It was easy to mock Alvin Toffler when he was riding high in the saddle, back in the 1970s. A self-described “futurist” (precise job description still TBD), he was part Jeremiah and part Arthur C. Clarke, warning us all about the dizzy pace of technological change even as he got giddy describing its supposed blessings.
In his day he was a darling of TV talk show bookers and sold millions of copies of books, Future Shock most famously but also other two-word titles like Third Wave and Power Shift. His literary and intellectual pretensions made him an easy target for smart guys who, in a strange coincidence, weren’t selling millions of books or getting asked to appear on TV themselves. (How pretentious was Future Shock? For the answer, treat yourself to the first two minutes of this Orson Welles-narrated documentary from the early seventies.)
