San Francisco, announced in 2013 that he aspires to become mayor—of New York. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Like his fellow Oligarch, he maintains that his business expertise qualifies him to run the nation’s biggest city, even if he hasn’t quite gotten around to living there.26 The tech Oligarch’s ascendency has made them feel somehow different—and superior.

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By 1990, the Valley accounted for 39 of the nation’s fastest growing electronics companies, compared to just four along Boston’s Route 128. Over the ensuing decade, Valley firms, largely through the application of software, also overcame what had once been considered insurmountable competition from Japan.45 The great hope promised by this emerging, post-industrial information economy was perhaps best stated by futurist Alvin Toffler. He distinguished between bureaucratic, top-down “Second Wave” industrial firms—which still remain powerful in their own right—and the flatter, more dispersed, and fundamentally less hierarchical “Third Wave” firms. The decentralization of technology, allowing people to communicate without going through a centralized computer, Toffler reasoned, would weaken the power of “Big Brother,” promoting instead the decentralization of power.46 Being simply the medium of the message, software companies could not control it, it was believed, and few considered how such companies’ activities could prove harmful to the consumer.47 These new Third Wave companies, noted one journalist, were seen as “wildly productive but humane,” headed by entrepreneurs who embraced an “egalitarian” ethos that saw senior executives hobnobbing with janitors in an almost comradely fashion.

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Indeed, despite all the talk of increased mass transit usage, the percentage of Americans working at home has grown 1.5 times faster over the past decade; there are now more telecommuters than people who take mass transit to work in 38 out of the 52 U.S. metropolitan areas.88 This emergence of the “electronic cottage,” to borrow Alvin Toffler’s phrase, reflects the potential for democratization in the information age. It also represents an enormous environmental bonus, as it greatly reduces both energy use and commute times. Indeed, a study by Global Workplace Analytics finds increased telecommuting could reduce carbon emissions by over 51 million metric tons a year—the equivalent of taking all of greater New York’s commuters off the road.

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

Schenker, “A Different Scenario: Personal Computers in the 80’s,” InfoWorld 2, no. 6 (April 14, 1980): 11, Box 1, Liza Loop Papers, M1141, SU; Peter J. Schuyten, “Subculture of Silicon Technology,” The New York Times, May 10, 1979, D2. 21. McKenna, The Regis Touch, xi. 22. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), 29; Jobs quoted in Mills, “The Third Wave.” 23. Christian Williams, “Future Shock Revisited: Alvin Toffler’s ‘Wave,’” The Washington Post, March 31, 1980, B1. 24. “Tandy Radio Shack Assaults the Small Computer Market,” The Rosen Electronics Letter 80, no. 14 (August 8, 1980), Catalog No. 102661121, CHM; McKenna, The Regis Touch, 62. 25.

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The machine seemed to be winning. When that happens, Ellul concluded darkly, “everything will be ordered, and the strains of human passions will be lost amid the chromium gleam.”19 Perhaps no author captured the information-age zeitgeist more thoroughly than a journalist and self-appointed futurist named Alvin Toffler. The hyperkinetic New Yorker had started his adult life as a Marxist civil rights activist, which he followed with several years experiencing the workingman’s life as a welder in Cleveland. Eventually he moved into journalism, ultimately leaving Marx behind to become an editor at the buoyantly capitalist Fortune magazine.

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(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. He predicted that technology would break down large bureaucracies into an “ad-hocracy” of many smaller, more agile units that could grow and shrink on demand.

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

.: Space policy institute, George Washington University, 1988), or Linda Billings, “Ideology, Advocacy, and Spaceflight: Evolution of a Cultural Narrative” in The Societal Impact of Spaceflight, Stephen J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds. (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.

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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.

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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. Like most conservatives, he pays lip service to women’s equality as an abstract principle, but never mentions actual feminists or feminist issues except to criticize them: for a typical example, see his Revolutionary Wealth: How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives, Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler (New York: Doubleday, 2006), pp. 132–33. It is certainly curious that both Toffler and Gilder are so obsessed with the threat to motherhood: it’s as if both are basing their politics on an opposition to the ideas of Shulamith Firestone, long before Firestone herself had actually appeared on the scene. 88.

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

The “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” represented the combined efforts of four authors: Esther Dyson, George Gilder, Alvin Toffler, and George Keyworth, who was Ronald Reagan’s former science adviser and a current PFF staffer. The document’s preamble opened with a grand flourish: “The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. . . . The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.” On the one hand, this triumph of the immaterial reflected Alvin Toffler’s claim that a “Third Wave” of socioeconomic change was sweeping the world. In the first wave, farming and manual labor dominated the economy; in the second, machines and mass production ruled the land.

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The builders of computers and telecommunications networks, suggested Wired—men like John Malone of TV cable behemoth TCI, Frank Biondi and Ed Horowitz of Viacom, and Bill Gates of Microsoft—were working to construct the hightech infrastructure of a new and better world. So too were libertarian pundits and politicians. In the logic of Wired, they were simply social, as opposed to technical, engineers. Like their brethren in Silicon Valley, conservative author and media analyst George Gilder, futurist Alvin Toffler, and Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich were working to bring about individual liberation and government by contract and code. Together, Wired seemed to suggest, these two communities had set about to free America and the world from the rigid, oppressive corporate and government bureaucracies of the twentieth century.

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The elections of 1994 ushered in the first Republican majority in both houses of Congress for forty years. Led by Newt Gingrich, the House of Representatives in the mid-1990s pushed for the downsizing of government and widespread deregulation— especially in the telecommunications sector. Together with Alvin Toffler, George Gilder, and technology journalist and entrepreneur Esther Dyson, Gingrich argued that America was about to enter a new era, one in which technology would do away with the need for bureaucratic oversight of both markets and politics. As Gingrich and others saw it, deregulation would free markets to become the engines of political and social change that they were meant to be.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism by David Golumbia

3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Californian Ideology, Cody Wilson, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, digital rights, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Ian Bogost, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, printed gun, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart contracts, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Travis Kalanick, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

The most important of these redefined terms that occur repeatedly in discussions of Bitcoin are “freedom” and “government,” both of which are central to all cyberlibertarian and political libertarian rhetoric. Referring to the 1994 manifesto “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, Winner (1997, 16) writes: Characteristic of this way of thinking is a tendency to conflate the activities of freedom-seeking individuals with the operations of enormous, profit-seeking business firms. In the “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” concepts of rights, freedoms, access, and ownership justified as appropriate to individuals are marshaled to support the machinations of enormous transnational firms.

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“The Politics of Cryptography: Bitcoin and the Ordering Machines.” Journal of Peer Production 4 (January). http://peerproduction.net/. DuPont, Quinn, and Bill Maurer. 2015. “Ledgers and Law in the Blockchain.” King’s Review (June 23). http://kingsreview.co.uk/. Dyson, Esther, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler. 1994. “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age.” Future Insight (August). http://www.pff.org/. Emery, Joel, and Miranda Stewart. 2015. “All around the World, Regulators Are Realizing Bitcoin Is Money.” The Conversation (August 11). http://theconversation.com/. Epperson, A.

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

“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. Einhorn would send out these papers without much comment. Sometimes he would scribble a line or two about the importance of a given document, mentioning perhaps that it dealt with an issue that would attain mind-boggling significance in the months ahead.

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He met with two close friends, one of them the managing director of the Lehmann Brothers investment firm, the other an executive vice-president of AT&T. Then, in a crosstown hop that could well stand as definitive of his present existence, Ira rode in the phone company executive’s limousine to former radical Jerry Rubin’s apartment, where he would stay the night. The two sixties’ veterans rapped until two. The next day, Ira saw futurist Alvin Toffler, whom Einhorn was instructing on the hands-on aspects of computer conferencing. Then he was off to Washington, DC, to visit with the Congressional Clearinghouse for the Future. Hectic. But hectic was routine for Ira. Einhorn did not have a slow day in March until the twenty-seventh. He slept late, ambled downtown for a lunch with phone company friends, and spent time reading.

