COMMENTARY | Ann Coulter, who supports Mitt Romney for president, laid into Newt Gingrich, Romney’s main rival recently. Along with the now familiar knocks about Gingrich’s character, Coulter believes that she has found Gingrich’s equivalent of Bill Ayers.
His name is Alvin Toffler, who first became famous for a book he wrote in 1970 called “Future Shock” in which he posited, among other things, that the pace of technological change will become overwhelming to significant number of people and that would become a societal problem. Toffler has since published several ground-breaking books about the future, notably “The Third Wave” in which he discussed the emerging information revolution, “Powershift” in which he suggested that old patterns of power were breaking down and reforming into different patterns, and “Creating a New Civilization” where Toffler examines the effects of technological change on politics. It is the last book that Gingrich wrote a forward to and made Coulter angry.
Coulter makes a lame attempt at humor by suggesting that Toffler wrote “Future Shock” because he could not program his VCR, despite the fact that VCRs were not generally available in 1970. The thesis that some people are frightened of technological change is not outside the mainstream, as Coulter should recognize. The left’s opposition to every energy technology, genetically modified food crops, vaccinations, the space program, and even the automobile should have led Coulter to realize that future shock is very much with us and has become a problem.
Toffler’s discussion of what he called the “post industrial society” brought on by information technology in “The Third Wave” was also phenomenally prescient. The Internet, computers, and other information systems have changed human civilization in ways that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
Rather than being a crazy person that Coulter makes him out to be, Toffler would seem to be just the sort of person that a president might want to listen to while crafting policy. Too much public policy is informed by political whim and irrational ideology, as exemplified by the current administration. It would be very refreshing if one had a president who actually thought about future trends and created policy accordingly. Coulter should be ashamed of herself for not only not understanding Toffler and his ideas but trying to pass both off as frightening.