Future Shock: Part II

Future Shock is all about. We're going to rehatch a little bit here, but this is definitely a situation where if you didn't listen to part one, you really should listen to part one before you jumped in with parts Yeah, because we are using Future Shock as as kind of time capsule um of the twentieth century fear and anxiety about change, the malaise about future, of fretting that has

now followed us into the twenty one century. So we're looking at sort of like this time caps is quaint um in this kind of retro futurist way, but it's also really humbling because many of the concerns are prescient and thoughtful. So let's launch right into him because one of the things that the Toddlers talk about, and what they got right, I think, in at least in my mind, is some of the reproductive technology, or what they call

birth technology. UM Now Toddler says. Dr E. S. E. Half As, an internationally respected biologists at Washington State University, has publicly suggested, on the basis of his own establishing work on reproduction, that within a mere ten to fifteen years, a woman will be able to buy a tiny, frozen embryo, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to

it as though it had been conceived in her own body. Now, back in the day, this was what Yeah, what are you talking? I remember the time magazine covers were they were shocking and start is it really had a lot of future shock to them. Yeah. And now he takes this idea and he says, okay, so that that's an idea, and he basically says, at some point it may be possible to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived and nurtured and raised maturity outside of

human body. Now, George Davarsky, writing for Ionine in an article titled how to Build an Artificial roomb um. This was published in He says it were still a couple of decades away from this, but um there has been the development of an artificial endometrium and that's been created

from real tissue. And he says that depending on the technology is available, of placenta could either develop naturally on that endometrial wall, or it could take the form of an external device that performs some of the same functions. For instance, a dialysis machine could actually help with waste disposal. And then he says, you add a little bit of synthetic ambiotic fluid, you regulate the temperature, you create some sororeal stimulation for the baby, and add a few microbes

and boom, we'll be there. Well, even that as complex of that sound also it's kind of an oversimplification, I think. I I I researched the the artificial womb notion a little while ago, and I remember being struck by just how it's It's a far more complex event that's happening here. It's not as simple as just squired the right fluids into the baby vote and uh, and the right kind of creature will emerged later he didn't like my car wash analogy, just kind of spirt some stuff. They emerge

on the other side. Uh, no, you're right. The environment of the womb is completely specialized, right. Um, So of course it would take a lot of work to even get to that point where you could do it. But hey, I would say that steps are being made in that direction. Um. But one of the things that that Toffler or the Topplers really picked up here is that this would change families.

This would change the face of families. This would change the way that people decided to have children or become parents. And he said that he thought he expected a lot of people in future to remain childless or make that decision, and that would allow them to both have robust careers and to sort of navigate life in an easier way as opposed to people who were saddled with a lot

of children. Because again, but at the same time, here we're seeing birth control in place, and this is giving women a lot more power and options in terms of regulating their own careers and making decisions. And so he does say, hey, there could be a compromise here, There could be the postponement of children and He says that instead of just being childless, people could decide that they could freeze those embryos and then later on she's to become parents. Now, he's correct in this sense that a

lot of people have delayed parenthood. If you look at this historically, people are choosing to have children in their thirties in their early forties as opposed to what we would think of as the childbearing years in the twenties. And of course there have been implications in this, but he takes us a step further and says, hey, why even worry about doing this while you're having your career. Why not become parents when you retire. Well, yeah, that's

that's an idea too. We have. I don't know that we've seen that that vision exactly pan out, but we do see later in later stages of of of parenthood. Sure. Sure, But what I'm thinking about is at this point, the Tolfers don't even know about bio gerontology or Aubrey de Gray, who is saying, hey, guys, we got it. We've got we have got the mechanics to begin to preserve the human body. I can't say it in a different way, or maintain the human body in a way that will

extend our lives. And so if if the two could meet, perhaps you know, in the near future, you would see that people are beginning to have children in their sixties or the seventies. Yeah, but that also kind of sounds like you're you end up pushing the deadline out, and then people still wait until right up to the deadline

