Ask Lemmy

Aldus Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932) is another one that predicted the state we find ourselves in.

It's with noting that Future Shock wasn't about the digital age; there was no digital age in 1970. Toffler was concerned about the rate of change and information overload, and he talks about the "information era." But it's useful to note that computers weren't on his radar - the technologies he was concerned about were things like Cable TV.

But it was less about the medium - the internet, still mostly only used by businesses and universities until almost 20 years later, when the WWW appeared - fits in perfectly. Toffler's theory is that - information age or not - as a species - our society and technology had started changing faster than our brains had evolved to handle. That we could just barely handle the introduction of the cotton mill - a device that had a huge impact on society; we could just about handle that much change in a generation, but now things were changing so rapidly that society couldn't keep up.

A really great modern simile is how people talk about computer technology and legislation. That Congress simply can't keep up with the rate of change in the world of software; that the people writing laws don't even understand the topics they're legislating. How well does the average person understand how blockchains work - even abstractly? How well does Nancy Pelosi? It's a microcosm of what Toffler was talking about, that afflicts the entire species.

The information age was just another stage; the point he was trying to get across is that, as a society, we can only handle so much change. He argued that we'd been struggling with this since the industrial age started. The information age - in Toffler's opinion - would be the last straw. Things would change so rapidly that we'd (individually) be in a constant state of shock.

I don't know that Toffler's Future Shock explains how we got here, though. It might be a factor, but is this the inevitable outcome?

Huxley, I think, provided a better (if less academic) theory. We are hedonists, and those in power realize that if they play to this, they can control society.

Both, I think, ignored the fact that economic libertarianism leads to oligarchies. And rather than "too big to fail" being an example against laissez-faire economics, it's a perfect example of the exercise of it. When you have enough power to influence legislature, you do, to your own benefit.

I do think they're all factors - streams that feed into the vast river in which current we're all caught, and which seems to be leading to a waterfall of global collapse. But I do blame capitalism as the must significant source. I don't think we have any better option (not communism, for sure), but I think the capitalism we have is broken and enables abuse, and contributed the must to all of the worst things that are happening: fast fashion, cheap disposable goods, concentration of wealth, income disparity, Elon Fucking Musk with his hand puppet controlling the country. And it's only Elon because Bezos didn't think of it first.