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Good article, but I disagree with his future shock theory. I happen to have grown up in Eastern Europe. When communism fell you had a flood of new technology po

by pbz 17y ago

Good article, but I disagree with his future shock theory. I happen to have grown up in Eastern Europe. When communism fell you had a flood of new technology pouring in. The society, from a technological point of view, was leapfrogging tens of years in a matter of months or short years. He had computers, color TVs, calculators, more TV time than ever before, all the electronic appliances you can think of, and so on. People weren't future-shocked, quite the opposite. There was this general vibe about what new things the future may bring, a general feel of optimism, of embracing anything new, especially science and technology. What was different? Education. The level of science education all the way to high school, and arguably beyond, was and still is much higher than in the US. In a way, the brains of most people were more ready to absorb all this new information. It's like having an athlete train in a closed room for years and all of a sudden letting him run freely. What we have in the states is not only muscle atrophy, but also brain atrophy. There are of course pockets of resistance, but the overall trend is negative. Sadly going back after years, I've noticed a similar mental laziness taking place even there. When the hunger for more is fulfilled, complacency settles in...

Kadin 17y ago
I agree. I don't think his "future shock" explanation really holds water. If anything, the last few decades have demonstrated that most people are far more tolerant of change than they themselves might have even predicted they'd be. Case in point: cellular phones. I remember when they first came out, first the wired-in car phones, and then the "bag phones" with the lead-acid batteries. And almost immediately you had a class of people saying "I hate those things, I'll never own one." Anyone older than 20 or so can remember a lot of backlash as phones started to get smaller, cheaper, and more popular. Very few of those people are still without cell phones. A few holdouts here and there -- I know a couple, we all do -- but fewer and fewer every day. The vast majority of people who initially rejected the technology as being too disruptive were brought around, sometimes grudgingly, into accepting it. The same story repeats itself over and over with many new devices or technologies. We tend to vastly underestimate our own ability to deal with change, even very disruptive change. The whole concept of "future shock" was a manifestation of this underestimation; it didn't happen this way. The explanation for the failure of the US space program, I think, is much more simple and is put forward in one of the comments to the linked piece: during the Cold War, Americans were content to spend large amounts of money on Apollo, in order to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Without that competitive aspect, public interest disappeared. People are simply not as willing to spend money on pure exploration as they are on a meaningless competition between nations. If you could frame the current space program in some sort of nationalistic, competitive terms -- perhaps versus the Chinese? -- people would probably be interested again. But since the public perception is that the US "won" the space race, and that nobody is currently that close (although the gap is narrowing), large investments like we saw in the past are simply not on the table.

by pbz 17y ago

Kadin 17y ago

I agree. I don't think his "future shock" explanation really holds water. If anything, the last few decades have demonstrated that most people are far more tolerant of change than they themselves might have even predicted they'd be. Case in point: cellular phones. I remember when they first came out, first the wired-in car phones, and then the "bag phones" with the lead-acid batteries. And almost immediately you had a class of people saying "I hate those things, I'll never own one." Anyone older than 20 or so can remember a lot of backlash as phones started to get smaller, cheaper, and more popular. Very few of those people are still without cell phones. A few holdouts here and there -- I know a couple, we all do -- but fewer and fewer every day. The vast majority of people who initially rejected the technology as being too disruptive were brought around, sometimes grudgingly, into accepting it. The same story repeats itself over and over with many new devices or technologies. We tend to vastly underestimate our own ability to deal with change, even very disruptive change. The whole concept of "future shock" was a manifestation of this underestimation; it didn't happen this way. The explanation for the failure of the US space program, I think, is much more simple and is put forward in one of the comments to the linked piece: during the Cold War, Americans were content to spend large amounts of money on Apollo, in order to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Without that competitive aspect, public interest disappeared. People are simply not as willing to spend money on pure exploration as they are on a meaningless competition between nations. If you could frame the current space program in some sort of nationalistic, competitive terms -- perhaps versus the Chinese? -- people would probably be interested again. But since the public perception is that the US "won" the space race, and that nobody is currently that close (although the gap is narrowing), large investments like we saw in the past are simply not on the table.