to do things. So would you say, oh, now I have more time to to enter the family stage of my life, we would say, would you say, oh, well, this is great for my career, and I'll just push off the child thing just a little longer. It's possible. But I just I really think that this analysis is

very interesting. Um and the Toddlers also talk about childless marriage, professional parenthood, which was sort of like seeding your parenthood responsibility to someone else post retirement, child rearing, corporate families, communes, geriatric group marriages. Okay, And then he said they talked about homosexual family units, polygamy. Than they say, these then are a few of the family forms and practices with which innovative minorities will experiment in the decades ahead. Well,

you definitely see a lot of that. I do feel like the definition of family has has changed a lot over the past few decades, and even even the definition of a child and parenting, you know, I mean, because

you have so many different models there. Now you have again to their point that you have the test two babies, you have the virtual fertilization, you have surrogate months, you have adopted parenting, and I mean even something as simple as adoptive parenting has really come a long way as as this because back back in the year the seventies and before, there was still that idea that you would adopt a child and then maybe never tell them that

they were adopted. And we have a we have a far more advanced and uh and I think, you know, more truthful and healthy um idea of what adoptive parenting is now and how that fits into this into our new and evolving idea of what a family is. You know. Some of that I think plays into this idea of how we regard um one another at different stages in our lives, because and in the book they were talking about how before the seventies, it was either that you

were a child or you were an adult. There was no teenager, there was no becoming an adult or acknowledging that there are different stages, so I think they're to that point. There's a lot more insitivity to how children are developing, and as a result, people are thinking more about, you know, how to form their minds as opposed to like you're you, you're termed eighteen, your your men now right,

go out? And oh yeah, I mean so Like even time I watch an episode of mad Men, I often reflect on men in in my life, my you know, my dad and my grandfather, you know, various uncles and as well as Don Draper's example, and think about like those past ideas of you know, you're no longer a child and now you're a man, and how how that that model doesn't really apply so much anymore, Like there's no against so many of us figure out a way way to uh sustain our childhood indefinitely and to put

off some imagined transformation into a man and definitely. And also that model of what a man was culturally and say the nineteen sixties us is, I feel, rather than what a lot of us would want to be. That's sort of you know, don't don't look your family members in the eye kind of a thing like work all day, support the family and not be there like so many of those models you see in in like old films.

They just like nobody even wants that anymore. It's so stifling. Yeah, yeah, And that's kind of what they say in here, And they say that that one of the things about having more fractured society is that you have more freedoms. Is that people begin to really embrace individuality in a way that allows them to express themselves in a way that

they hadn't been able to before. Just to bring the discussion back around to reproductive technology and future shock, I ran across this wonderful quote from Ray Kurtz Flow in a two thousand twelve Wired interview. He said, people actually adjust to the reality of their technology amazingly quickly. Is descriptions of technologies just around the corner that they find daunting. But when there's a new treatment for a disease that works better, people can wax philosophically. Oh, I don't know

if we really to extend longevity. But when it actually comes to curing curing a disease or treating it better, it's adopted without hesitation. The only question is does it really work. The same thing with social networks or wikis or Wikipedia, all these things, we eagerly adopt them. The only question is that do they really help us. When it becomes clear that they do, we adopt them very readily. They quickly become a part of our everyday world so

that we can't do without them. That's true. I've read um study. I believe that is the sixty plus group that are really sort of the biggest users of their smartphones because they're beginning to see that there is a huge UM. I mean, this isn't a lifesaving thing, but this is something that can really simplify their lives in some ways. And so then you begin to get this idea of well maybe it's you know, necessity is the

mother of adoption, um, rather than invention. Yeah, and you see in some cases that kind of skipping of a technology, you know, like uh, you see like a various older people in our lives that may have never figured out exactly how to program a VCR back when that was a thing, but now they're just complete masters of their

