Word: toffler
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...they all stand in the shadow of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, the husband-and-wife team whose 1970 blockbuster, Future Shock, blasted the infant profession into the mainstream and set the standard by which all subsequent would-be futurists have been measured. A quarter-century later, having been catapulted back onto the front pages through their association with Newt Gingrich's "cyberbrain trust," the Tofflers are about to be repackaged for the digital era by Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood agenting Goliath. The vehicle for this effort: a multimedia clearinghouse called FutureNet, which is building everything from a site...
...Tofflers who brought futurism to the masses. Future Shock made the new profession cool. The book and its best-selling sequels, The Third Wave (1984) and Powershift (1990), examined not just tomorrow but today, not just one industry but all mankind, making the paradigm-shattering argument that what was really changing society was the radical acceleration of change itself. Future shock, the Tofflers said, is what happens when change occurs faster than people's ability to adapt to it. The book resonated for the 1960s counterculture, and in some ways it echoes even louder in the digital era. "People today...
...military's microsensors and omniscient rows of video monitors may be expensive, but much of the technology needed to attack information systems is low-cost (a computer, a modem), widely available (a willing hacker) and just as efficient (one phone call). "It's the great equalizer," says futurist Alvin Toffler. "You don't have to be big and rich to apply the kind of judo you need in information warfare. That's why poor countries are going to go for this faster than technologically advanced countries." An infowarrior could be anyone in the checkout line at the local computer store...
...truly a wonder. Here he is, prating and preening like a parrot on a stump about the need to renew American civilization. This is the guy who hates the '60s but reincarnates them in his 40-acres-and-a-laptop Utopianism; who thinks kitsch "futurologists" like Alvin and Heidi Toffler are gurus and that a fund-raising cultist like Arianna Huffington is an intellectual. He filled his cable-TV sermons about "Renewing American Civilization" with brazen plugs for corporations that contributed to his funding operation, GOPAC. He wants to destroy the national endowments while promoting tax breaks for developers...
...actual and begin to explore the possible that life's infinities begin to reveal themselves to us." Deep, eh? The musicians on Headtravel certainly take themselves and their music seriously, and that's not altogether a bad thing. It makes for excellent music, and you can disregard the Alvin Toffler futuristic cyber-Utopia talk...