Previews and premises

BOOKS Letter to the author John Chris Jones Previews and Premises Alvin Toffler 230 pages (London and Sydney, Pan hooks, 1984)

Dear Alvin Toffler, Sitting before a computer in a Welsh cottage I should be perfectly placed to write this review of your book, but nevertheless I have experienced my usual difficulty in getting started on a piece of public writing. If your picture of the electronic cottage (perhaps the most attractive of your many images) is as real as I hope it is, then I should have been feeling thejoie dc vivre of pure decentralization, as you describe it, and as I too wish it was . . . But did I feel that? No I didn’t. What I felt, before writing this review, was not at all the freedom of exercising a unit of decentral power but the usual experience of difficulty-in-beginning that I, and I imagine many others, encounter before the prospect of writing for unknown readers, via the printing press. It’s the centralism, not the decentralism, of the technology that inhibits, that held me back. That is why I am addressing this review to you instead of to ‘the public’. It is this, my self-induced shift in the form of a public convention, rather than my use of a computer in a cottage, that released me from writer’s block and allowed me to reconnect my words to my John Chris Jones is a member of Fufwes’advisory board, and can be contacted at 13 Hillmarton Road, London N7 9JE, UK.

FUTURES April 1987

thoughts, via the knowledge that this is addressed directly to one person to whose ideas I am happy to respond. But what of your book? I am intrigued to see that it consists of your answers (edited by yourself) to questions put to you by a committed socialist* and that the questions refer not only to your ideas but also to your working methods and to the story of your life, which fascinate me. This book reveals more of your thought than I’ve grasped from your others* and provokes me to question as well as to agree with what you say. As I do not have space to respond to very much of the book, I am choosing just four questions and answers from the interviews. These are selected without bias, using random numbers. For each I will quote a small part of the text and then give you my reactions. Straight

line thinkers

Under this title the random numbers lead me to the question “How do you go about your own work?” and to the point on page 187 where you say: Futurism is an art, not a form of engineering. So I can sum up my view simply. Use science in support of art. To this, as to much of what I’ve read in this book, and in your others, I can hear myself saying both yes and no. Yes because I like very much to see rationality put in its rightful place (supporting imagination, not squashing it) and no because I don’t like the idea of using evidence only if it supports one’s hunches. If “futurism is an art” then it is

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fiction, and to present it as truth is wrong. And if evidence is essential to what one writes then it is probably more important to look for that which contradicts one’s hunches than that which supports them. It is out of struggling to rethink, when faced with contradictions, that imagination can take over and reveal a wider view of things than is to be found in conventional reasoning. When you do that, eg in your struggle with the obvious follies of commuting as a way of shifting information, you arrive at liberating insights. But when, eg in Future Shock, you use biological evidence to explain cultural fears, I doubt your analogies. A futurist

before

Castro?

In a question on page 214 you are asked if a futurist would be able to predict revolutionary change. In your reply you say yes, it is possible for an individual to influence the future, as Fidel Castro and his co-revolutionaries did, but only within limits. It seems to me that you miss the point of the question. Do you or do you not believe that the trends or forces you describe, eg in X%e Third Wave, are independent of conscious human action? Are we merely objects by inscrutable waves and moved influences or are we victims of a pretence that the actions of industrialists are natural forces that must be obeyed? Also (and this was I think the specific point you missed), can students of existing trends anticipate the sudden eruptions of social resistance which make the contents of any history book so very unexpected, from page to page? Surely the answer is no. History is unpredictable, thank badness, thank goodness, and futurology only works if one assumes that the future is going to be non-historical-which is to say that politics are suddenly supposed to have become extinct. I prefer to think that you and other futurologists are not so much predicting as making things happen, or else stopping them happening. That is

your power -the political power we all exercise, though we may seldom realize it, in how we describe things and in how we act. L%j& vu in the Pacific Under this title, on page 82, you are asked to sum up the many changes you see happening as industrialists of many nations invest in the Pacific area. In your reply you use several kinds of imagery each with different implications, ie we are restructuring (our economic systems and our political relationships); the Pacific is emerging (as an economic power); various high-tech nations are jockeying (for position in the emerging global order); each (nation) is watching (its classical industries die as new ones emerge); such large-scale shifts are a consequence (of the rise of a new civilization in the full sense of that term-new technologies, new social forms, and, inevitably, new political structures as well); they (the large-scale shifts) are like the cracking and heaving (of geotectonic plates under the earth); (they are like) the upthrust of something radicafb new (through the crust of the old order); (until) new global structures nystallize (we will continue to live with) extreme instability. It seems to me, Mr Toffler, that, in taking all these images to represent the investment of money and human energy in the Pacific area, and elsewhere, you are mystifying what is happening, making economic change appear to be inevitable and social and political change to be an aberration. Yet, from what you say elsewhere, I guess that you enjoy change and see it as healthy. But if that is so, why do you describe change in the imagery of stability and fear, the language of those who protect the status

FUTURES Aprll1967

quo, and and that and

with its assumption that chaos is bad death is too? I believe that death chaos are neither bad nor good but they are essentials of life, as is rest as is homeostasis.