smartphone because the technologies farm are relevant to their existence. Well, so much easier to yeah, yes, true with Surrey in your life right now, Another topic that Toffler touches on is the idea of a disposable society. He says, quote, we develop a throwaway mentality to match our throwaway products. This mentality produces, among other things, instead of radically altered

values with respect to property. But the spread of disposability through society also implies decreased durations in man thing relationships. And that's man thing, not man thing the comic book character. If you're wondering, instead of being linked with a single object over a relatively long span of time, we were linked for brief periods with the succession of objects that supplanted. Um. This is this is one of those those ideas that he brings out that at once rings true. Like there's

a lot of this that totally rings true. There are some of the finer details of it that don't necessarily hold up all the way. But but I feel like for the most part he got this one right. Um. Because one idea that instantly comes to mind here is furniture. Uh, you know you mentioned Ikia in the last episode. Like not, not only is Ikia a model of build it yourself furniture, but it isn't a model of furniture that no one's buying expecting it to be passed on to their grandchildren.

The previous model was, you know, you spent, you put a lot of money into a well crafted piece of furniture and that is part of your heritage. And now we we really don't expect most of our furniture in the last you know, in the next week. Yeah, there is definitely a huge aspect of our society that is disposable.

But I'm also thinking about, um, the fact that we tend to just kind of hoard a little bit, and you know, there's that part of materialism which allows us to do that, to just keep a mass more and

more things. Oh yeah, for instance, self storage units. I believe we've touched on this before, but um, the latest stats from the Self Self Storage Association, they say that they are now over forty eight thousand, five hundred primary self storage facilities in the United States as of the year in two thousand thirteen, and then there are another four thousand secondary facilities. Primary facilities are ones who are basically all they do are the main thing they do.

In storage facilities, secondary there's some other primary business at hand. But the self storage rentable space in the US alone is now two point three billion square feet. That's approximately two hundred and ten million square meters uh. And they say that that figure represents more than seventy eight square miles of rentable self storage space under one roof, an area more than three times the size of Manhattan Island.

So that's kind of crazy. And I think that that's part and personal of a disposable society, or creating goods that are so cheaply made or so easy to buy or so uh cost effective that you can either dispose of them where you just can buying more and more of the junk. You know, It's true, it's kind of like both both sides of it. Yes, we're it's a disposable culture, but we're not quite so disposable that we're going to throw all of that old disposable stuff away.

We need to put that somewhere because we might need it again. Like we're still clinging to some of those sort of post depression ideas and and and the old fashioned ideas that we need to hold onto the things we own. We need to hold onto well crafted materials because they are their usefulness will continue in the decades ahead. We're still holding onto some of those ideas, but we're holding onto it with disposable materials, and so we're kind

of getting the worst of both worlds. And then you have some people in extreme cases who are have huge amounts of anxiety connected to those things because their their own sorts of uh psychological states are playing out in terms of objects. And of course I'm saying hoarding here,

which is closely related to obsessive compulsive disorder. But this was also making me think about um our relationships be has the top us also point out that in the future UM people will be so mobile and spread out so much um that we will begin to have very surface relationships, disposable relationships, will have what they call the nine to five or the workday relationships, where you know you're having these relationships through coworkers, but it's not necessarily

going deeper than that. And that we've begun to move away from family in terms of social bonds and more toward one another in in these very superficial ways. Yeah, and I feel like you do see a lot of that in life. Yeah, although if you want to play Devil's after get here, you could say that people maybe are a little bit more isolated because Uh. Technology has put us in that position. And you know, a Facebook

front is different than a face to face friend. But they would say that communities have sprung up uh in the void, right, and that there is a connection that people feel, even if it is as abstract as an

avatar that you create to communicate with another person. There's a wonderful moment in the documentary version of Future Shock where a little girl has has taken her doll back to the shop UH and exchanges it for a new, shinier doll, and then the store owner throws the old doll and the garbage and the music is very ominous and then UH. And then Orson Welles tells us even friends don't last in this future UM, which which was

