Alvin Toffler - Future Shock

To the eye of the uninitiated, all young people with long hair seemed alike. Yet important sub-units emerged within the movement. According to David Andrew Seeley, an acute young observer, there were at its height "perhaps a score of recognizable and distinct groups." These varied not only by certain subtleties of dress but by interest. Thus, Seeley reported, their activities ranged "from beer parties to poetry readings, from pot-smoking to modern dance – and often those who indulge in one wouldn't touch the other." Seeley then proceeded to explain the differences that set apart such groups as the teeny-boppers (now largely vanished from the scene), the political activist beatniks, the folk beatniks, and then, and only then, the original hippies per se.

Members of these subcultural subsidiaries wore identifying badges that held meaning for insiders. Teeny-boppers, for example, were beardless, many, in fact, being too young to shave. Sandals were "in" with the folk set, but not some of the others. The tightness of one's trousers varied according to subcult.

At the level of ideas, there were many common complaints about the dominant culture. But sharp differences emerged with respect to political and social action. Attitudes ranged from the conscious withdrawal of the acid hippie, through the ignorant unconcern of the teeny-bopper, to the intense involvement of the New Left activist and the politics-of-theabsurd activities of groupings like the Dutch provos, the Crazies, and the guerrilla theater crowd.

The hippie corporation, so to speak, grew too large to handle all its business in a standardized way. It had to diversify and it did. It spawned a flock of fledgling subcultural enterprises.

Even as this happened, however, the movement began to die. The most passionate LSD advocates of yesterday began to admit that "acid was a bad scene" and various underground newspapers began warning followers against getting too involved with "tripsters." A mock funeral was held in San Francisco to "bury" the hippie subcult, and its favored locations, Haight-Ashbury and the East Village turned into tourist meccas as the original movement writhed and disintegrated, forming new and odder, but smaller and weaker subcults and minitribes. Then, as though to start the process all over again, yet another subcult, the "skinheads," surfaced. Skinheads had their own characteristic outfits – suspenders, boots, short haircuts – and an unsettling predilection for violence.

The death of the hippie movement and the rise of the skinheads provide a crucial new insight into the subcultural structure of tomorrow's society. For we are not merely multiplying subcults. We are turning them over more rapidly. The principle of transience is at work here, too. As the rate of change accelerates in all other aspects of the society, subcults, too, grow more ephemeral.

Evidence pointing toward a decrease in the life span of subcults also lies in the disappearance of that violent subcult of the fifties, the fighting street gang. Throughout that decade certain streets in New York were regularly devastated by a peculiar form of urban warfare called the "rumble." During a rumble, scores, if not hundreds, of youths would attack one another with flailing chains, switchblade knives, broken bottles and zip-guns. Rumbles occurred in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and even as far away as London and Tokyo.

While there was no direct connection between these far-flung outbreaks, rumbles were by no means chance events. They were planned and carried out with military precision by highly organized "bopping gangs." In New York these gangs affected colorful names – Cobras, Corsair Lords, Apaches, Egyptian Kings and the like. They fought one another for dominance in their "turf" – the specific geographic area they staked out for themselves.

At their peak there were some 200 such gangs in New York alone, and in a single year, 1958, they accounted for no fewer than eleven homicides. Yet by 1966, according to police officials, the bopping gangs had virtually vanished. Only one gang was left in New York, and The New York Times reported: "No one knows on what garbage strewn street ... the last rumble took place. But it happened four or five years ago [which would date the death of the rumble a mere two or three years after the 1958 peak]. Then, suddenly, after a decade of mounting violence the era of the fighting gangs of New York came to an end." The same appeared to be true in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia and elsewhere as well.

The disappearance of the violent street gangs has not, of course, led to an era of urban tranquility. The aggressive passions that led poor Puerto Rican and Negro youths in New York to wage war on rival gangs is now directed at the social system itself, and totally new kinds of social organizations, subcults and life style groupings are emerging in the ghetto.

What we sense, therefore, is a process by which subcults multiply at an ever accelerating rate, and in turn die off to make room for still more and newer subcults. A kind of metabolic process is taking place in the bloodstream of the society, and it is speeding up exactly as other aspects of social interaction are quickening.

For the individual, this raises the problems of choice to a totally new level of intensity. It is not simply that the number of tribes is expanding rapidly. It is not even that these tribes or subcults are bouncing off one another, shifting and changing their relationships to one another more and more rapidly. It is also that many of them will not hold still long enough to permit an individual to make a rational investigation of the presumed advantages or disadvantages of affiliation.

The individual searching for some sense of belonging, looking for the kind of social connection that confers some sense of identity, moves through a blurry environment in which the possible targets of affiliation are all in high-speed motion. He must choose from among a growing number of moving targets. The problems of choice thus escalate not arithmetically, but geometrically.

At the very instant when his choices among material goods, education, culture consumption, recreation and entertainment are all multiplying, he is also given a bewildering array of social choices. And just as there is a limit to how much choice he may wish to exercise in buying a car – at a certain point the addition of options requires more decisionmaking than they are worth – so, too, we may soon approach the moment of social overchoice.

The level of personality disorder, neurosis, and just plain psychological distress in our society suggests that it is already difficult for many individuals to create a sensible, integrated, and reasonably stable personal style. Yet there is every evidence that the thrust toward social diversity, paralleling that at the level of goods and culture, is just beginning. We face a tempting and terrifying extension of freedom.

The more subcultural groupings in a society, the greater the potential freedom of the individual. This is why pre-industrial man, despite romantic myths to the contrary, suffered so bitterly from lack of choice.

While sentimentalists prattle about the supposedly unfettered freedom of the primitive, evidence collected by anthropologists and historians contradicts them. John Gardner puts the matter tersely: "The primitive tribe or pre-industrial community has usually demanded far more profound submission of the individual to the group than has any modern society." As an Australian social scientist was told by a Temne tribesman in Sierra Leone: "When Temne people choose a thing, we must all agree with the decision – this is what we call cooperation."

This is, of course, what we call conformity.