The detrimental costs of not caring, demonstrated by our inaction, are far greater than the benefits of our taking responsible stewardship of our home, the Earth.

Surviving Our Collision with Tomorrow

I have been called a Luddite. And I welcome it.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, from his book A Man Without A Country

n that mysterious way that books have of sometimes choosing us rather than the other way around, my old copy of Future Shock, circa 1970, kept winking and nodding at me for weeks, tipping itself ever so slightly forward from the row of other books on the shelf, valiantly trying to snag my attention with its bold Peter Max-esque title font bordered in psychedelic yellow. Finally, unable to quell my curiosity any longer, I gave in to its wiles, pulling it out after what felt like centuries.

Written by sociologist Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi Toffler, the book, when it first appeared, immediately grabbed worldwide attention. Today, nearly 40 years later, it's still considered a landmark work, with over 6 million copies sold.

In it, Toffler predicted, far ahead of its time, the coming computer revolution, along with an accurate description of the major impact this would have on life as we know it. Network mogul Ted Turner has even credited Toffler with inspiring him to create CNN. Future Shock uncannily anticipated such revolutionary new technologies and trends as cloning, cable television, VCRs, satellites, the concept of customizing products and niche markets, the way that modern daily life would come to be hyper-speeded up, and the advent of the "knowledge economy," which would give rise to another of the terms Toffler originated, information overload.

Toffler coined the term future shock to describe a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time," as society suddenly finds itself, like it or not, in the throes of an enormous structural change at the very last minute. In this particular case, Toffler was describing the accelerated rate of technological and social changes he saw beginning to overtake us near the end of the 1960s, overwhelming people, leaving them feeling disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation." He believed that the majority of social problems beginning to run rampant at the time -- spiraling numbers of divorces, single-parent families, addictions and crime, along with a mass exodus from cities to their outlying suburbs -- were all symptoms of future shock.

Well, over the decades between the book's inception and today, all of those inventions and trends have come to pass; and maybe we were initially shocked when they first nudged their way onto the scene, these many facets of techno-wonder. But by now, they've become so entrenched in our lives, so a part of who we think we are, that it's hard to imagine living without them. Then again, it's not as if we're free of those '60s future shock symptoms: the incidences of shattered families, suburban sprawl and all the rest have all spiked alarmingly these last 40 years. In terms of future shock, is it possible that we ain't seen nothin' yet?

Through the magic of synchronicity, only days after I'd found myself camped out by the woodstove immersed in Toffler's opus, a friend e-mailed me an article from the December 11 Oregonian about a current star of the "YouTube universe," 38-year-old Greg Craven. His homemade attraction, tantalizingly titled The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See (a low-tech affair, shot in what looks to be his den, and posted this past summer), has been viewed almost 3 million times to date. Craven, who describes himself as "a high school science teacher in the process of burning out," took a break from his job to direct and film himself addressing the subject of . . . global warming.

What is it about this decidedly unsexy subject that's packin' 'em in? Craven's most terrifying video we'll ever see centers around the argument of whether climate change is real. We can't say with certainty that it is, he posits reasonably -- but then again, we can't say it isn't, either. Not at this point. We also can't say with any certainty that humans are causing climate change; likewise, we can't say we aren't. So, he rationalizes, human-caused climate change is at the very least a possibility.

Leaning earnestly into his own camera, he asks, "What if I told you I think I've found an argument that makes that whole bitter question of whether it's really happening or not moot?"

And then, like the true high school teacher he is, Craven positions himself in front of a white board and, using a game-theoretic setup, he proceeds to demonstrate that the whole thing is a game against nature. Our choice, he claims, is either to take precautionary actions against global warming now, before it's too late, or to do nothing, believing that none of the catastrophic predictions will ever occur. When faced with such uncertainty, he concludes, the risk of acting -- worldwide economic depression caused by our efforts to avert something that was never a real threat in the first place -- is far less devastating than the risk of not acting -- massive destruction resulting in the end of life as we know it. Put another way, he says, the detrimental costs of not caring, demonstrated by our inaction, are far greater than the benefits of our taking responsible stewardship of our home, the Earth.