you know, again very much overstating the case there. But again you do see shades of that in our modern society. You do do. And they also talked about simulated environments, this idea that we would begin to create these um environments that we would move through in a more abstract way. UM. But we haven't seen that completely yet. We we know that the Internet of everything is on the horizon. We know that nearly every surface can become interactive, but We're

not quite there yet. But on the other hand, simulated environments in the form of video games still remain a very big business. People are putting themselves in these environments. Not quite in the virtual reality UH idea that became prevalent in the in the nineteen eighties and and and part of the nineties. But still they are immersing themselves in a virtual world uh an unreal world and spending

a lot of time and energy there. But I am still waiting for that travel lodge of Remember that report we saw from futurists Ian Pearson who said, like, one day you can go that travel lodge and you can call up any sort of background environment that you want. You could have your sheets outfitted with sensors that might

interact with someone else. You could have contacts active contact lenses that would put retinal images on your eyes and into your brain, so that you could be staring at someone, but they could be completely different than than than who you are actually staring at and transforming your reality into

this artificial reality. Yeah, and that was definitely a study that gave me a little future shock, Like maybe not like the crippling level of future shock, but very much that that in all level of future shock where you really have to think, wow, things could in the future significantly change in a way that it shakes culture itself. Yeah. And if you think about that model too, that changes the economic model too, because everything in that that that

space is for sale too. I mean, if you like the dresser, you can just go tap on it or scan it and that could be delivered to you in one hour via a drone. Yeah, thank you Amazon. On the subject of a disposable culture, something we're talking about recently in our very own break room here, how stuff works cups because we have one of those k cup machines,

they're Curi Curig. We put a little the little plastic cup in and then you pop it and it shoots hot water through there and makes you a cup of coffee. And then what do you do with the little plastic cup You throw it away? Right. Well, it's become quite popular. Just in our office. According to a survey by the National Coffee Association, nearly one in five adults drink single cup brewed coffee yesterday, so it makes it the second most popular way to brew coffee, right after your normal

hum Mr coffee type coffee machine. Sadly, my method to eropress hasn't quite made his way to the top yet. But but here's where he gets the Erroopress is a wonderful device, even though it is sometimes mistaken for either a drug paraphernalia or some sort of a sexual device.

But still it's a wonderful way to make coffee. According to Seattle Times, uh U S consumers bought one thirty two million dollars worth of coffee pods in two thousand eight four October, three point one billion for them last year, and that was compared to six billion uh for roasted coffee and two point five billion in instant coffee. This is all from two thousand fourteen Mother Jones article Your coffee POD's dirty secret and where it gets really dirty

is we can consider this. In two thousand thirteen, Green Mountain produced eight point three billion cake cups, enough to wrap around the equator of the planet ten point five times, do we, liamb You will not quit telling me that's that until I quite using the cake cups, will you. I know they're fast, I know they're a little faster than the other machine, but but yeah, ten point five times around the uh The the equator of the point.

Now we should mention that that Kurig just released a sustainability report announcing that the company plans to make all their coffee pods recyclable by So there's a silver lining the right. So if you can see the lining beyond the belt of k cups that are now orbiting the plant, So in six years I can feel good about having a cup. Yeah, there you go, all right, or just get the little my mom has one and she uses a little uh disposable or not disposable, but the little

reusable thing you get like a little cake cup. Yeah, and just fill it with you just put coffee grounds in there and kind of treat it like a you know, a grown ups coffee maker. All right, Yeah, it can be done. You don't have to you don't have to abandon your device. You just a little convenient it is. It is, alright, So again something that the Dolfers could not have anticipated. We're gonna take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk about what

else they didn't anticipate. All right, we're back. Before we get it into the next section, I do want to mention real quick that another area that I feel like they maybe not got right, but are getting right, Like they're they've successfully forecast some of what's happening in the world.

