The abstraction of movement
Back in the 1990s when I spent an inordinate amount of time looking at books in thrift stores, I could always count on seeing works by Alvin Toffler, one of the original self-styled futurists, who at that time was a right-wing hack in the George Gilder vein supplying talking points for the likes of Newt Gingrich. I always assumed Toffler's work was so readily available on thrift-store shelves because it was the sort of managerialist tract that a boss might foist on underlings to read, similar to Who Moved My Cheese? another book that no Goodwill was without. (Nowadays when I'm thrifting, I tend to see Lean In.)
Toffler, who was an editor for the business magazine Fortune, established his reputation in 1970 with Future Shock, which attempts to assess the impact of what it construes as ever-accelerating and self-perpetuating social change. Whereas earlier business editors might have played at sociology to diagnose the present — as with Fortune editor William Whyte's 1956 book The Organization Man — Toffler had the ingenious idea to simply make ideologically expedient claims about the future as though they were inevitable facts. These could be extrapolated from anecdotes and pliable trends, recasting existing contradictions and conflicts in an apparently apolitical light. His specific predictions are beside the point now, but the attitude behind them animates all the "futurist" apologists for how tech companies now dictate the terms and conditions of how many people must live.
The title Future Shock may suggest that the book is some sort of proto-tech-criticism and that it might end up in some similar place to The Limits to Growth, arguing for a more careful management of the earth's resources. But in actuality it is more like the opposite of that. It insists that change must continue to accelerate and lays the conceptual groundwork for Silicon Valley's paeans to disruption. "Future shock," it turns out, is not shock at how capitalists are asserting increasing control over the direction of society, leveraging technology to immiserate workers; it's instead the shock of elites at how badly people are failing to keep up with the demands that assuring the survival of capitalism imposes on them.
The gist of Future Shock is clear from Toffler's opening paragraphs. If Hegel argued that the "owl of Minerva flies at dusk" — i.e. events can be assessed and interpreted only in hindsight — Toffler confidently stands that on its head: "Previously, men studied the past to shed light on the present. I have turned the time-mirror around, convinced that a coherent image of the future can also shower us with valuable insights into today." This seems an exceedingly convenient method: Make up a future (capitalism forever!) that justifies your critique of the present and requires the political interventions you prefer.
What Toffler presents as a brave, far-seeing assessment of a lamentable condition (the sad fact of disruptive change) is in reality a projection of the status quo into perpetuity. It's not particularly futuristic, in the sense of being imaginative; rather, it reflects the characteristic lack of imagination that is the hallmark of hegemony — the famous boot stomping on the face forever, or the famous end of the world that will occur before the end of capitalism. "The acceleration of change in our time is, itself, an elemental force," Toffler announces, reifying "change" into an autonomous abstraction, something that appears to cause itself, with consequences society must then adjust to. He then goes on to serve up a hearty helping of neoliberalism before the fact, stressing the needs for individuals to maintain their economic viability through an abject adaptability. "Successful coping with rapid change will require most of us to adopt a new stance toward the future, a new sensitive awareness of the role it plays in the present," Toffler asserts. He sees "future shock" as a "psychological disease" of the weak-minded and hopes his book will "increase the future-consciousness of its reader," by which he means not the forward-thinking, desublimated embrace of pleasure, as in Charles A. Reich's "Consciousness III" (to cite The Greening of America, another work of ersatz cultural analysis that came out in 1970), but a kind of anticipatory subservience to technocracy, the sad discipline of the early adopter.
The same criticism that Marx applied to the bourgeois categories of political economy can be applied to Toffler: A concept ("change") is abstracted from its embeddedness in social relations and then discussed as though it were a universal truth that determined those relations: "Change" is making us respond to "what technology wants."
In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's critique of Proudhon, he writes:
Economists express the relations of bourgeois production, the division of labour, credit, money, etc., as fixed, immutable, eternal categories ... Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production, M. Proudhon, holding this upside down like a true philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of the principles, of these categories, which were slumbering — so M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us — in the bosom of the “impersonal reason of humanity." M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc.
Marx then proceeds to attenuate technological determinism ("The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist") by insisting on the fact that economic categories "are historical and transitory products" made by people through the social relations they establish and modify. Positing economic forces as forces of nature serves only to justify existing relations of domination as fixed and immutable, as necessary and pre-ordained, a natural order of things. Who moved my cheese? The great cheesemonger in the sky.