Leaning in again for the clincher, Craven, calling himself an "information warrior," challenges and even encourages people to find flaws in his argument. Think for yourselves, he's saying -- don't take my word for it. And if, in the end, you agree with him, he urges those in his audience to forward the video to as many people as possible. "This is likely to be the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced," he warns. "We have greatness within us -- [we're] innovative, giving, determined. It's time for the best in us to come out."

In this information age, says Craven, citing one of Toffler's own terms, you can change the culture one person at a time, eventually creating an avalanche. Herein lies the challenge. Describing victims of future shock, Toffler cites one of the most widespread responses to high-speed change: outright denial. Those in denial flatly refuse to take in new information when the demand for decisions crescendos beyond their capacity to cope. The "Denier," says Toffler, can't accept the evidence of his or her senses, concluding instead that "things really are the same and that all evidences of change are merely superficial." This strategy increases the likelihood that when the Denier is finally forced to adapt, his or her encounter with change "will come in the form of a single massive life crisis rather than a sequence of manageable problems." Without making widespread changes to accommodate climate change now, are we in danger of incurring a similar massive life crisis upon ourselves?

Greg Craven is convinced we are. As the consequences of global warming loom ever more apparent, it would be easy to enter this new year feeling massive "information overload," particularly since none of the news is good. And when faced with making a choice between a catastrophic scenario and one that's still going to entail hardship and loss but will be somewhat less horrendous in scale, who wouldn't rather just run away?

Toffler tells interviewer Peter Schwartz in the November 1993 issue of Wired magazine about an experience he once had with a class of 15-year-old high school students. "I gave them index cards, and I said, ‘Write down seven things that will happen in the future.'" The students described a very dramatic series of events: revolutions, assassinations, all of us drowning in some unnamed ecological sludge. "But I noticed," he goes on, "that of the 198 items that they handed in, only six used the word ‘I.' So I gave them another set of cards, and I said, ‘Now I want you to write down seven things that are going to happen to you.' Back came, ‘I will be married when I'm 21,' ‘I will live in the same neighborhood,' ‘I will have a dog.'"

The conclusion he draws from this is simple. In order to avoid future shock, he says in the book, "we must vastly widen our conception of possible futures." Calling for "a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies," he encourages everyone -- and he means everyone -- to participate in "the flaming imagination of art." Toffler continues, "The overwhelming majority of ideas put forward will, of course, be absurd, funny or technically impossible. Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to harsh critical judgment." This requires an environment in which it's safe to risk making mistakes, in which "novel juxtapositions of ideas can be freely expressed before being critically sifted." He calls this process "imagineering."

This approach, meeting what seems like an impossible challenge with free-range creativity, is what's behind Greg Craven's plea that we pass his video to each other through cyberspace until it's reached everyone we know -- not so that he can become a media star but in order to wake us out of our future shock numbness. When we're frozen by our own anxiety nightmares, we can't even begin to entertain possible alternatives to our oily way of living, and that's what is being called for now.

Inarguably, our new technologies are at the root of what's causing many of our global warming catastrophes today. Kurt Vonnegut, in his recent book A Man Without a Country, published just before he died last year, brags about writing letters by hand, using a typewriter rather than a computer and sending his only copies of his manuscripts to a typist through the post office. Was he really advocating a movement where we turn our backs on the most up-to-date of our technologies in order to wrest back control? Well, Vonnegut was the ultimate trickster; his real interest, however, lay in encouraging a resurgence of our lost social values, a sense of community and all the aesthetic joys that new technologies have made obsolete. Could we loosen our hold on some of these new toys and not only lessen our impact on the Earth but actually gain back pieces of ourselves?

Craven, another playful trickster, adds, "We need as many information warriors out there as we can get!" How can we become the imagineers needed now to meet what's likely to be the greatest threat humanity has ever faced? By paying attention. To what? To everything. Let's shake ourselves out of our future shock lethargy. The time has come to radically rethink our way of living. What are the countless alternatives we can begin now, each one of us, to imagine in order to create a path away from this collision with tomorrow? Let's tap into that "flaming imagination of art" to begin vastly widening our conception of the days to come, which are just around the corner.