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Word spread throughout New Age circles and the fringe-science community, and people wrote to Ira asking, sometimes begging, to receive goodies from the network. By the mid-1970s Ira Einhorn’s network was a certified phenomenon in and of itself. Names appearing on the cover letters of recipients of a given piece might include economist Hazel Henderson; Lehmann Brothers managing director Shel Gordon; Seagram heir Charles Bronfman; futurist Alvin Toffler; science adviser to the British Commonwealth Christian de Lait; corporate presidents John Haas and George Bartol; Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand; physicists Freeman Dyson, David Bohm, Frijtof Capra, and Heinz Pagels; Esalen cofounder Mike Murphy; journalists Alex Cockburn and Jack Anderson; authors Colin Wilson, Robert Theobold, and Thomas Kuhn.

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

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.

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Back in the quaint midcentury year of 1965, Mary Poppins was awarded five Oscars, the Grateful Dead played their first concert, and I Dream of Jeannie premiered on NBC. But it was also the year of the first spacewalk, the invention of hypertext, and the first successful use of the human respirator. These events and inventions, and others, were promising so much change, so fast, that Alvin Toffler was motivated to write his seminal essay “The Future as a Way of Life,” in which he coined the term “future shock”: We can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality.

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

Fung and Hsieh’s paper goes a long way to doing for trends what poets have been trying to do for love since time immemorial. They give us a working model that quantitatively defines their value for us. Traders will not be surprised to learn that trend following advisors performed best during extreme market moves, especially during bad months for equities.20 14 Change is not merely necessary to life—it is life. Alvin Toffler Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets Yet, even when trend following success is brought to their attention, investors are often skeptical. They say the markets have changed and that trend following no longer works. Their concerns usually stem from a random press story of a trend follower who supposedly “blew up” and lost all of his clients’ money.

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They often panic and pull out just before a big move makes them a lot of money. • Clients may start asking for the trader to change his approach. Although they may not have articulated this directly to the fund manager, they really wanted the trend following strategy 43 Change is not merely necessary to life—it is life. Alvin Toffler 44 Trend Following (Updated Edition): Learn to Make Millions in Up or Down Markets customized for them before investing their money in the first place. The manager is then faced with a difficult decision: Take the client’s money and make money through management fees (which can be lucrative) or trade the capital as originally designed.

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During her two years of battling unemployment, Levine has worked for $8 an hour at Pottery Barn and for $18 an hour as a temp for a Wall Street trading firm. “I can’t even afford a dog,” she says.33 204 The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told—and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity…Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their ‘beliefs’…The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

“It is time for a step-change in advertising,” said Simon Sugar, chief executive of Amscreen, who developed the OptimEyes technology behind the screens. “Brands deserve to know not just an estimation of how many eyeballs are viewing their adverts, but who they are, too.”11 The Wave Theory This notion of appealing to users based on their individual surfing habits taps—ironically enough—into the so-called wave theory of futurist Alvin Toffler.12 In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Toffler described the way in which technology develops in waves, with each successive wave sweeping aside older societies and cultures.13 There have been three such waves to date, Toffler claimed. The first was agricultural in nature, replacing the hunter-gatherer cultures and centering on human labor.

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In this way it is necessary to ask the degree to which The Formula is genuinely improving working conditions, or whether it is simply (to quote cultural critic Paul Virilio) transforming workers into unwitting participants in a Marxist state pageant, “miming the joys [of] being liberated”—with full knowledge that anything other than full enthusiasm will be noted down against their CourseSmart-style engagement index and unearthed by an algorithm in time for a future job interview. Here it is worth turning once more to the work of Alvin Toffler, whose concept of “demassification” laid out many of the principles described in this chapter. In The Third Wave, Toffler questions why it is that everyone should be asked to start work at 9 A.M. and finish at 5 P.M. each day. By changing this massified approach to a more individual one, centered around the self, Toffler argues that both employers and employees would experience benefits.

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We’ll just get different prices, different news, different entertainment.”42 The Discrimination Formula? A number of Internet theorists have argued that in the digital world, previous classifications used for discrimination (including race, gender or sexuality) will fall away—if they haven’t already. Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave identifies a number of individuals and groups subtly or openly discriminated against during the last centuries and argues that this marginalization is the product of Second Wave societies. According to Toffler, in the unbundled, personality-driven Third Wave society such discriminatory practices will slink off into the digital ether.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

It was the first time the nation had been without a draft since FDR reinstated one in 1940, in preparation for America’s entry into World War II. Rand never wrote about her indirect role in this achievement, but she did endorse Nixon in 1968, partly on the basis of his opposition to the draft. Perhaps the purest, least rhetorical, and hardest-hitting public statement of her views appeared in a March 1964 Playboy interview. With Alvin Toffler, who in 1970 would publish Future Shock, asking the questions, the text crackled with maverick intelligence. Explaining her choice of the dollar sign as an emblem in Atlas Shrugged and a trademark decoration on her person, she said, “As the symbol of the currency of a free country, [it] is the symbol of a free mind.”

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., Ludwig von Mises Institute; Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; Allan Ryskind; Roger Salamon; Roberta Satro; Wilfred Schwartz; Marc Schwalb; Chris Matthew Sciabarra; Duncan Scott, director, the Objectivist History Project; Marian L. Smith, historian, History Office and Library, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Department of Homeland Security; Betsy Speicher; Ellen Stuttle; Joan Kennedy Taylor (deceased); William Thomas, director of programs at the Atlas Society; John Thornton; Henry Teitel; Alvin Toffler; James S. Valliant; Don Ventura; Jeffrey Walker; Mike Wallace; Greg Walsh, archivist, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Eugene Winick; Marna Wolf. Special thanks to Barbara Branden, who gave generously of her time, knowledge, and resources; to Nathaniel Branden, who spoke with me at length, on multiple occasions; and to Patricia O’Toole, without whose encouragement this book would not have been written.

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A few years later she would tell a friend: Author interview with Nathaniel Branden, December 11, 2008. Marna, had quit high school: Letter to Mimi Sutton, April 30, 1946 (LOAR, p. 275). She and Frank agreed to pay: Letter to Mimi Sutton, March 24, 1946 (LOAR, pp. 265–66). a strain developed: Author interview with MW, June 21, 2004. she did not see it as a moral duty: Alvin Toffler, “The Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand,” Playboy, March 1964, p. 40. the old and the lame, she complained: Letter to Marjorie Williams, June 18, 1936 (LOAR, p. 32). “I considered it an investment”: Author interview with MW, June 21, 2004. Similarly, when discussing Thaddeus Ashby’s long residence: BBTBI.

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

To some extent that is certainly the case, though saying so too easily neglects the massive diversity of digital communications, which include everything from blogs and vlogs with the tenor of zines to backward-­ looking, paper-­imagining forms like the pdf , now used to e-­publish so that others may print out. In addition, diy publishing needs to be located within and against diy more generally. The futurologist Alvin Toffler, who was already using the term “prosumer” in 1980—alas not “prosumerdom”—came pretty close to predicting today’s independent video, home offices, and distributed computing, but his description of 1980s-­style diy may come as more of a surprise. His futurological extrapolations take as their point of departure the then-­new diy home pregnancy test kits; direct long-­distance telephone dialing; self-­service gasoline pumps; and automated teller machines (atm s).56 Add the then-­familiar mix tapes, copy shops, and film-­processing kiosks, and I think it makes a wonderfully evocative context for—among other things—the imminent availability of desktop publishing, which arrived courtesy of Aldus and Apple to the embrace of amateurs and others. 150 AFTERWORD N OT E S P R E FAC E 1.

