What brings on future shock, according to Toffler, is a rate of social change that has become so fast as to be impossible for most human beings to assimilate. "The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease," Toffler argues. "Future shock arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one's own society. But its impact is far worse. For most travelers have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not."
An effect was much more than simply a spillover from the silvery streamlining of the space program. It was an increasing preoccupation with the future and technology that helped change not only the country’s look in the 1950s and ’60s, but also, in some ways, its very conception of itself, as if seen anew from space.
The architect Buckminster Fuller, one of the space age’s most ardent proselytizers, put it much more coherently in his book “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”: “We are all astronauts.”
If this is the future, someone forgot to stock it properly. Where are the personal service robots, the moon vacations, the self-contained cities rising out of the smog? What happened to all those sci-fi prophecies? In Where’s My Jetpack? (Bloomsbury), Popular Mechanics columnist Daniel Wilson moans that “it’s the twenty-first century, and things are a little disappointing.” Wilson, the author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, begs “all the scientists, inventors, and tinkerers out there” to “please hurry up” (emphasis in original).
Wilson shouldn’t be so moony. Fanciful futurist visions can obscure all the neat stuff we’ve accumulated, once-wild innovations that are far cooler and more functional than jetpacks. (Microwave ovens, anyone?) They also make it easy to forget that the ultimate responsibility for choosing which technologies fill our lives lies with us, the ordinary consumers, more than any rocket scientists. Take the titular jetpack. It exists—but no one really wants it. It’s a 125-pound monster with a flight time of 30 seconds, powered by expensive fuel. The dream of individual human flight was realized in 1961, and we haven’t been able to find any use for it outside of Bond movies, the first Super Bowl halftime show, and Ovaltine commercials.
I grew up believing in a technological future. The picture of tomorrow's world that I carried around in my head throughout childhood years corresponded, more or less, to that which one might have acquired from any number of science-fiction movies or from such monuments to technology as the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was characterized mainly by neatness and order, miles of gleaming chrome, millions of buttons to push, and endless gadgets to do all the work. All of our "old-fashioned" ways of doing things were, I believed, to be replaced by new, modern, better ones. Automated highways would take the place of conventional roads; one nourishment pill in the morning would save us consuming three meals during the day. In retrospect, what I find to be particularly interesting in this childhood image is the fact that the technological future always seemed to be an end in itself. When adults in my life spoke of it, they implied its inevitability - with some interest and some, but not much, enthusiasm. No one seemed to care very much for the prospect, but it was "progress," and only a fool would try to resist its tide.
Similar notions were apparently the main themes of the Century of Progress International Exposition held in Chicago in 1933. In the great world's fair tradition, this extravagant celebration aimed to demonstrate what technology was capable of doing for humanity. In the process, it brought out dramatically what one author has called "technology's triumph over man." Upon entering the Hall of Science, one was confronted by a large sculptural group featuring a life-sized man and woman, their "hands outstretched as if in fear or ignorance." Between this couple stood a giant angular robot almost twice their size, bending down, with a metallic arm "thrown reassuringly around each." The visitor to the fair need not have searched far for the meaning of this image. It could be found in the Exposition motto: SCIENCE FINDS - INDUSTRY APPLIES - MAN CONFORMS.
As I grew older, I naturally began to question my childhood vision, putting aside a fascination with gadgets to ask myself what was lacking in this future. Why, despite all good intentions, did this image of the future always come out looking more like Brave New World or 1984 than Utopia? What was the meaning of "progress" in these terms, if no one ever asked whether it serves to make people happier?
Men, the women are at it again. This time it's nothing as mild as demanding the vote or wearing pants.
In a shuddering world, "modernism" has reached the feminine hairline.
From Broadway to Park Avenue, the girls have gone slightly mad over something called "the futuristic, non-objectivism" hairdo. It's in six different colors and at $35 a do.
The creator of this hair-raising hairstyle is a diminutive, red-haired coiffurist who has a booming 200-pound voice in 100-pound frame. His trademark is Mark.
"Women," Mark said with a majestic wave of his thin hands, "need, positively need, to be lifted from the slough of sameness they have fallen into in the past century."
The magic of laser-holography, a new technique which creates 3-D pictures apparently out of thin air, could result in business conferences like the one shown above. On the left the heads of a branch office have just come in to their boardroom, first thing in the morning. Across their table is their boss. He is in the head office of the company in the centre of a major city thousands of miles away. It is night-time and is the end of his day. 3-D cameras hanging from the ceilings of each room create the illusion of a [complete] room with the two sides present (this picture has been split down the middle to avoid confusion). Electronic conferences like this would save enormous amounts of time, money and energy.
Interplanetary travel will become "commonplace" in the next 50 years, World War I ace Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker predicts.
"In fact," he told an audience of Rotarians yesterday, "space ships in the year 2007 will be semi-self-sustaining planets in themselves."
Rickenbacker, who is now chairman of the board of Easter Airlines, also foresaw the day when "nuclear powered guided missiles will reach speeds up to 25,000 miles an hour."
Think back to 1964, the year you received that extraordinary gift, your Sheaffer LIFETIME Pen - the year you started enjoying guaranteed writing performance for life.
Right away you liked that 14K gold point - the way it glided over paper, the way it captured your kind of writing. And still does, because inlaying adds strength to this point.
You enjoyed that turned-up tip right from the start, too. It still makes your writing feel more natural. Just as every other feature still delivers the best performance possible - the same performance you admired the first time you touched this amazing point to paper. Can a pen give more than writing pleasure for life?
In a steel vault, buried on the lawn before the City's modernistic skyscraper courthouse is a 1957 automobile and many another memento of Oklahoma's 50th year.
"Tulsarama!" visitors filled out cards predicting the city's population in 2007. Closest guess will win the car - 50 years from now - along with a $100 trust fund, plus interest. The money will be paid to the heirs of the guesser if he or she is not alive in the centennial year.
The National Library of France (BnF) has an amazing collection of prints from 1910 which depict life in the year 2000. They are credited to Villemard.
The Barber
The Avenue of the Opera
A Curiosity
The Electric Train From Paris to Beijing
A Rescue
Speak to the Caretaker
Sentinel Advanced in the Helicopter
Cyclist Scouts
Phonographic Message
One For the Road
Lady In Her Bathroom
Heating With Radium
Hearing The Newspaper
Correspondence Cinema
Cars of War
Building Site
At School
A Festival of Flowers
A Chemical Dinner
Airship On The Long Course
The Tailor
Flying Police
When I was a kid growing up in the early 60's, anybody could have told you exactly what the future of food was going to look like. We'd seen "The Jetsons," toured the 1964 World's Fair, tasted the culinary fruits (or at least fruit flavors) of the space program, and all signs pointed to a single outcome: the meal in a pill, washed down, perhaps, with next-generation Tang.
The general consensus seemed to be that "food"—a word that was already beginning to sound old-fashioned—was destined to break its surly bonds to Nature, float free of agriculture and hitch its future to Technology. If not literally served in a pill, the meal of the future would be fabricated "in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials," as one contemporary food historian predicted, including not only algae and soybeans but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from fuel oil and then "spun and woven into 'animal' muscle—long wrist-thick tubes of 'fillet steak.' "