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	The detrimental costs of not caring, demonstrated by our inaction, are far greater than the benefits of our taking responsible stewardship of our home, the Earth. Surviving Our Collision with Tomorrow I have been called a Luddite. And I welcome it. -- Kurt Vonnegut, from his book A Man Without A Country n that mysterious way that books have of sometimes choosing us rather than the other way around, my old copy of Future Shock, circa 1970, kept winking and nodding at me for weeks, tipping itself ever so slightly forward from the row of other books on the shelf, valiantly trying to snag my attention with its bold Peter Max-esque title font bordered in psychedelic yellow. Finally, unable to quell my curiosity any longer, I gave in to its wiles, pulling it out after what felt like centuries. Written by sociologist Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi Toffler, the book, when it first appeared, immediately grabbed worldwide attention. Today, nearly 40 years later, it's still considered a landmark work, with over 6 million copies sold. In it, Toffler predicted, far ahead of its time, the coming computer revolution, along with an accurate description of the major impact this would have on life as we know it. Network mogul Ted Turner has even credited Toffler with inspiring him to create CNN. Future Shock uncannily anticipated such revolutionary new technologies and trends as cloning, cable television, VCRs, satellites, the concept of customizing products and niche markets, the way that modern daily life would come to be hyper-speeded up, and the advent of the "knowledge economy," which would give rise to another of the terms Toffler originated, information overload. Toffler coined the term future shock to describe a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time," as society suddenly finds itself, like it or not, in the throes of an enormous structural change at the very last minute. In this particular case, Toffler was describing the accelerated rate of technological and social changes he saw beginning to overtake us near the end of the 1960s, overwhelming people, leaving them feeling disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation." He believed that the majority of social problems beginning to run rampant at the time -- spiraling numbers of divorces, single-parent families, addictions and crime, along with a mass exodus from cities to their outlying suburbs -- were all symptoms of future shock. Well, over the decades between the book's inception and today, all of those inventions and trends have come to pass; and maybe we were initially shocked when they first nudged their way onto the scene, these many facets of techno-wonder. But by now, they've become so entrenched in our lives, so a part of who we think we are, that it's hard to imagine living without them. Then again, it's not as if we're free of those '60s future shock symptoms: the incidences of shattered families, suburban sprawl and all the rest have all spiked alarmingly these last 40 years. In terms of future shock, is it possible that we ain't seen nothin' yet? Through the magic of synchronicity, only days after I'd found myself camped out by the woodstove immersed in Toffler's opus, a friend e-mailed me an article from the December 11 Oregonian about a current star of the "YouTube universe," 38-year-old Greg Craven. His homemade attraction, tantalizingly titled The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See (a low-tech affair, shot in what looks to be his den, and posted this past summer), has been viewed almost 3 million times to date. Craven, who describes himself as "a high school science teacher in the process of burning out," took a break from his job to direct and film himself addressing the subject of . . . global warming. What is it about this decidedly unsexy subject that's packin' 'em in? Craven's most terrifying video we'll ever see centers around the argument of whether climate change is real. We can't say with certainty that it is, he posits reasonably -- but then again, we can't say it isn't, either. Not at this point. We also can't say with any certainty that humans are causing climate change; likewise, we can't say we aren't. So, he rationalizes, human-caused climate change is at the very least a possibility. Leaning earnestly into his own camera, he asks, "What if I told you I think I've found an argument that makes that whole bitter question of whether it's really happening or not moot?" And then, like the true high school teacher he is, Craven positions himself in front of a white board and, using a game-theoretic setup, he proceeds to demonstrate that the whole thing is a game against nature. Our choice, he claims, is either to take precautionary actions against global warming now, before it's too late, or to do nothing, believing that none of the catastrophic predictions will ever occur. When faced with such uncertainty, he concludes, the risk of acting -- worldwide economic depression caused by our efforts to avert something that was never a real threat in the first place -- is far less devastating than the risk of not acting -- massive destruction resulting in the end of life as we know it. Put another way, he says, the detrimental costs of not caring, demonstrated by our inaction, are far greater than the benefits of our taking responsible stewardship of our home, the Earth. Leaning