The back-to-the-home

movement

Under this title you are asked about your vision of the “electronic cottage”, your belief that much of the work now done in offices will in the future be done at home. On page 25, as part of a long answer, you state that commuting is the single most antiproductive thing we do, that it is a miserable and unpaid part of many jobs, and that most people hate it and would love to be liberated from it. For these reasons you discount the objections of your interviewer-the objections that homeworking is likely to bring back harsh piece-work procedures, and a loss of sociability. I share your enthusiasm for the decentralizing of work and your irritation at the obvious folly of commuting once it becomes cheaper and easier to move information than to move people. But is that the whole story? My feelings about this have changed greatly since reading feminist critiques of homeworking and of the casualization of work (notably in the writings of Ursula Huws).~ Very briefly her argument is this: l

0

Information technology is ‘good for the family’. It is seen, quite simply, as providing the means whereby women workers can be returned to the home, and to the dominion of their husbands, without the loss of their services as a cheap form of clerical labour. 4 . . . (to the ideologues of the family) this scenario must have a beautiful sense of rightness about it. In one fell swoop they can sweep up the spreading numbers of women who have been becoming visible parts of the workforce-having rapped them over the knuckles for

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abandoning their children and their handicapped dependants-and plonk them back where they belong in the home. Once there, they return to public invisibility and lose all the new and hard-won freedoms of the post-war years, while still (and here lies the beauty of it) continuing to carry out their role as an essential part of the workforce keeping the wheels of industry turning and getting the nappies washed, for a bargain basement price.5 Perhaps more fundamental is her pointing to the reason why men may favour homeworking and women may not-it is because to a man the home is a place of leisure, the place where he is serviced freely, by women, but to many women the home is a place of never-ending work where leisure doesn’t exist. To them, teleworking is the return to a life sentence from which, through work outside the home, they had begun to escape. Given these criticisms of our masculine assumptions I have to ask what, if anything, is left of the “obvious rightness” of transferring work to the home? And what is left of my own feeling that electronics is the essential agent for the demechanization of life? My first thought is that, though electronicspmnifs the humanization of life, it is not enough by itself to bring it about. The decentral dream, the promise of your book, is hindered by seeing technologies as irresistible waves and is helped by seeing them as political decisions, no more, no less. Electronic homeworking as seen so far is an advantage to some, but by no means all. In the book you tell of your early years as a shop floor worker and union organizer. I hope that one day you will recall your sympathy with those at the receiving end and tell us how your vision of electronic decentralism can be realized. What are the political realities of remote working and how can it be experienced

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as good? If these questions are not answered the ‘third wave’ could become a ‘flood’ that sets the privileged afloat while others sink. It’s not just a question of cables and computers and inevitable trends, it’s the question of redistributing power. And of seeing centralism, decentralism, electronics, futurology, book reviews, and every other human construction or convention, as the artefacts they are. But, despite these criticisms, I thank you and your interviewer for this book. To relate the abstractions of technology to the practicalities of life as lived is surely a public good. A lot of what is written about the future fails to make that attempt. Cofion gorau (Best wishes) John Chris Jones

The anonymous interviewer was an editor from The South End Press, Boston, MA, USA. Alvin Tamer’s two books, Future Shock and The Third Wave (which have appeared in many editions and have led to their author being consulted by many heads of state) are surely the most influential examples of futurology to date. Ursula Huws, The New Homeworkers, Low Pay Unit Pamphlet No 28 (Low Pay Unit, 9 Poland Street, London, UK, 1984); isolation”, in Ursula Huws, “Terminal Making Waves: The Politics of Communications (London, UK, Free Association Books, 1985); Ursula Huws, “Cable TV and women’s work”, Emergency, 1, (1) (London, UK, Pluto Press, 1983). 4. Ibid, “Terminal 5. Ibid, “Cable page 62.

isolation”, TV

page 15.

and women’s

work”,

Building a bridge Sam Cole Growth

and Development : Analysis Peter Hall 337 pages, f9.99 paperback, f25 hardback

An Economic

(Oxford, UK, Martin by Basil Blackwell)

Robertson,

supplied

It must be said at the outset that this is a useful book and one which should find a place as a textbook in introductory courses on economic development. As the author explains, the work is an attempt to “build a bridge” between standard economic theory and development economics. As such it will also be useful to futurists who wish to grasp better the economists’ debate about development. The spirit of the book is to provide a relatively straightforward framework Sam Cole is Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Environmental Design, Hayes Hall, 3435 Main Street, Buffalo, NY 14214, USA.

based on two widely used, albeit controversial, tools: the aggregate production function and the Solow growth model. On this framework the author hangs a which depicts current rich tapestry, controversies about the sources of economic growth and development and the relationship between them. In evaluating the various theories and in his final prescriptions the author is ultimately somewhat limited. This is mildly disappointing (at least if one expected more) given his previously published work and also his contemporary writings. The reason is that in defiance to its title the book is less an analysis than a presentation of key concepts and issues in the area of development economics. The author discusses the notion of ‘development’, inequality and poverty and suitable indicators of development, the dual economy models, agriculture, physical and human resources, the mobilization

FUTURES April 1987