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Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Nature of Work and Power (New York: Basic, 1984), 125. 53. Ames, Beyond Paper, 45–47, 85. 54. Ibid., 93. 55. Streeter, The Net Effect, 124 (emphasis in the original). A related point about the uneven penetration of technological change had been made before by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 207–8. 56. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 29. 57. These generalizations by me and others are supported and elaborated by ethnographic accounts, including Harper, Inside the imf; Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine; and Sellen and Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office.

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Lee Harrington (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7, 16; this last is Henry Jenkins’s point, elaborated in his conclusion to this volume, “Afterword: The Future of Fandom,” 357–64. 53. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002). 54. I elaborate this point in Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006), chapter 4. 55. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 21. 56. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 286, 368– 69. N OT E S TO A F T E R W O R D 187 WORKS CITED Acland, Charles R. “Introduction: Residual Media.” In Residual Media, edited by Charles R. Acland, xiii–xxvii. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Adelman, Joseph M. “The Business of Politics: Printers and the Emergence of Political Communications Networks, 1765–1776.”

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

This number rises to 61 percent of Early Adopters and 74 percent of the Bleeding Edge. 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.

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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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We’re closer to a vision of “producer democracy” than we are to any of the consumerist views that long ago took hold in the mass media, including much of the journalism presented on that platform. We won’t know what a producer public looks like from looking at the patterns of the media age, in which broadcasting and its oneto-many economy prevailed. But we do know what a “producer public” will look like. Alvin Toffler described it thirty years ago. It will look like a totalized “consumerist” society, where everyone’s spare moment is on the market and where journalists in the blogosphere will have their every word quantified and evaluated by vigilant advertisers. Where “producers” are simply consumers made more dependent on the marketplace by the illusion of greater participation in the marketplace.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

In contrast to the walled-in city of the imperial era, the producer city’s walls were moved back, and new populations were absorbed into suburbs, much like in the modern city.28 THE RISE OF THE INDUSTRIAL CITY The modern city emerged from the producer city but in ways fundamentally transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Futurist and author Alvin Toffler points out that this “second wave,” or industrial, society accelerated urban density and concentration, in part due to the need to keep the workforces of new factories and associated businesses in close proximity. It did so by “stripping the countryside of people and relocating them in giant urban centers.”29 This was most notable in Britain in the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution.

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For my generation, it will be harder.”125 BEYOND THE CASH NEXUS We are entering an era for which there is no real precedent. Today’s market system has created wonders and spread prosperity around much of the world, but it has not been too kind to the family. The ideal corporate executives of today, futurist Alvin Toffler noted over three decades ago, are those who have “dissolved” themselves from “their deep emotional attachments with their families of birth.” But this represents just the beginning. To Toffler, the nuclear family represents “the second wave” of human existence, which is being replaced by a more flexible “third wave” lifestyle.126 “Just as the nuclear family was promoted by the rise of the factory and office work,” Toffler suggests, “any shift away from the factory or the office would also exert a heavy influence on the family.”127 Family ties have also been undermined by the fierce competition of this highly globalized “third wave” economy.

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In his book, Pilot cites a 2012 survey of 3,000 millennial-generation business owners, which found that 82 percent believe many businesses will be built entirely with virtual teams of online workers by 2022.156 Millennials, in particular, may be attracted to the environmental savings that can result from reduced office energy consumption, roadway repairs, urban heating, office construction, business travel, and paper usage (as electronic documents replace paper).157 Overall, according to a 2007 survey, greater use of telecommuting in the United States alone could save 1 billion tons of emissions over 10 years.158 Yet for most, the real benefit of telework is smashing the great barrier between work and home life. We may well be on the verge of the home-centered urban paradigm first envisioned by futurist Alvin Toffler more than four decades ago. In his vision, the house becomes “the electronic cottage,” the center of a new economy, with benefits not only for the environment but also for families, partly from allowing mothers and fathers to work while being active parents.159 The implication for housing forms is fairly obvious: as people use houses for work, they are likely to look for larger—not smaller—and more comfortable places to live.

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

It also means that voting in supermarkets, in McDonald’s and on the bus will all be possible and perhaps even encouraged in the future. “The political technology of the industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.” Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock The up side The hope is that developments such as these will make politics more interesting and politicians more accountable and honest. Gone will be the days of utterances made in small rooms “off the record” in the full knowledge that such remarks will not be captured by a television news crew.

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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. Toffler also placed the term “information overload” into the general consciousness.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The ten thousand years Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar, Economic Transformations. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT And in the last hundred The remainder coming between 1000 BCE and 1700 CE. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For the futurist Alvin Toffler Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). See also the work of Nikolai Kondratiev on long-cycle waves. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT More recently the economist Carlota Perez, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2002).

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Waves—pulsating, emergent, successive, compounding, and cross-pollinating—define an era’s horizon of technological possibility. They are part of us. There is no such thing as a non-technological human being. This conception of history as a series of waves of innovation is not novel. Sequential and disruptive clusters of technologies recur in discussions of technology. For the futurist Alvin Toffler, the information technology revolution was a “third wave” in human society following the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions. Joseph Schumpeter saw waves as explosions of innovation igniting new businesses in bursts of “creative destruction.” The great philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford believed the “machine age” was actually more like a thousand-year unfolding of three major successive waves.

Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

The social causes for conflicts in capitalism would give way together with the manufacturing industry. One of the earliest and most scholarly inclined among post-industrial thinkers is Daniel Bell.2 Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Daniel Bell paved the way for more popularised works by futurists like Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker and Robert Reich, just to mention the most influential names. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, similar thoughts surfaced yet again taking a slightly different shape, this time emphasising networks and information. A milestone is the three-volume study of the so called ‘network society’ by the sociologist Manuel Castells.

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Instead these critics like to highlight the example set by FOSS ventures and underground record labels that experiment with alternative licenses. In such forward-thinking business models, customers and users are invited to participate in the development process. Their argument resonates with a claim first made by the futurist Alvin Toffler in the early 1980s. He too predicted a merger between the producer and the consumer and invented the neologism ‘the prosumer’ for his new creature.14 Both Toffler and contemporary critics of intellectual property law give credit to digital technology as the agent behind this transformation. Typically, the interactivity of videogames is contrasted with the passivity of watching television, and a vague optimism is attached to the surge of new media.

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Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard—From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), and, Martyn Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn—The Cultural Politics of Consumption (London: Routledge 1993). 13. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth—How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), 76. She goes on to remind the reader that the opposite concept of beauty is when the features of a person become attractive to another person because of their unique relation. 14. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). 15. Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work, (London: Sage, 1995). 16. Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig De Peuter, Digital Play—The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. 17.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

Alvin Toffler, business process, disinformation, Ford Model T, interchangeable parts, Silicon Valley

“Although I sense that you already understand quite a bit more than you think. But first, let’s go on to Adolescence, the second stage in a small business’s growth.” ADOLESCENCE: GETTING SOME HELP As governments, we stumble from crisis to crash program, lurching into the future without plan, without hope, without vision. Alvin Toffler The Third Wave Adolescence begins at the point in the life of your business when you decide to get some help. There’s no telling how soon this will happen. But it always happens, precipitated by a crisis in the Infancy stage. Every business that lasts must grow into the Adolescent phase.

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And it doesn’t take a genius to see that the world today is in a state of massive chaos. Wars, famine, crime, violence, inflation, recession, a shifting of traditional forms of social interaction, the threat of nuclear proliferation, HIV, holocaust in all its horrific forms are all communicated instantly and continuously to the fixated consumer, to all of us watching TV. As Alvin Toffler wrote in his revolutionary book, The Third Wave, “…most people surveying the world around them today see only chaos. They suffer a sense of personal powerlessness and pointlessness.” He went on to say that, “Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensive structure is an aimless wreck.