in again for the clincher, Craven, calling himself an "information warrior," challenges and even encourages people to find flaws in his argument. Think for yourselves, he's saying -- don't take my word for it. And if, in the end, you agree with him, he urges those in his audience to forward the video to as many people as possible. "This is likely to be the greatest threat that humanity has ever faced," he warns. "We have greatness within us -- [we're] innovative, giving, determined. It's time for the best in us to come out." In this information age, says Craven, citing one of Toffler's own terms, you can change the culture one person at a time, eventually creating an avalanche. Herein lies the challenge. Describing victims of future shock, Toffler cites one of the most widespread responses to high-speed change: outright denial. Those in denial flatly refuse to take in new information when the demand for decisions crescendos beyond their capacity to cope. The "Denier," says Toffler, can't accept the evidence of his or her senses, concluding instead that "things really are the same and that all evidences of change are merely superficial." This strategy increases the likelihood that when the Denier is finally forced to adapt, his or her encounter with change "will come in the form of a single massive life crisis rather than a sequence of manageable problems." Without making widespread changes to accommodate climate change now, are we in danger of incurring a similar massive life crisis upon ourselves? Greg Craven is convinced we are. As the consequences of global warming loom ever more apparent, it would be easy to enter this new year feeling massive "information overload," particularly since none of the news is good. And when faced with making a choice between a catastrophic scenario and one that's still going to entail hardship and loss but will be somewhat less horrendous in scale, who wouldn't rather just run away? Toffler tells interviewer Peter Schwartz in the November 1993 issue of Wired magazine about an experience he once had with a class of 15-year-old high school students. "I gave them index cards, and I said, ‘Write down seven things that will happen in the future.'" The students described a very dramatic series of events: revolutions, assassinations, all of us drowning in some unnamed ecological sludge. "But I noticed," he goes on, "that of the 198 items that they handed in, only six used the word ‘I.' So I gave them another set of cards, and I said, ‘Now I want you to write down seven things that are going to happen to you.' Back came, ‘I will be married when I'm 21,' ‘I will live in the same neighborhood,' ‘I will have a dog.'" The conclusion he draws from this is simple. In order to avoid future shock, he says in the book, "we must vastly widen our conception of possible futures." Calling for "a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies," he encourages everyone -- and he means everyone -- to participate in "the flaming imagination of art." Toffler continues, "The overwhelming majority of ideas put forward will, of course, be absurd, funny or technically impossible. Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to harsh critical judgment." This requires an environment in which it's safe to risk making mistakes, in which "novel juxtapositions of ideas can be freely expressed before being critically sifted." He calls this process "imagineering." This approach, meeting what seems like an impossible challenge with free-range creativity, is what's behind Greg Craven's plea that we pass his video to each other through cyberspace until it's reached everyone we know -- not so that he can become a media star but in order to wake us out of our future shock numbness. When we're frozen by our own anxiety nightmares, we can't even begin to entertain possible alternatives to our oily way of living, and that's what is being called for now. Inarguably, our new technologies are at the root of what's causing many of our global warming catastrophes today. Kurt Vonnegut, in his recent book A Man Without a Country, published just before he died last year, brags about writing letters by hand, using a typewriter rather than a computer and sending his only copies of his manuscripts to a typist through the post office. Was he really advocating a movement where we turn our backs on the most up-to-date of our technologies in order to wrest back control? Well, Vonnegut was the ultimate trickster; his real interest, however, lay in encouraging a resurgence of our lost social values, a sense of community and all the aesthetic joys that new technologies have made obsolete. Could we loosen our hold on some of these new toys and not only lessen our impact on the Earth but actually gain back pieces of ourselves? Craven, another playful trickster, adds, "We need as many information warriors out there as we can get!" How can we become the imagineers needed now to meet what's likely to be the greatest threat humanity has ever faced? By paying attention. To what? To everything. Let's shake ourselves out of our future shock lethargy. The time has come to radically rethink our way of living. What are the countless alternatives we can begin now, each one of us, to imagine in order to create a path away from this collision with tomorrow? Let's tap into that "flaming imagination of art" to begin vastly widening our conception of the days to come, which are just around the corner.