Future Shock Documentary (1972) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Future Shock Documentary (1972) [video]

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74 pointsmindcrime18 comments

I just read a related book, “The Shockwave Rider” from 1975, which apparently Brennan said was derived from “Future Shock”. Despite some big misses in predicting future tech, it was a very interesting exploration of the effects of rapid change on individuals and society, and of course the protagonist smart enough to ride the wave. Looking forward to watching this and reading Future Shock.

Some highlights:

- Plug in culture for skilled workers, seamlessly moving from city to city and leaving everything behind.

- A few asteroid mining companies have huge clout with government and dominate the economy. Huge benefits and protections for executives. Higher access to restricted data.

- Average joes reduced to tribalism and street fighting.

- Delphi prediction market allowing people to bet on and influence social change.

Replace asteroid mining with oil, and it doesn’t seem too far off..

The Shockwave Rider is part of a sort-of-series of near-future novels by John Brunner. The others are Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation), The Sheep Look Up (ecological catastrophe) and The Jagged Orbit (interracial violence).

Nice, I’ve bookmarked all of them to read together and just soak up Brunner’s vision of the future.

I've read The Shockwave Rider but not the others... definitely looking forward to digging into the rest of the John Brunner catalog at some point. Thanks for highlighting those!

Toffler and other "futurists" have always struck me as complete and utter charlatans. His predictions or whatever you want to call them always seem to fall into one of two categories: Things that are already happening or things that have maybe a 50/50 chance of happening. As Filip Buekens wrote in "The Dark Side of the Loon: Explaining the Temptations of Obscurantism" (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/55704402.pdf), "[The] promise of a deep insight into intriguing subject matters is often sufficient to lure the audience into a futile quest for understanding."

That's a seriously reactionary film! Just one example: footage of a feminist rally followed by violent rioting.

Toffler made predictions about culture and society, not tech. He "predictions" were about about the impact of tech on the systems of society and culture as dictated by the major waves of tech evolution since the dawn of man. The Third Wave outlines the waves of history, Future Shock is about the friction of assimilating to rapidly changing tech and culture, Powershift is about the shift in power from a top down system to a producer-consumer system due to decentralization and Revolutionary Wealth is about the revolution where new business and economic models emerge such as patreon, bitcoin and the Gig economy. I recommend all of these books as they outline a framework for understanding the nature of the technological imperative.

Using observational data to make inferences about what might happen in the future is not called "futurism." It's called "intelligence."

That doesn't really matter. The point is, Toffler provided a useful framework for thinking about the world and certain changes going on in the world. Whether you call it "futurism", "intelligence", "black magic" or "quxxikigibikig" is irrelevant.

And to your earlier point... no, "futurists" aren't always going to be right about specific details of their predictions. And I doubt many of them would claim that they are, or that that's even the goal. I think the real point of "futurism" is to stimulate thinking about certain plausible events and outcomes, and equip people to gain a small edge in gauging the probability of certain events, or classes of events. In this regard, "futurism" is still valuable, even if the crystal ball is a little fuzzy.

A) It's not irrelevant at all. These people call(ed) themselves futurists. You can't hand-wave away its semantic significance and pretend we don't need to talk about how that word is bullshit.

B) I could hardly think of a less compelling defense of futurism than "a fuzzy crystal ball is better than no crystal ball."

We live in a post-post-modern world. These days it's more relevant to read Rushkoff and look into his 'present shock' idea: http://www.rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/

> In his new book, PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now (Current; March 15, 2013), Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – present shock. Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.

This reads as if they didn't read Future Shock. The book outlines Future Shock as experiencing culture shock merely through observing that the future has happened & what you grew up understanding is no longer sufficient to relate to your surroundings

Wow, Orson Welles is the host! I was not expecting that. I had no idea a Future Shock documentary existed. Thanks for sharing.

For some reason I was expecting Herbie Hancock, even though I knew the album came out later. Tangental, but that album lived up to the name. It was the 1st to feature record scratching, and an early mastery of digital sampling.

This is a classic that I think should be shown in schools. And as much as I abhor remakes, its time may be coming however. I just hope it can capture some of the magic. The Cosmos continuation with Tyson is great, but it just doesnt capture the joyous wonder for me that Sagan's did. I feel this film would lose much of the awesome but sinister undertone without Welles.

Hancock was early, but far from first.

It seems to still be completely relevant.

I wonder if Ridley Scott was inspired by 34:45 - 35:30

This documentary and the book it's based on are hugely relevant to the present. I'd also recommend Herbert Simon's works (referenced in Future Shock).

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