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.

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Demand forecasting, product mix planning, purchasing, storage, goods handling, distribution, shelf stacking, customer service and many other aspects of the business have been automated to varying extents in different places and at different times. The retail industry has also given us the clearest examples of another, associated phenomenon known as “prosumption”. This term was coined in 1980 by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, one of the leading thinkers about the trends we are discussing in this book. At the same time as organisations automate many of their processes, they enlist the help of their customers to streamline their operations. In fact, they get their customers to do some of the work that was previously done for them.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

One book in particular influenced the threat perception: Clifford Stoll’s 1989 The Cuckoo’s Egg chronicled how a German hacker breached Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and then sold stolen files to the KGB, Russia’s spy agency.39 In 1991 the Michelangelo virus caused a major scare. Then, in February 1993, an Islamic extremist detonated a huge truck bomb underneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The tower didn’t collapse, but the incident highlighted how vulnerable America’s infrastructure was. Futurists Heidi and Alvin Toffler, in a widely read 1993 book, War and Anti-war, again repeated Schwartau’s warning.40 A single Islamic extremist with a computer and a modem, they argued, could cause immense damage to entire armies 10,000 miles away. Hackers weren’t just pranksters, and technology empowered the weak. The Pentagon became concerned—and decided to put these theories to a test.

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In the Rand-simulated crisis, cyberwar was truly coming: hackers caused a catastrophic flow malfunction at the largest refinery in Saudi Arabia; crashed a high-speed train in Maryland, killing sixty; took CNN off-line; downed an airliner into a residential area in Chicago; grounded all types of a specific Airbus model; sabotaged the London and New York stock exchanges; messed with US command-and-control systems on ships and aircraft; triggered a revolution in Saudi Arabia; and brought about a host of other calamities. Computers, the Rand analysts were sure, would become veritable weapons.43 But computers weren’t like other military weapon systems. Everybody could buy one, and everybody could write code, so everybody could attack—not just states. “It’s the great equalizer,” Alvin Toffler told Time magazine after the exercise. “You don’t have to be big and rich to apply the kind of judo you need in information warfare.”44 National-security officials in Washington understood that hackers were not alone. America’s adversaries would take advantage of this new attack vector. “We’re more vulnerable than any nation on earth,” added then NSA director Vice Admiral John McConnell.45 Soon, elected politicians became concerned as well.

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House of Representatives, One Hundred Second Congress, First Session, June 27, 1991, no. 42 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), 10. 37.Winn Schwartau, Terminal Compromise (Old Hickory, TN: Interpact Press, 1991). 38.Steven Levy, Hackers (New York: Doubleday, 1984). 39.Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 40.Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-war: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). 41.Bob Brewin and Elizabeth Sikorovsky, “Information Warfare: DISA Stings Uncover Computer Security Flaws,” Federal Computer Week 9, no. 3 (1995): 1, 45. 42.Neil Munro, “The Pentagon’s New Nightmare: An Electronic Pearl Harbor,” Washington Post, July 16, 1995, C03. 43.Roger C.

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.

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

Rather than knowing-by-reducing to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in vast, loosely connected webs. 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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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.

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

And, to return to the question we raised in the last chapter, is the current approach to technology design leading in the right direction, or may it again be focusing too tightly on an idealized view of information and how itand individualswork? Just a Click Away? The home office may seem little more than a click away, but predictions have put it just over the horizon for some time now. In 1980, Alvin Toffler predicted that within our lifetime urban downtowns would "stand empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living space. "Yet a 1998 survey shows that the office vacancy rate dropped to single digits for the first time since 1981, despite office completions doubling in 1997. 4 Another prediction claimed 66 percent of workers would work from home by the millennium.5 Though reliable figures are hard to find, it would take a startling burst between now and 2000 to reach even 6 percent.

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Gates, 1995, p. 21; Gordon Bell and James N. Gray, quoted in Nardi and O'Day, 1999; Phillips, quoted in Napoli, 1999. 2. SETI stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. For more information, see http://seti.ssl.berkeley.edu [1999, July 21]. 3. The notion of the "third wave" comes from the futurist Alvin Toffler's (1980) book of the same name. Page 255 4. Indeed, the degree to which we complain about such technologies when they do go wrong indicates the extent to which we have all become dependent on them to go right. The apprehension about the Y2K bug, which some predict may allow tiny embedded chips to bring huge social institutions to a halt, is itself a sign of how deeply enmeshed these things are in our lives. 5.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

In the Industrial Age, Hong Kong had no need to be a democracy, as it was spared the unpleasant necessity of gathering resources to support a formidable military establishment. Hong Kong was defended from the outside, so it could afford to maintain a really free economy. It was precisely the capacity to rake in resources that made democracy supreme during the megapolitical conditions of the Industrial Age. Mass democracy went hand in hand with industrialism. As Alvin Toffler has said, mass democracy "is the political expression of mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass entertainment, and all the rest."4 Now that information technology is displacing mass production, it is logical to expect the twilight of mass democracy.

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You can now go into a store and purchase blue jeans that will be cut from a pattern customized to your measurements and sewn up half a world away. When new institutions at last evolve to fit the new megapolitical realities of the Information Age, you will be able to obtain governance at least as well customized to meet your personal needs and tastes as blue jeans. Alvin Toffler, of all people, has criticized the idea that information technology could make citizens into customers. Toffler says, wrongly we believe, "That is far too narrow of a model. Whether we like it or not, there is a world of religion and feeling out there that cannot be simply reduced to contractual relationships."

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But to say that is not to argue that it is impossible, much less that it would be a bad arrangement. A little less irrational gusto in nationalism could save millions of lives. "Entry, Exit" and "Voice" Of course, the commercialization of sovereignty is an unfamiliar concept, apparently even to Alvin Toffler. But its central idea-the economic mode of expression-is commonplace in the lives of people living at the end of the twentieth century. In any marginally free economy, consumers can act to express their desires directly by purchasing services and products. Or by withdrawing their custom. When you become dissatisfied with one version of a product or a provider of a service, you can directly express your dissatisfaction by means of "exit."

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

To understand this possibility, it’s helpful to understand a few of the developments that have led to today’s marketplace. At the tail end of the twentieth century, we started moving from the selling of ideas,36 the so-called information economy, toward the selling of feelings, or what author Alvin Toffler called the “experience economy.” This is why retail shops started to look like theme parks. Why, instead of stocking ammo on their shelves like Wal-Mart, the outdoor retailer Cabela’s turns their stores into a hunter’s paradise of big-game mounts, faux mountainsides, and giant aquariums. It’s how Starbuck’s can charge four dollars for a fifty-cent cup37 of coffee: because they’re providing that cozy “third place” between work and home.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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Stukel, then president of the multi-campus University of Illinois, entitled “The Future of Land Grant Universities” but relevant to public (and, to a lesser extent, private) universities in general. Stukel was a long-time engineering professor at that institution before moving into administration. He served as president from 1995 to 2005. In the tradition of Alvin Toffler, Stukel invokes the metaphor of the wave in describing high tech. The wave of the future is the technological imperative taken to an extreme, for one either rides it out and, to this extent, controls one’s destiny, or else drowns. There is no middle ground. It is the application of Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion.

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

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. As a teenager, I’d send my money orders (gasp!) off to mail-order catalog shops.

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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?”

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

Our minds are throwing in the towel, waving the white flag. And so the age of anxiety, exponentially expanding with each fresh push to emphasize change and future over constancy and progression. Chasing the future isn’t saving us, it’s killing us. ° ° ° ° ° ° 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.

