Though Alvin Toffler suggested lunching on Sunset Boulevard, for convenience we settled on the terrace of the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, not far from the glass-and-steel home he shares with his wife, muse and co-author, Heidi.
I was more than happy to meet at this legendary Hollywood haunt to pick the mind of 77-year-old Toffler, the world’s most famous futurologist. Maybe I would even see Warren Beatty and Nancy Reagan (yes it’s true) doing lunch in their regular booth. To keep me company until Toffler arrives, I order a Vesper martini - half gin, half vodka, dry - now the retro rage in LA. It’s a testament, I tell myself, to one of Toffler’s key maxims: change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.
It’s been 36 years since he and Heidi published their first blockbuster, Future Shock, and a decade less since The Third Wave, which predicted demassification, diversity, knowledge-based production, the acceleration of change. Yet paradoxically Toffler is now more celebrated in countries such as Brazil, China and South Korea than he is at home, where the future has already more or less arrived. Not much has yet been written in the US press about their new book, Revolutionary Wealth, aside from some good reviews in the New York Times and USA Today. But it has garnered a lot of coverage in Germany and Italy, and is already a bestseller in China and India. In Japan, where he’s just been, he is a veritable oracle.
As soon as the usual pleasantries are out of the way, Toffler begins by lamenting the state of affairs in the Middle East. This isn’t what I want to talk about, so I blurt out my first question: are you a prophet unsung in your own country because no one wants to listen, or because Americans have so thoroughly accepted your premises that there is no more to argue about? He more or less accepts the latter explanation, noting that Europe’s renewed attention, for example, would seem to arise from the perception that it is falling behind.
“While the revolutionary wealth system is all about decentralisation, niches, flexibility and devolution to networked and distributed power, Europe’s leaders are trying to build a megastate,” he says. “Europeans have very slow-moving institutions and societies. And they are proud of that fact. This is fine, but there will be a price. The large states - France, Germany, Italy - are falling into relative decline behind the US and Asia.”
I suggest we order as this promised to be a long conversation. Toffler chooses a Cobb salad with grilled shrimp and sparkling water. I opt for the prosciutto and melon and a glass of pinot noir.
Continuing on the theme of where his message most resonates, Toffler lists the parade of potentates he and Heidi have tutored over the years. It’s an impressive tally: Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 as he was formulating perestroika. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist Chinese premier in 1988. Most of the Japanese leaders from Nakasone to Koizumi; Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad; India’s Abdul Kalam. South Korea’s Kim Dae-jung and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez read him in jail. Lately Toffler has been hanging out with Carlos Slim Helu, the Mexican telecom mogul and one of the world’s richest men.
As Toffler pauses for a bite, I ponder how one might label what he does. Although management consultants Accenture recently listed him as the third most influential voice among business leaders, behind Bill Gates and the late Peter Drucker, Toffler is neither a Tom Peters-type business consultant nor a management guru. He’s closer to what we used to call a master thinker. So what’s on his mind now?
His big notion of the moment is that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the “prosumer”. One example with huge implications for ageing societies: “Soon there will be one billion people over 60,” he notes. “They will be using new technologies from self-diagnosis to instant toilet urinalysis to self-administered therapies delivered by nanotechnology to do for themselves what doctors used to do. This will change the way the whole health industry works.” Inexorably, this huge aspect of the non-money economy will drive the market for medical technologies, creating vast new value and a lot of wealth for somebody.
With desk-top manufacturing, prosumers will really come into their own, he says. In some cases prosuming entails a “third job” where the corporation “outsources” its labour not to India or the Philippines, 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 FedEx packages on the internet instead of relying on a paid clerk.
The development Toffler believes may go down as this era’s greatest turning point is the creation of wealth 12,000 miles above earth. 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 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.”
For Toffler, the diversifying wealth system will be mirrored in our personal lives. “We won’t see the death of the family, but the diversification of family formats. We are on the verge of accepting gay civil unions. There are single mothers, unmarried couples, married couples with no kids, fathers and mothers in serial marriages. Monogamy won’t go away, but polygamy may gain wider acceptance.”
Instead of the geographically bounded, socially ascribed communities of the past, he foresees networks of the like-minded that bring people together as never before. Freed from the demands of standardisation in Toffler’s new wealth system, we will live on “customised time” suited to our own personal rhythms, working and playing by our own schedule. “Creative piece work” will replace jobs and careers as we become prosumers, much of the time outside the money economy. Work will move out of the factory and office, and back into the home.
Absorbed in his vision, Toffler ignores his wilting salad. I suggest that this upheaval won’t go down well with a lot of people vested in the status quo. If all the big institutions wither away under this new dynamic system, so will the security. Look at the French students who protested against the very economy he’s outlining.
Toffler responds that we will see “wave conflict” erupt across the world. We are seeing it now, he suggests, in Mexico, where the recent elections showed the country divided nearly 50-50 between, on one hand, the “first wave” peasant south and the “second wave” urban labour unions and, on the other hand, the more prosperous “third wave” north which has benefited from Nafta and globalisation. Similar conflict is roiling China and Brazil.
Even in the US, institutions out of sync with each other are caught in a “clash of speeds” between the old system and the new. “Standardised education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100 mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10 mph. You cannot have a successful economy with that degree of desynchronisation.”
Japan, in Toffler’s view, also suffers from desynchronisation. “The technology is the easy part. The hard part is to make consonant changes in institutions and social structures to bring it all into sync. This is where Japan, with its notorious social and cultural rigidity, has fallen down. Japan’s main challenge is to loosen up.”
The collision of speeds extends to geopolitics, not least the conflict between pious premodern Islamists and the postmodern fast caste of secular consumers. In Korea, Toffler notes, Kim Dae-jung admirably laid out an evolutionary 30-year timeline for his “sunshine policy” to change the North. But rapid-fire events - such as Kim Jong-il’s recent missile tests - forced the political agenda before the policy had had time to work. Then it unravelled, like Gorbachev’s perestroika, which also had a decades-long timeframe in the mind of its author.
“This clash of speeds can often derail the current path of change, or at least send it on a detour,” he warns.
“That is why linear extrapolations are so misleading. Sometime in the next 20 years, the odds are strong that there will be a significant social upheaval there that throws all such projections into question.”
Lunch has by now stretched into mid-afternoon, and we are starting to feel the heatwave that has been baking LA. Since global warming doesn’t get much ink in Toffler’s new book, I wonder what he thinks. “I start with doubt about forecasts and retrocasts that supposedly tell us what will happen centuries hence and what did happen in the pre-human past,” he says. “Remember Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. If ever there was a misleading forecast about the year 2000, it was that.”
I have one last question: in all his years of charting the future, what has he got wrong? “We talked about human and animal cloning in the 1970s and thought it would be a reality by the mid-1980s,” he responds. “We underestimated the slow pace of the science. Though we pointed out the moral dilemmas, we didn’t foresee the strength of the anti-science Christian right.” I didn’t need to remind him that on the day we met Bush vetoed legislation to ease the path for stem-cell research. “Also,” Toffler laughs, “the paperless office has not arrived - yet.”
Toffler calls for coffee. I order cherry sorbet. Our conversation has revealed not only a truly magnanimous mind - open, objective and disinterested, which is to say, intellectually honest - but also a really nice guy. Someone who is clearly ahead of the future no matter how fast it moves.
Hotel Bel-Air, Los Angeles
1 x Cobb salad
1 x melon and prosciutto
1 x green salad
1 x cherry sorbet
1 x espresso
1 x dry martini
2 x San Pellegrino water
1 x glass of pinot noir
Total: $128.28
