Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a leveling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units is the crowning achievement of the industrial age. Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflect the state of affairs under industrialism.

In the same breath, however, they reveal shocking ignorance about the character of super-industrialism. Focused on what society was, they are blind to what it is fast becoming. For the society of the future will offer not a restricted, standardized flow of goods, but the greatest variety of unstandardized goods and services any society has ever seen. We are moving not toward a further extension of material standardization, but toward its dialectical negation.

The end of standardization is already in sight. The pace varies from industry to industry, and from country to country. In Europe, the peak of standardization has not yet been crested. (It may take another twenty or thirty years to run its course.) But in the United States, there is compelling evidence that a historic corner has been turned.

Some years ago, for example, an American marketing expert named Kenneth Schwartz made a surprising discovery. "It is nothing less than a revolutionary transformation that has come over the mass consumer market during the past five years," he wrote. "From a single homogenous unit, the mass market has exploded into a series of segmented, fragmented markets, each with its own needs, tastes and way of life." This fact has begun to alter American industry beyond recognition. The result is an astonishing change in the actual outpouring of goods offered to the consumer.

Philip Morris, for example, sold a single major brand of cigarettes for twenty-one years. Since 1954 by contrast, it has introduced six new brands and so many options with respect to size, filter and menthol that the smoker now has a choice among sixteen different variations. This fact would be trivial, were it not duplicated in virtually every major product field. Gasoline? Until a few years ago, the American motorist took his pick of either "regular" or "premium." Today he drives up to a Sunoco pump and is asked to choose among eight different blends and mixes. Groceries? Between 1950 and 1963 the number of different soaps and detergents on the American grocery shelf increased from sixty-five to 200; frozen foods from 121 to 350; baking mixes and flour from eighty-four to 200. Even the variety of pet foods increased from fifty-eight to eighty-one.

One major company, Corn Products, produces a pancake syrup called Karo. Instead of offering the same product nationally, however, it sells two different viscosities, having found that Pennsylvanians, for some regional reason, prefer their syrup thicker than other Americans. In the field of office décor and furniture, the same process is at work. "There are ten times the new styles and colors there were a decade ago," says John A. Saunders, president of General Fireproofing Company, a major manufacturer in the field. "Every architect wants his own shade of green." Companies, in other words, are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Two economic factors encourage this trend: first, consumers have more money to lavish on their specialized wants; second, and even more important, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the cost of introducing variations declines.

This is the point that our social critics – most of whom are technologically naive – fail to understand: it is only primitive technology that imposes standardization. Automation, in contrast, frees the path to endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity.

"The rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products which characterize our traditional mass production plants are becoming less important" reports industrial engineer Boris Yavitz. "Numerically controlled machines can readily shift from one product model or size to another by a simple change of programs ... Short product runs become economically feasible." According to Professor Van Court Hare, Jr., of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, "Automated equipment ... permits the production of a wide variety of products in short runs at almost 'mass production' costs." Many engineers and business experts foresee the day when diversity will cost no more than uniformity.

The finding that pre-automation technology yields standardization, while advanced technology permits diversity is borne out by even a casual look at that controversial American innovation, the supermarket. Like gas stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike whether they are in Milan or Milwaukee. By wiping out thousands of little "mom and pop" stores they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Yet the array of goods they offer the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.

The reason for this contrast is simple: Food and food packaging technology is far more advanced than construction techniques. Indeed, construction has scarcely reached the level of mass production; it remains, in large measure, a pre-industrial craft. Strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions, the industry's rate of technological advance is far below that of other industries. The more advanced the technology, the cheaper it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication, gas stations, airports, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mold. Uniformity will give way to diversity. (Where the process has begun, the results are striking. In Washington, D.C., for example, there is a computer-designed apartment house – Watergate East – in which no two floors are alike. Of 240 apartments, 167 have different floor plans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere.)

While certain parts of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United States has already leaped to the next stage – the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey.

The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favor diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European and Japanese cars into the American market in the late 1950's opened many new options for the buyer – increasing his choice from half a dozen to some fifty makes. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted.

Faced with foreign competition, Detroit took a new look at the so-called "mass consumer." It found not a single uniform mass market, but an aggregation of transient minimarkets. It also found, as one writer put it, that "customers wanted custom-like cars that would give them an illusion of having one-of-a-kind." To provide that illusion would have been impossible with the old technology; the new computerized assembly systems, however, make possible not merely the illusion, but even – before long – the reality.

Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as "the one you design yourself," because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there "isn't a dungregular Mustang any more, just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) × 4 (engines) × 3 (transmissions) × 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modifications don't apply) + 2 (Shelby grandtouring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/ transmission combinations)."