As they mentioned possible technological backlash h quote protests against the ravages of irresponsibility used technology, and they said that they could crystallize in a pathological form a future phobic fascism with scientists quote substituting for Jews and concentration camps. That's an extreme vision of what the future could hold. But I instantly thought of, for instance, the the German backlash against nuclear power, current backlash against in as a

spine of all the anxiety surrounding heart bleed. I feel like we we are seeing seeds of maybe not the extreme vision of where this could had, but we see some of the some of those currents already in our culture well. And again I think that speaks to the topplers pointing out that we don't have the structure in place, and that they're saying this in the seventies. Is two thousand and fourteen, and we still have not caught up with the technology in terms of how to manage it.

Um from from different sectors, whether or not it is from the government or from private corporations. Um. But let's let's talk about some things that they didn't anticipate. Um. And one of the things I'm thinking about is the way our memory systems would change. Indeed, the way that we think has been completely changed by our technology. Yeah. Now, another thing that didn't come up much is this idea that we're pretty adaptable, and with a aptibility comes creativity.

There's an article from I O nine and it's by Charlie Jane Anders, and she writes it in terms of culture shock, not necessarily future shock, that researchers William Maddox and Adam Dlinsky have done a lot of work showing that people who had a multi cultural experience, like living in a foreign country for several months, they score higher

on various tests of creativity. And she said that you could assume that people who have overcome future shock would similarly score higher on those tests, because what is future shock but uncertainty about what's going on in anxiety. As a result, if you are dumped into a place that you are not familiar with, where the language is completely foreign to you, and the systems are different systems where you operate just day to day, then it's sort of

the same thing. Yeah, I mean, it's very much a situation of worldview, you know, this which which you often encounter when you're discussing religion. In the way that we we view ourselves within a cosmology, you know, we have this bubble around us, and in that bubble, within that bubble or ideas about who we are, how we fit in with the universe, what makes sense, what the rules are, who who is the us in the sentence, and who are the others? Certainly religion can be a part of that,

but technology as well. I mean, technology is part of your worldview, and if you are ever forced to step outside of it like that, I feel like stepping outside of your worldview is is a vital, uh means of gaining a larger understanding about what it is to be human and what it what it is to exist on this planet. Yeah, I mean that's stepping out of your

normal cy bias. Yeah, stepping out of what you take for granted as the normal world and realizing, hey, there are other equally valid ways of looking at the universe. They're equally valid ways of dealing with day to day life and they and they may involve drastically different technology.

They may involve significantly less technology. Another thing that they didn't anticipate is that there would emerge out of this kind of future shock, or are all these different different systems that were coming online a kind of retail homogeny um and researcher Shigahiro Oyshi with the University of Virginia writes about the idea that greater mobility is partly responsible

for the rise in the number of chain stores. So no matter where you go, you see the same handful of shops and restaurants, and this is reassuring in an age where people are moving around a lot. And actually, if you want more on this, you can see the article why Americans love chain stores in Atlantic cities. Yeah, you do fall into that situation where there's going to be a part of any certainly American city that looks just like it's uh, the same colony of commercialism in

another city. No matter what the actual environment is, no matter what the actual cortial cultural demographics are, you're gonna find that same strip mall land spreading out around the earthen center like some sort of a mold. So ultimately, at the end of the day, what can we still learn from future shock, Why is this, Why is this still relevant? You've got to use technology to build a decent,

democratic and humane society, right, Yeah, certainly. I mean most of our really scary ideas of technology affecting the future, uh tend to involve a loss of rights, the loss of humanity, and some sort of totalitarian flavoring to the ice cream. But we we've also seen plenty of examples of say social media being used in the last few years, where the technology is at least being used with the intention of pushing um freedom. Yeah, and you do see

also in developing countries where this becomes really important. Um, you know, Twitter is used there in a way that it's not used you know, say and and Sudan. It's being used there in the way that's not being used in the United States, and is able to report things in a way that people did not know what was going on. So it's really important that way. But I was just thinking that in terms of struct sure that something like the city of Portland, Oregon or Portlandia is

