FUTURE SHOCK - THE FUTURE - SHOT FULL OF HOLES
A True Story Of Future Shock
THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY TRUE TALE OF THE DEATH OF THE FUTURE
The story which inspires this essay:
Back in the day my family and I lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our neighbors were mostly disaffected folks from the city. It wasn’t perfect in any way. We had some great neighbors such as musician Terry Riley and the usual sort of people you might find in any suburb in this world today. Ordinary people and a few extraordinarily exceptional people.
It was no idyllic hippie California hideaway. The local back to the landers had some significant issues. Issues which over time have become vastly more significant in modern times.
Our family lived on a few acres miles from our nearest neighbors up a rugged gravel road from the main drag - a remote country road mainly traversed by hunters and logging trucks. Our mailbox was at the end of the driveway - a row of mailboxes - near where our kids got on and off the school bus.
One day I walked down to meet the bus and saw there was a bullet hole in our mailbox. I wasn’t concerned. Bullet holes in mailboxes and street signs were an expected sight in rural America. Kind of like billboards or signs which proclaimed “WATCH FOR RADAR”, or “DANGEROUS CURVES”.
But there was a message in this mailbox. One foretelling the future. In the mailbox was a package. In the package a book. It was a brand new copy of Future Shock 1. There was a bullet hole through and through every page.
I always thought it was an omen - a sign of things to come. I for one don’t believe in coincidences or accidents. I believe the universe - or whatever we wish to call it - speaks to us in metaphor and semaphore.
I read the book around the bullet holes, teasing blasted pages apart as I went. I thought the book was less than brilliant and a kind of obvious way to get rich for someone who could still type and think. The writer and publishers made a killing.
I often think - what if someone had written the real actual truth about what was occurring now all around us? What then? Would we have been better prepared for the dystopian totalitarianism which has now descended like a fog all around us?
But in the end no one did write such a fully realized book which explained this murder of the future in our time. There were limited hangouts sure. Those limited hangouts where the partial truth is revealed but never the whole truth.
Limited hangouts which fulfilled the tactics of spies and intelligence operatives from the beginning of time. But it was so inconvenient to understand the full truth being revealed.
“In Time the Grandfather Clock Groaned”
In FUTURE SHOCK - the author does a skillful job of revealing part of the truth and is paid well to do so. But any truth you expect to find will be shot full of holes.
Unknown to us the future had been shot full of holes. But in time we would know only too well.
Like a crime scene where the victim lies in ghostly outline of the sidewalk. But if the detectives know the full story they are not telling us a thing.
“Elementary, my dear Watson”
Attributed to Sherlock Holmes
“Forget it Jake. It’s China Town.”
THE FUTURE IS STONED COLD DEAD - UNLESS OF COURSE WE GIVE IT A TIMELY SHOT OF NARCAN.
Additional thoughts on Future Shock by Ted Gioia, fellow writer.
I read https://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Shock-Alvin-Toffler/dp/1982584424 many years ago, among many the other weird Sci-fi books like 'Level 7' - but never expected to find the reality when I joined HMG War Office in the 1960s and was posted to Bicester RAC Ordinance Depot ( St Georges barracks).
Upon my arrival, I was duly processed and signed the Secrets Act more than once (to be sure). On my first day, I witnessed a steam train appearing out of the ground! My trainer told me that there were underground cities beneath this 20 sq mile site and it has 7 levels!
My skin crawled, but I had no desire to tell him about the book! Just another anecdote of my diverse life experiences. :-D
I read this book in 1970. 13 I guess looking back, did not read it again. However in later years I encountered Paul Virilio. Three interrelated concepts from Virilio’s unique lexicon stand out as uniquely relevant for political theology: dromology, accidentology, and revelation. Writing in the late 70s on trends that have proliferated, Virilio declares that “there is no democracy, only dromocracy,” the rule of speed (Speed and Politics, 69). For Virilio, speed itself is neither good nor bad, and there can be a non-oppressive, voluntary multiplicity of cohabitating speeds. But today we are all drawn into a dangerous acceleration, filtered through and motivated by the logic of militarization, a dialectic of attack and defense. “In fact, history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” says Virilio (Speed and Politics, 90). For Virilio, then, the primary driver of modern politics is not the secularization of theology into law, nor even the dialectic between the bourgeoisie and proletariat; the key to social domination is speed and the battle over movement, the militarized governance of mobility, which immobilizes populations not only with tear gas and batons, but by making them sedentary, passive, and aloof through fast travel and the captivation of screens. https://politicaltheology.com/paul-virilio/
Time–space compression occurs as a result of technological innovations driven by the global expansion of capital that condense or elide spatial and temporal distances, including technologies of communication (telegraph, telephones, fax machines, Internet) and travel (rail, cars, trains, jets), driven by the need to overcome spatial barriers, open up new markets, speed up production cycles, and reduce the turnover time of capital.
According to Paul Virilio, time-space compression is an essential facet of capitalist life, saying that "we are entering a space which is speed-space ... This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but via programming" (qtd. in Decron 71[5]). In Speed and Politics, Virilio coined the term dromology to describe the study of "speed-space". Virilio describes velocity as the hidden factor in wealth and power, where historical eras and political events are effectively speed-ratios. In his view, acceleration destroys space and compresses time in ways of perceiving reality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93space_compression