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Stephanie Nolan, “Suicide among India’s Young Adults at ‘crisis’ Levels,” The Globe and Mail, June 21, 2012, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/suicide-among-indias-young-adults-at-crisis-levels/article4362016/. 15. Lorianna De Giorgio, “What Chronic Stress Does to Your Brain,” The Toronto Star, July 15, 2012, http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1225370--what-chronic-stress-does-to-your-brain. 16. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1990). 17. Ibid., 2. 18. Toffler, Future Shock. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 375. 21. Ibid., 379. 22. Ibid., 377. 23. Toffler, Future Shock. 24. Ibid., 379. 25. Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, 33. 26. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old. 27. Lucas Mearian, “IBM Smashes Moore’s Law, Cuts Bit Size to 12 Atoms,” Computerworld, January 12, 2012, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2501259/data-center/ibm-smashes-moore-s-law--cuts-bit-size-to-12-atoms.html. 28.

The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

However, as breakdowns and crises spread to many domains (e.g. global monetary system, government, education, environment, jobs, etc.) if the transition towards an information economy becomes indeed an 'Age of Uncertainty’ then the time is ripe to reconsider the old organisational assumptions. Under such circumstances, holding on to the old expert-driven, hierarchical command and control structures will predictably kill the very innovations that the circumstances require. Tony Judge, whom Alvin Toffler described as 'one of our most brilliant organisation theorists', claims that the organisations of the future will take the form of' networks not co-ordinated by anybody; the participating bodies co-ordinate themselves'. The first large-scale contemporary implementation of such principles was accomplished by Dee Hock, when he founded the VISA credit card system in the 1970s.298 VISA has grown spectacularly to become the largest business organisation in the world: it has a sales volume of 81.3 trillion per year and serves 600 million clients.

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In contrast, Careful Communities is an 'excess Yin' deviation where concerns about community cohesion have taken over when a monetary meltdown triggers widespread socio-economic disarray. Finally, Hell on Earth occurs when no faction in society fills in the power vacuum left after a monetary crash. Alvin Toffler claimed: 'What appears to be emerging is neither a corporate dominated future nor a global government, but a far more complex system ... We are moving toward a world system composed of units densely interrelated like the neurons in a brain rather than organised like the departments of a bureaucracy.'

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Naturally, the producer cherishes this kind of loyalty, but the customer gets (or should get) many advantages for continuing as well: uninterrupted quality, continuous improvements, attentive personalization—assuming it’s a good service. Access mode brings consumers closer to the producer, and in fact the consumer often acts as the producer, or what futurist Alvin Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer.” If instead of owning software, you access software, then you can share in its improvement. But it also means you have been recruited. You, the new prosumer, are encouraged to identify bugs and report them (replacing a company’s expensive QA department), to seek technical help from other customers in forums (reducing a company’s expensive help desk), and to develop your own add-ons and improvements (replacing a company’s expensive development team).

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from $1.64 in 1977 to $3.58 in 2000: Figures adjusted for inflation. Ronald Bailey, “Dematerializing the Economy,” Reason.com, September 5, 2001. “Software eats everything”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011. Toffler called in 1980 the “prosumer”: Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam, 1984). subscribe to Photoshop: “Subscription Products Boost Adobe Fiscal 2Q Results,” Associated Press, June 16, 2015. Uber for laundry: Jessica Pressler, “‘Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry,’” New York, May 21, 2014. Uber for doctor house calls: Jennifer Jolly, “An Uber for Doctor House Calls,” New York Times, May 5, 2015.

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Nilles further acknowledged that telecommuting would not be perfect for executives who, in accordance with management theories of the era, needed ‘face-to-face meetings to renew confidence in verbal cues, perceptions of attitudes, and similar imponderables not easily transmitted’ over telephones. Finally, he warned that there would be consequences for labour: if the unions and the courts decided that making people telecommute looked too much like divide and rule, then they would resist it tooth and nail. Alvin Toffler was the next futurist after Nilles to back telecommuting. In his book The Third Wave (1980), he split civilization into three eras or waves: (a) agricultural; (b) industrial and (c) the coming one of information. Toffler was convinced that the third wave had arrived (‘A new civilization is bursting into being in our midst!’)

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., MIT Press, 1994; http://mitpress2.mit.edu/ebooks/City_of_Bits/Getting_to_the_Good_Bits/1994Telepresence.html. 283 ‘enable employees of large organizations’, Jack Nilles, ‘Telecommunications and Organizational Decentralization’, IEEE Transactions on Communications, vol. COM-23, no. 10, October 1975. 285 For ‘A new civilization is bursting into being in our midst!’, Alvin Toffler, ‘The Electronic Cottage’, 14 October 1981, see: http://www.embedded.com/print/4319730. 288 ‘counting teleworkers is like measuring a rubber band’, Lars Qvortrup quoted in Paul J. Jackson and Jos M. van der Wielen (eds), Teleworking: International Perspectives. From Telecommuting to the Virtual Organisation, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 21. 289 ‘In the late ’90s my favorite line at the beginning of a presentation’, Ruth David, ‘The Father of Indian Outsourcing’, Forbes, 29 May 2007: http://www.forbes.com/2007/ 05/21/outsourcing-raman-india-oped-cx_rd_0522raman.html. 291 ‘Tell an American that your name is Raja’, Chris Walker and Morgan Hartley, ‘The Culture Shock of India’s Call Centers’, Forbes, 16 December 2012: http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganhartley/2012/12/16/the-culture-shock-of-indias-call-centers/. 291 ‘I don’t know what Wales is’, Daily Mail, 28 April 2014: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270536/Wales-heard-What-Welsh-BT-customer-told-spoke-centre-worker-India.html. 292 For ‘IBM was one of the first global companies’, see: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/environment/climate/commuting.shtml. 292 For IBM headcount secrecy, see: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9169678/IBM_stops_disclosing_U.S.

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

Humanity faces some formidable challenges, and it is in no small part thanks to the blind spots and mistaken metaphors of outdated economic thinking that we have ended up here. But for those who are ready to rebel, look sideways, to question and think again, then these are exciting times. ‘Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them … how to learn, unlearn, and relearn,’ wrote the futurist Alvin Toffler.22 This could not be more true for those seeking economic literacy: now is a great moment for unlearning and relearning the fundamentals of economics. The power of pictures Everybody’s saying it: we need a new economic story, a narrative of our shared economic future that is fit for the twenty-first century.

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By largely ignoring the core economy, mainstream economics has also overlooked just how much the paid economy depends upon it. Without all that cooking, washing, nursing and sweeping, there would be no workers – today or in the future – who were healthy, well-fed, and ready for work each morning. As the futurist Alvin Toffler liked to ask at smart gatherings of business executives, ‘How productive would your workforce be if it hadn’t been toilet trained?’32 The scale of the core economy’s contribution is not to be dismissed lightly, either. In a 2002 study of Basle, a wealthy Swiss city, the estimated value of unpaid care being provided in the city’s households exceeded the total cost of salaries paid in all of Basle’s hospitals, daycare centres and schools, from the directors to the janitors.33 Likewise, a 2014 survey of 15,000 mothers in the USA calculated that, if women were paid the going hourly rate for each of their roles – switching between housekeeper and daycare teacher to van driver and cleaner – then stay-at-home mums would earn around $120,000 each year.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

All of these forms can be instantaneously consumed even as they absorb vast amounts of what might otherwise be free time. The consumers, furthermore, produce information, which is then appropriated by the owners of the media for their own purposes. The public is simultaneously constituted as both producers and consumers, or what Alvin Toffler once called ‘prosumers’.10 There is an important corollary here and this broaches a theme that we will encounter elsewhere: capital profits not through investing in production in these spheres but by appropriating rents and royalties on the use of the information, the software and the networks it constructs.

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Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 8. McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The World at Work: Jobs, Pay and Skills for 3.5 Billion People’, Report of the McKinsey Global Institute, 2012. 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Kalamazoo, Black & Red, 2000. 10. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow, New York, Bantam, 1980. 11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009. 12. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, London, NLR Books, 1971. 13. Gordon, ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over?

