Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) was an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide.

Toffler is a former associate editor of Fortune magazine. In his early works he focused on technology and its impact through effects like information overload. In 1970 his first major book about the future, Future Shock, became a worldwide best-seller and has sold over 6 million copies. It was the 4th best-selling book worldwide during the 1970s.

He and his wife Heidi Toffler moved on to examining the reaction to changes in society with the best-selling book, The Third Wave in 1980. In it, they foresaw such technological advances as cloning, personal computers, the internet, cable television and mobile communication. His later focus, via their other best-seller, Powershift, (1990), was on the increasing power of 21st-century military hardware, the proliferation of new technologies, and capitalism.

He founded Toffler Associates, a management consulting company, and was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, visiting professor at Cornell University, faculty member of the New School for Social Research, a White House correspondent, and a business consultant.

Early life

Alvin Toffler was born on October 4, 1928 in New York City, and raised in Brooklyn. He was the son of Rose (Albaum) and Sam Toffler, a furrier, both immigrants from Poland. His family was Jewish and he had a younger sister. He was inspired to become a writer from the age of 7 due to his aunt and uncle — Phil Album, an editor, and Ruth Album, a poet — who lived with the Tofflers. "They were Depression-era literary intellectuals," Mr. Toffler said, "and they always talked about exciting ideas."

Toffler enrolled at New York University in 1946 where he became an English major, though by his own account he was more focused on political activism than grades. He met his future wife, Adelaide Elizabeth Farrell (Heidi Toffler), when she was starting a graduate course in linguistics. Being radical students, they decided against further graduate work, moved to the Midwestern United States, and were married on April 29, 1950 by a justice of the peace whom Mr. Toffler described as a "roaring drunk."

Career

Seeking experiences to write about, Alvin and Heidi Toffler spent the next five years as blue collar workers on assembly lines while studying industrial mass production in their daily work. He compared his own desire for experience to other writers, such as Jack London, who in his quest for subjects to write about sailed the seas, and John Steinbeck, who went to pick grapes with migratory workers. In their first factory jobs, Heidi became a union shop steward in the aluminum foundry where she worked. Alvin became a millwright and welder. In the evenings Alvin would write poetry and fiction, but discovered he was proficient at neither.

His hands-on practical labor experience helped Alvin Toffler land a position at a union-backed newspaper, a transfer to its Washington bureau in 1957, then three years as a White House correspondent covering Congress and the White House for a Pennsylvania daily newspaper. Meanwhile, his wife worked at a specialized library for business and behavioral science.

They returned to New York City in 1959 when Fortune magazine invited Alvin to become its labor columnist, later having him write about business and management. After leaving Fortune magazine in 1962, Toffler began a freelance career, writing long form articles for scholarly journals and magazines. His 1964 Playboy interview with Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov was considered one of the magazine's best.

Toffler was hired by IBM to conduct research and write a paper on the social and organizational impact of computers, leading to his contact with the earliest computer "gurus" and artificial intelligence researchers and proponents. Xerox invited him to write about its research laboratory and AT&T consulted him for strategic advice. This AT&T work led to a study of telecommunications which advised its top management for the company to break up more than a decade before the government forced AT&T to break up.

In the mid-’60s, the Tofflers began five years of research on what would become Future Shock, published in 1970. It sold millions of copies and made him famous. The book has never been out of print and has editions in dozens of languages. He continued the theme in two more books, The Third Wave (1980) and Powershift (1990), with the help of his wife Heidi Toffler.

In 1996, with American business consultant Tom Johnson, they co-founded Toffler Associates, an advisory firm designed to implement many of the ideas the Tofflers had written on. The firm worked with businesses, NGOs, and governments in the US, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, and other countries.

His ideas

Toffler explains, "Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone." Toffler is also frequently cited as stating: "Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to unlearn." The words came from Herbert Gerjuoy, whom Toffler cites in full as follows: "The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself."

Early in his career, after traveling to other countries, he became aware of the new and myriad inputs that visitors received from these other cultures. He explained during an interview that some visitors would become "truly disoriented and upset" by the strange environment, which he described as a reaction to culture shock. From that issue, he foresaw another problem for the future, when those from a "new environment comes to you ... and comes to you rapidly." That kind of sudden cultural change within one's own country, which he felt many would not understand, would lead to a similar reaction, one of "future shock."

In his book The Third Wave, Toffler describes three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves"—each wave pushes the older societies and cultures aside.

