“Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler is not actually fiction but I can’t resist posting this in the “Prophetic Fiction” category. What I am wondering though is if others can see as I do in the example of this 1972 documentary that the rapid development of many previously advancing technologies have been in effect virtually arrested?
Humanity’s Arrested Developement
Most often it is specifically those advancements that would empower the individual that tend to get suppressed and it goes waaaaaay back. When trying to figure out why so many things are so wrong in this world, isn’t this what it’s really all about? Think “Edison vs Tesla”…
If one can accept as fact that advancements in certain areas have indeed been suppressed, and that these are usually things particularly beneficial which we the consumers have been denied again and again – one can then conclude that these suppressions are not of a benevolent nature. Quite the contrary. Is this not then proof that letting an oligarchy that operates above the law by affectively being the writers of the law, which hides itself and it’s misdeeds by owning and controlling the media, which funds itself by creating it’s own money out of thin air, and that brutally squashes any dissent that threatens to raise too much public awareness about any of this… has all been a very big mistake? Do we just keep making that same mistake by continuing to let “them” decide which technologies are to be embraced, and which are to be rejected? Who exactly are “they” anyway?
Wait… so what if anything does any of this have to do with the book “Future Shock”?
The connection is actually only indirect, but there is a perceivable pattern of how TPTB frighten the public with a variety of methods or tools through the media. Basically the scare always precedes the legislation which quickly follows, and it is a process. The public AND the politicians are manipulated through fear into giving certain special interests exactly what they want. Anyone paying attention to specifically which advancements are the ones being suppressed decade after decade, can easily perceive who or what benefits by the suppression, and also who or what suffers the consequences of that suppression. I feel that the book Future Shock was probably used as one part of a larger fear campaign for the general purpose of more easily supressing certain technologies. The author of a book used in this way does not necessarily have to be a knowing participant of such a “campaign”. Media manipulation is a pulling together of many things to paint a picture to communicate an effect.
Isn’t it worth asking who it would be that would prefer that certain beneficial technologies be slowed down? The public at large? Really? Wouldn’t it more likely be those special interests who’s interests are NOT things like less expensive forms of energy, cars that run on water… or even cars that maybe don’t even need roads? Yeah. We wouldn’t want THAT kind of scary freedom to get loose now would we?
This is not to say that all technology should just run amuck i.e. nuclear power plants everywhere, microwaves shooting all over the place, or who knows what dumped frantically and untested into the atmosphere and onto the population by mad climate scientists, but – no. It IS the truly destructive things that stroll right on through unhindered and into our lives isn’t it? When it comes to the truly concerning technologies, those that are the actual real threats, books on these matters are not likely to become media sensations like Future Shock did. Unfortunately for humanity the concerns, whatever they may be, of whoever is really running the show are clearly NOT humanitarian.