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

In the last year, awareness that advanced AI brings both immense promise and immense peril has become widespread. I’m sure that both Kurzweil and Bostrom would freely admit that, like Newton, they saw further than others because they stood on the shoulders of giants – in their cases people like Hans Moravic, Vernor Vinge and Alvin Toffler. There seems little point trying to pin down the exact source of each and every innovative idea our species has had: we can just be grateful that we do have them. Those of us who have been thinking about these things for years have long felt there needed to be a global debate about the future of artificial intelligence.

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

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.

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

It is the fact of locomotion . . . that defines the very nature of society. 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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Anderson, The Trends of Urban Sociology, 14. 39. 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.

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

I’m excited to go on this journey with you. 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.”

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., “A Country Level Analysis Measuring the Impact of Government Actions, Country Preparedness and Socioeconomic Factors on COVID-19 Mortality and Related Health Outcomes,” EClinicalMedicine 25 (August 1, 2020): 100464, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464. 5 Bryan Walsh, “SARS Made Hong Kong and Singapore Ready for Coronavirus,” Axios, March 25, 2020, https://www.axios.com/sars-hong-kong-and-singapore-ready-for-covid-19-46444868-2550-4d90-ab92-a3cc90635cb4.html. 6 Karen Attiah, “Africa Has Defied the Covid-19 Nightmare Scenarios. We Shouldn’t Be Surprised,” Washington Post, September 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/22/africa-has-defied-covid-19-nightmare-scenarios-we-shouldnt-be-surprised/. 7 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 8 Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. 9 Barbara Freeman and Robert Hawkins, “Evoke—Developing Skills in Youth to Solve the World’s Most Complex Problems: Randomized Impact Evaluation Findings,” World Bank Education, Technology and Innovation: SABER-ICT Technical Paper Series no. 19 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29167.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

Michael Gibbons quoted in Michael Covel’s “‘Why’ Doesn’t Matter to the Technical Trader.” SFO Magazine, April 24, 2007. 2. Jeff Zucker, former CNBC CEO. See http://www.newsweek.com/2007/08/13/forward-into-battle.html. 3. See http://www.thefinancialphilosopher.com/2011/02/understanding-markets-naturenot-naivety-or-narcissism.html. Snow Job 1. Alvin Toffler. 2. Jim Rohrbach blog post in response to “Trend Following is not Fundamental Analysis.” January 28, 2011. See http://www.michaelcovel.com/2011/01/28/trend-followingis-not-fundamental-analysis/. Twit Me a River 1. See http://www.citywire.co.uk/global/can-you-make-money-from-twitter/a479038?.

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.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

The Impact Hub, for example, has created spaces all over the world to encourage collaboration and support for professionals who seek to create organizations that improve the human condition. These spaces are open and designed to build community and inspire innovation, and they have been growing explosively. The New York Times recently pointed out that although the dream of working independently in our own homes has been gaining in popularity, ever since Alvin Toffler introduced the notion of the “electronic cottage” in his book The Third Wave, many of these home workers have found the isolation alienating and are looking for more connection and interaction. NeueHouse, a new “co-working” space in Manhattan, is a mash-up of a private club and an open office space.

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

But the data paradox is that a world richer and richer in data has so far yielded little payoff in most fields. 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.

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.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

Vladimir Nabokov: Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1973; repr. New York: Vintage International, 1990); Vladimir Nabokov, “Nabokov on Nabokov and Things,” New York Times, May 12, 1968, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/lifetimes/nab-v-things.html. 471. “I generally start”: Interview with Alvin Toffler, Playboy, 1963, in Strong Opinions, 29. 472. “I awake around”: Ibid., 28–9. 473. “My habits are simple”: Interview with Allene Talmey, Vogue, 1969, in Strong Opinions, 157. 474. “soccer matches”: Interview with Kurt Hoffman in Strong Opinions, 191. 475. “I sleep even worse”: “Nabokov on Nabokov and Things.” 476.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Prior to flight, humans always balanced mobility with domesticity, venturing farther and farther afield while picking up speed, although never straying too far from home. The size and shape of cities evolved in turn, but our daily lives stayed rooted in them. Road warriors said goodbye to all that, commuting halfway across the country for lunch and back in time for dinner. This rupture of time and space was shocking at first, leading the sociologist Alvin Toffler to pronounce that “never in history has distance meant less. Never has man’s relationship with place been more numerous, fragile, and temporary … We are breeding a new race of nomads.” They’re a tribe of mostly middle-aged men, married without children and earning a median salary of $78,700. Their time, as calculated by Brookings, is worth an inflation-adjusted $67 an hour.

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His idiom is a mash-up of consultant-speak and academic jargon, each one wielded to differing but complementary effect. He hammers home his collection of catchphrases like a good thought-leader should. “The Web can’t move a box,” “business is a contact sport,” and “never make strategic decisions on a cyclical basis.” And then there’s “survival of the fastest,” poached from Alvin Toffler. “My favorite book of his is Powershift, published in 1990,” Kasarda told the room. “It’s a five-hundred-eighty-five-page treatise asking what will define the next hierarchy of countries, of companies, of regions and communities. It can be boiled down to three words: speed, speed, and speed. It wouldn’t be the big eating the small, but the fast eating the slow.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Through the gravitational pull of wealth (and, some would say, unfairly government-supported monopolies), his net worth is estimated to have risen from $20 billion to $60 billion in just two years. Still, he’s known for his thrifty lifestyle, doesn’t use a computer, and is proud of the fact that he owns no homes outside of Mexico. The Wall Street Journal quoted author and friend Alvin Toffler as saying of Slim: ‘‘If you didn’t know he was the richest guy in the world, you’d just think he was a likable and intelligent guy.’’ 160 The New Elite India now boasts four of the ten richest people in the world, up from just one in 2007, led by steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal (number four globally with an estimated net worth of $45 billion).

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

See Rifkin, 1995. 25. The term “prosumer” is a portmanteau of “producer” and “consumer” that is often used to indicate a higher degree of digital literacy, economic participation, and personal control over the means of technology production. The term is mostly attributed, in this context, to Alvin Toffler, a futurist who thought that the line between traditional economic consumer and producer would eventually blur through engagements with technology and that this participation would generally lead to greater mass customization of products and services by corporations. See Toffler, 1970, 1980; Tapscott, 1996; Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010. 26.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The first to systematically explore its potential in the modern world was the US physicist Jack Nilles, who in 1976 published a book titled The Telecommunications–Transportation Tradeoff.1 Writing against a backdrop of soaring oil prices and growing excitement about the personal computer, Nilles argued that society was approaching a tipping point. Once the cost of telecommunications equipment fell below the cost of commuting to work, which he forecast it would soon do, centralized offices would become a relic of the past. A few years later, the popular futurist Alvin Toffler echoed this prediction in his 1980 book The Third Wave.2 In a throwback to pre-industrial cottage industries, in which the manufacturing of products like textiles occurred within the worker’s own home, he imagined the ‘electronic cottage’ re-establishing the home as the focal point of work. The rapid growth of the internet in the 1990s further fuelled the belief that a large-scale transition to remote working was just over the horizon.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

After leaving AOL, Case started the venture capital company Revolution, focused on entrepreneurs, which he believes are the engines of future prosperity and the key to the revival of communities across the nation. In his 2016 book, The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future, named as an homage to the futurist Alvin Toffler’s groundbreaking 1980 book with a similar name, Case wrote that the first wave was getting people online, the second wave was adding connection through search and social media functions, and “the Third Wave of the Internet is coming, the moment where the Internet transforms from something we interact with to something that interacts with everything around us.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

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

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The alternative to historical pessimism about the future of modern society is not optimistic complacency: they are opposite sides of the same holistic view. The alternative to cultural pessimism is not some sort of megatrend “third wave” or other futurological adventure of authors like Warren Wagar and Alvin Toffler. The classical liberal view originally sprang up precisely because its adherents recognized the dangers of insisting that individuals have significance only if they are part of a larger whole. In earlier times, that holisticorganic model had been “the great chain of being,” in which a person’s status was assigned by God and nature and enforced by political authority.