• First Wave is the society after agrarian revolution and replaced the first hunter-gatherer cultures.
• Second Wave is the society during the Industrial Revolution (ca. late 17th century through the mid-20th century). The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system, and the corporation. Toffler writes: “The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”
• Third Wave is the post-industrial society. According to Toffler, since the late 1950s, most nations have been moving away from a Second Wave Society into what he would call a Third Wave Society, one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource. His description of this (super-industrial society) dovetails into other writers' concepts (like the Information Age, Space Age, Electronic Era, Global Village, technetronic age, scientific-technological revolution), which to various degrees predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, and the acceleration of change (one of Toffler’s key maxims is "change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways").

In this post-industrial society, there is a wide diversity of lifestyles ("subcultures"). Adhocracies (fluid organizations) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources (see ersatz) and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians instead of proletarians), who are loosely affiliated. Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personalized, production catering to small niches (see just-in-time production).

The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so-called configuration system. "Prosumers" can fill their own needs (see open source, assembly kit, freelance work). This was the notion that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the prosumer. In some cases, prosuming entails a "third job" where the corporation "outsources" its labor not to other countries, but to the unpaid consumer, such as when we do our own banking through an ATM instead of a teller that the bank must employ, or trace our own postal packages on the Internet instead of relying on a paid clerk.

Since the 1960s, people have been trying to make sense out of the impact of new technologies and social change. Toffler's writings have been influential beyond the confines of scientific, economic, and public policy discussions. Techno music pioneer Juan Atkins cites Toffler's phrase "techno rebels" in The Third Wave as inspiring him to use the word "techno" to describe the musical style he helped to create Toffler’s works and ideas have been subject to various criticisms, usually with the same argumentation used against futurology: that foreseeing the future is nigh impossible. In the 1990s, his ideas were publicly lauded by Newt Gingrich.

The development Toffler believes may go down as this era’s greatest turning point is the creation of wealth in outer space. Wealth today, he argues, is created everywhere (globalisation), nowhere (cyberspace), and out there (outer space). Global positioning satellites are key to synchronising precision time and data streams for everything from cellphone calls to ATM withdrawals. They allow just-in-time (JIT) productivity because of precise tracking. GPS is also becoming central to air traffic control. And satellites increase agricultural productivity through tracking weather, enabling more accurate forecasts.

Critical assesment

Accenture, the management consultancy firm, dubbed Toffler the third-most influential voice among business leaders, after Bill Gates and Peter Drucker. The 2002 Accenture list of Top 50 business intellectuals ranked him eighth. Toffler has also been described in a Financial Times interview as the "world’s most famous futurologist". In 2006 the People's Daily classed him among the 50 foreigners who shaped modern China. Author Mark Satin characterizes Toffler as an important early influence on radical centrist political thought.

Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China convened conferences to discuss The Third Wave in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the book was the No. 2 best seller in China.

Newt Gingrich became close to the Toffler's in the 1970s and said The Third Wave had immensely influenced his own thinking and was "one of the great seminal works of our time."

Selected awards

Toffler has received several prestigious prizes awards, including the McKinsey Foundation Book Award for Contributions to Management Literature, Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, and appointments, including Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

In 2006, the Alvin and Heidi Toffler were recipients of Brown University’s Independent Award.

Personal life

Toffler was married to Heidi Toffler, also a writer and futurist. They lived in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, California, just north of Sunset Boulevard. They previously owned a home in Redding, Connecticut.

The couple’s only child, Karen Toffler (1954–2000), died at age 46 after more than a decade suffering from Guillain–Barré syndrome.

Alvin Toffler died on June 27, 2016, at his home in Los Angeles.

Bibliography

Alvin Toffler co-wrote his books with his wife Heidi.

• The Culture Consumers (1964) St. Martin's Press, ISBN 1199154814
• The Schoolhouse in the City (1968) Praeger (editors), ASIN: B000HUAUGW
• Future Shock (1970) Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-27737-5
• The Futurists (1972) Random House (editors), ISBN 0394317130
• Learning for Tomorrow (1974) Random House (editors), ISBN 0394719808
• The Eco-Spasm Report (1975) Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-14474-X
• The Third Wave (1980) Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-24698-4
• Previews & Premises (1983) William Morrow & Co, ISBN 0-688-01910-2
• The Adaptive Corporation (1985) McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-553-25383-2
• Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990) Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-29215-3
• Creating a New Civilization (1995) Turner Pub, ISBN 1570362246
• War and Anti-War (1995) Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-60259-0
• Revolutionary Wealth (2006) Knopf, ISBN 0-375-40174-1