a great example. It's a microcosm and it doesn't barely cover the issues that we're talking about today. But here's the city that in the nineteen seventies, was like, man, what do we want to look like in twenty years? And they actually invested a ton of money in their transit system and in other ways that they thought would help, uh, the economy and the people grow there and then well and behold it becomes this grand city to to live

in and everybody flocks to it. And in the same way, you know, you feel like you you hear this all the time, like you're we're going to invest in the future, and it's just lip service because a lot of it is just maintaining, um this this sort of same structures and power structures that have been in play. Yeah, there's a again in Future Shock, there's the overall theme of

the future is coming? Are you ready for it? And one of the sort of a physical example of that that I that I encountered my previous job where I worked at a newspaper out in Covington, Georgia, which is uh, significantly outside the perimeter. But Atlanta is a big urban sprawl, so communities to sprawl outward like the like a blob,

like a big urban amiba. And there's a city between Covington and Atlanta called Conyers, and Conyers was always sort of this example of this is what happens when you were not ready for the future to expand into your area, because it's kind of an area where this urban expansion, this urban sprawl has just completely uh overflown everything, and it covers both the infrastructure, I mean the streets, and

then just also a personal identity of the town. So I remember there being a lot of talk like how are we gonna how is this town going to meet the future? We're gonna be washed over as well. Well. Now think about something like a city like Beijing, how is that city going to meet the future? Because that city, in many ways is a snapshot of what many large cities in the world will look like in twenty thirty years.

Because we know that we're migrating more and more and more to cities, so we've got larger populations, and so then it really becomes very important as to how you're going to manage that and use technology in a way that helps support everybody as opposed to creating a greater divide in wealth. Yeah. Yeah, Well, indeed, some of the larger Chinese cities are a great example of like what what can we learn from these cities? What have they done right? What are they doing wrong? How are their

steps to correct matters? Now? What should we learn from all these examples? And finally another issue that the top wars of course at the point out and I mentioned that this briefly talking about protests against technology revolting against technology. Part of that is the fact that we need to realize when technologies are too dangerous, When or when is our approach to it or handling of it, uh just

too much? When should we back off? Because certainly we shouldn't be afraid of technology, we shouldn't be afraid of the future, we shouldn't bar any doors. But arguably we need to have an understanding of what the risk are as well. Well. I think some of it too is like why would technology be dangerous? Well, it would be dangerous because it would infringe, some people would say, on your rights as a person. It would be dangerous because

it would be used in nefarious ways. And we see that again with the n essay and accumulation of data to try to get a foothold in the world scene in terms of staving off any sort of threats that the United States might think it has against it. Now, Toffler has a book called War and Anti War, and he says that in terms of war and these power structures and danger, he says that the thesis is very simple of his book, the way you make war is

the way you make wealth. If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war. And if you change the way you make war, you ought to be thinking about changing the way you make peace. So I thought this is very interesting to to put it that way, because a lot of the strife that we feel is because there's a bunch of people douking it out power wise and trying to either accumulate wealth

or stature, or arms or all the above. Indeed, all right, so there you have it, future shock, what they got right, what they got wrong, some of the various bits in between, And certainly there's a lot of room for discussion here regarding those those bits and pieces that haven't been accounted for yet, some of these predictions that haven't come true,

but they haven't come true yet. Some of these problems that with technology that we're not really having to grapple with now, but perhaps we're gonna have to grapple with them, uh in the next ten years. In the next twenty years, And wouldn't would be great to see a suite of studies about future shock in places like Japan or other places in Asia where you have a more robust AI presence, and you know, to really try to put actual figures to this idea of anxiety. Yeah, you know, it would

be interesting. Indeed, I mean they really should be just straight up future shock studies. I like it all right, So we're gonna close this one out. As usual, We'll go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com for all of our podcast episodes, are blog episodes, are videos, links out to our social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Tumbler, Google Plus, YouTube, Mind Stuff Show that is our name.

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