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

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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Brian Owens, “Reliability of ‘New Drug Target’ Claims Called into Question,” NewsBlog, Nature, September 5, 2011. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/09/reliability_of_new_drug_target.html. 41. This estimate is from Robert Birge of Syracuse University. http://www.sizes.com/people/brain.htm. 42. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 362. 43. “The Polarization of the Congressional Parties,” VoteView.com. http://voteview.com/political_polarization.asp. 44. Dan M. Kahan, et al., “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change, May 27, 2012. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1547.html. 45.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

International organized crime groups, rogue governments, and even terrorists are rapidly establishing their own data brokerages and bolstering their analytic capabilities in order to take full advantage of the single largest bonanza that has ever come their way, with frightening implications for us all. CHAPTER 6 Big Data, Big Risk Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate. ALVIN TOFFLER On the evening of November 26, 2008, a sixty-nine-year-old man checked into room 632 at the luxurious Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, India. The guest, K. R. Ramamoorthy, was visiting from Bangalore on a routine business trip. Little did he know that his life was about to change forever.

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Sadly, the situation is about to get much worse as new generations of even more powerful technologies come online, further separating us from ever experiencing a reality that has not been in one shape or form intermediated by somebody else. Control, Alt, Deceit One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition. ALVIN TOFFLER In 1865, Congress passed legislation allowing the director of the U.S. Mint to add the motto “In God we trust” to all gold and silver coins minted for circulation. The line, originally drawn from the fourth stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” has since become the official motto of the United States.

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

According to my favorite death-flock calculations, Jeff is set to expire, hopefully painlessly and quickly, on April 9, 2036, while I’m not going anywhere until January 16, 2041. 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.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

“No more vapor theory anymore,” wrote Geert Lovink. Vapor theory tends to ignore the computer itself. The computer is often eclipsed by that more familiar thing, information society. Mine is not a book about information society, but about the real machines that live within that society. Thus, my study skips direct engagement with the work of Alvin Toffler, Peter Drucker, Daniel Bell, and others who discuss the third phase of capitalist development in social terms. The large mass of literature devoted to artificial intelligence and speculations about the consciousness (or lack thereof ) within man and machine is also largely avoided in this book.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, George Santayana, index card, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex

Part 2 of this book will provide specific coaching about how to use these three models for making action choices, and how the best practices for collecting, processing, planning, organizing, and reviewing all contribute to your greatest success with them. 3 Getting Projects Creatively Under Way: The Five Phases of Project Planning You’ve got to think about the big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. —Alvin Toffler THE KEY INGREDIENTS of relaxed control are (1) clearly defined outcomes (projects) and the next actions required to move them toward closure, and (2) reminders placed in a trusted system that is reviewed regularly. This is what I call horizontal focus. Although it may seem simple, the actual application of the process can create profound results.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

The new economics looks at the whole picture, the vital effort that people make bringing up children or making the neighbourhood operate effectively or preventing crime. It may not be appropriate for that work to be paid but, equally, it is certainly not right to ignore it, or pretend that somehow it isn’t essential and hugely valuable. The futurist Alvin Toffler used to ask executives what it would cost in real cash terms if none of their staff members had been toilet trained. The fact that they are is, in effect, a massive subsidy from the informal economy to the formal. The co-production theoretician Edgar Cahn describes this informal economy as ‘core’ because it is far more important than the money economy.23 Yet the money economy, and the traditional economic obsession with it, is constantly corroding the core economy, leading to the current problems of crime and alienation.

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!

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

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

✸ Best recent purchase of under $100? BabyBjörn baby carrier. ✸ Do you have any quotes that you live your life by or think of often? “‘Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler. Both are famous futurists. These quotes remind me that world-changing ideas will seem absurd to most people, and that the most useful work I can be doing is to push the envelope of what is considered possible. If what I’m doing sounds reasonable to most people, then I’m not working in a space that is creative and innovative enough!”

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

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Despite the brush-off, Fuller agreed to work on Smith’s book, with part of the proceeds donated to Narconon, a nonprofit “dedicated to reducing crime and drug abuse, for their youth program.” In reality, it was a vehicle for Hubbard’s theories and affiliated closely with Scientology. As the futurist Alvin Toffler characterized Fuller as “the leader of something approaching a religious movement,” other groups were turning his ideas to more positive ends. Domes went up at the Libre and Red Rockers communes in Colorado; teenagers built a dome as a youth center in the Bronx; and CHARAS had been working quietly all this time on the Lower East Side.

…

“dedicated to reducing crime”: Copyright page of RBF, Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth, comp. and photographed by Cam Smith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972). a vehicle for Hubbard’s theories: Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 241–43. “the leader of something”: Alvin Toffler, The Futurists (New York: Random House, 1972), 6. Libre and Red Rockers: Amy Azzarito, “Libre, Colorado, and the Hand-Built Home,” in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 95–108.

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."

…

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.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

All these things had taken time and money to build up and had a lasting value to whoever owned the airport, but they consisted not of physical stuff but of ideas, knowledge, and social relations. In the language of economists, they were intangible. The idea that an economy might come to depend on things that were immaterial was an old one. Futurists like Alvin Toffler and Daniel Bell had begun to talk about the “post-industrial” future as long ago as the 1960s and 1970s. As the power of computers and the Internet became more apparent in the 1990s, the idea that immaterial things were economically important became increasingly widely accepted. Sociologists talked of a “network society” and a “post-Fordist” economy.

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

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. In fact, the millennia-old belief that mathematics offers eternal and immutable truths was crushed.

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Leary, “Scholarly reflections on the ‘Selfie,’” OUPblog, November 19, 2013, https://blog.oup.com/2013/11/scholarly-reflections-on-the-selfie-woty-2013/. Leary was asked, along with several other scholars, to write a short reflection; the article is not attributed to him. “people can convey”: “Prosumption,” originally coined by Alvin Toffler, combines production and consumption in the same action. We offer ourselves on social media, to our friends, glamorized and sanitized. Somewhere therein is a hope that these images will raise our general social capital and will cover over, say, our downsized journalism or legal careers. the wealthy of television past: If we go even further back, before television ever flickered into view, the films of one of the worst economic times in our history, the Depression, were famous for their opulence.

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Alvin Toffler, Day of the Dead, edge city, Jaron Lanier, late capitalism, Mondo 2000, telepresence

It conceives of the world, in other words, in postmodern terms. According to Gibson's geography, cultural identities have become neutralized. The international and intercultural have become the norm. He suggests it is thus grossly naive to think of oneself as an intellectual within any national restriction. This rhymes with Alvin Toffler's assertions in his futurist sociological study, The Third Wave (1980), which cyberpunk spokesperson Bruce Sterling calls "a bible to many cyberpunks."(14) Toffler argues that, as we approach a new millennium, globalism has become an "evolutionary necessity" for our planet, and that it will be suicidal for us to pretend otherwise.(15) If Gibson's imagination is deeply international, it is also deeply intertextual.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

In 1969, a scientist at the US Patent Office named Allan Kiron predicted that computers and new communications tools would change the nature of work and bring it home. He coined the term dominetics, an awkward portmanteau of domicile, connections, and electronics that failed to catch on but inspired others, such as academic Jack Nilles’s telecommuting, which pitched working from home as a solution to long drives. As the PC era dawned in 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler predicted that home would soon become an “electronic cottage,” where internet-enabled home offices would bring us greater flexibility with both work and family, while downtown offices would be “reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living space.” As digital technology grew more powerful, inexpensive, and common in every profession, remote work became a reality for many.

Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe by Denis MacShane

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, fixed income, Gini coefficient, greed is good, illegal immigration, information security, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low cost airline, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, post-truth, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reshoring, road to serfdom, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Thales and the olive presses, trade liberalization, transaction costs, women in the workforce

. […] In this bewildering context, businessmen swim against highly erratic economic currents; politicians see their ratings bob up and down […] value systems splinter and crash’ as the world lived with ‘the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time.’ This over-excited hyperbole was from the best-selling book The Third Wave by the futurologist Alvin Toffler, written four decades ago. Today there are plenty of commentators and writers to tell us that we are living in equally challenging and fast-changing times. Just so, but by any definition Europeans, even with all their problems, live a far better life than they did in 1980 and intelligent political choices can help.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Flatter hierarchies and more interesting work are the social payoffs; rising incomes and an end to slumps the economic payoffs. Quality replaces quantity, knowledge replaces physical capital, and flexible networks replace rigid organization charts” (Henwood 2003, 3–4). 14. Among the most popular are Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1976), Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), John Naisbett’s Megatrends (1984), Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society (1993), Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead (1996), Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1995) and New Rules for the New Economy (1998), Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 (1997), Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005), and Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics (2006). 15.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 221, 229. 3.Elizabeth Dwoskin, “Pandora Thinks It Knows If You Are a Republican,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304315004579381393567130078 (accessed August 31, 2016). 4.Quoting Alvin Toffler in Sikes, Fast Forward, 208. 5.Hague v. Committee for Industrial Organization, 307 U.S. 496 (1939). For present purposes, it is not necessary to discuss the public forum doctrine in detail. Interested readers might consult Geoffrey R. Stone, Robert H. Seidman, Cass R. Sunstein, Mark Tushnet, and Pamela Karlan, The First Amendment, 4th ed.

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.”

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 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, knowledge worker, the map is not the territory, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

That phrase represents the evolution of three generations of time management theory, and how to best do it is the focus of a wide variety of approaches and materials. Personal management has evolved in a pattern similar to many other areas of human endeavor. Major developmental thrusts, or "waves" as Alvin Toffler calls them, follow each other in succession, each adding a vital new dimension, For example, in social development, the agricultural revolution was followed by the industrial revolution, which was followed by the informational revolution. Each succeeding wave created a surge of social and personal progress.

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

It’s not because I think any of these innovations are a bad idea; it’s because quite simply I don’t feel ready. 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.

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

In fact, we have not been in such a world for quite a while yet the relationship between work and education has trundled on as though nothing had changed. The AI economy promises to be much less like what we have grown up with. The implication is that people will need to have several periods of learning and training in their life, interspersed with periods of employment.28 The great thinker and futurist Alvin Toffler long ago suggested that “the illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”29 This implies that the labor force must be able to change as rapidly as the environment around them is changing. This can apply as much to “education for leisure.”

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Jeremy Lovell, “Briton Wires Nervous System to a Computer,” Reuters, 22 March 2002, <http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&u=/nm/20020322/tc_nm/britain_cybernetics_dc_2 > (27 March 2002). 53. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). 54. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980). 55. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in aConnected World (New York: Random House, 2001). 56. C. M. Kornbluth, “The Marching Morons,” Galaxy, April 1951. 57. Sean Griffin, “Walt Disney Programs,” <http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/W/htmlW/waltdisneyp/waltdisneyp.htm >. 58.

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.

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.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Under the Movirtu scheme, communities can share a phone; however, each person is to be given a unique number to make and receive individual calls. Therefore a community can come together to purchase a phone yet with a guarantee of privacy for each individual. It has often been suggested that the latest technology threatens the city. For the bestselling futurologist Alvin Toffler technology allows one to be connected anywhere in the world and thus we will all live and work remotely in ‘electronic cottages’, far from the city limits. Why tolerate the problems of the city when we no longer have to live on top of one another? But strangely enough, thanks to new technology – mobiles, the internet, Web 2.0 – we are now more and more likely to embrace the complex density of the city than ever before.

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.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Things That Make Us Smart, Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine, by Donald A. Norman (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). Norman has crusaded for designing our technologies to more seamlessly integrate into our world and, in doing so, has helped envision a future of ubiquitous computing. 320 Selected BiblioejRApky The Third Wave, the Classic Study of Tomorrow, by Alvin Toffler (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). So far ahead of its time in describing elements of the shift to the global networked society that it's still relevant. The Unbound Prometheus, by David S. Landes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Shows the power of technology as a key driving force in long-term economic change, with a particular focus on the industrial revolution.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization by Michael O’sullivan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, classic study, cloud computing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, credit crunch, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, knowledge economy, liberal world order, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, performance metric, Phillips curve, private military company, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tulip mania, Valery Gerasimov, Washington Consensus

There is another element that may help unite the notion of the rise and fall of countries and their enduring successes: the extent to which countries move in developmental, economic, and demographic cycles. Several books have explored these themes: for example, Walt Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth, Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, and William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning. One of the places where the rise and fall of nations is visible is in financial markets. Looking at long-term changes in stock market capitalization is one way of examining this. For example, in 1900 the proportion of the world stock market made up by the US market was 15 percent, Germany held 13 percent, Japan held close to none, and the United Kingdom held 25 percent.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business climate, card file, collective bargaining, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, ending welfare as we know it, George Gilder, haute couture, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Herman Kahn, index card, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Joan Didion, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, Project Plowshare, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

It featured an interview with Peggy Goldwater. She described how, when working eighteen-hour days opening a new store in Prescott in 1937, her husband’s “nerves broke completely.” The problem abated, she said, then resurfaced two years later, never to come back again. It was the interviewer, a journalist named Alvin Toffler, who chose to describe these incidents with the fateful words “nervous breakdown.” Muckraking liberal columnist and radio commentator Drew Pearson picked up the story and started the drumbeat: Goldwater wasn’t mentally fit to be Commander in Chief. If Nelson Rockefeller had been a candidate of more ordinary means, he might have begun to question the expense of maintaining an elaborate opposition research operation to impugn a campaign so skilled at delivering knockout blows against itself.

…

For BOMFOG, see Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, SEP, May 30, 1964. 339 For Spencer-Roberts drumming up crowds, see Time, June 12, 1964. For appeal to blacks, see NAR to Fresno Elks, March 13, 1964, RAC, Box 11/940. For Berkeley, see San Francisco Examiner, March 13, 1964. 339 For attempt to break story of Goldwater’s psychological episodes, I rely on Molitor interview. Peggy Goldwater interview is in Alvin Toffler, “The Woman Behind Barry Goldwater,” Good Housekeeping, May 1964. See Time, June 12, 1964, for Drew Pearson. 339 For Goldwater paraphernalia generally, see Summer 1982 special issue of The Keynoter, “A Choice, Not an Echo: The 1964 Campaign of Barry Goldwater.” For “Arriba con Barry,” see Kitchel to Woodruff, April 13, 1964, AHF, Box 13/42.

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

Quoted in India Today, the weekly newsmagazine, August 8, 2005, p. 49. 24. 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.

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

. ———. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957. ———. Anthem. New York: Signet, 1961 [Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1946]. ———. For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House, 1961. ———. The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Revised 2nd edn. New York: Signet, 1963. ———. Interviewed by Alvin Toffler. Playboy (March 1964). ———. The Romantic Manifesto. Revised 2nd edn. New York: Signet, 1971 [Cleveland: World Publishing, 1969]. ———. The Foreign Policy of a Mixed Economy. 1965 talk. Audiotape. New Milford: Second Renaissance. ———. Speaking Freely: Ayn Rand Interviewed. Edwin Newman, interviewer.

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