Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,703

This is the grave of Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

Born in 1928 in New York City, Alvin Toffler grew up in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the child of Polish immigrants. It was a family that embraced literature and big ideas and the kid picked that up. He went to NYU for college, was mostly engaged in left wing political activism, but graduated with a degree in English in 1950. He met Heidi Farrell in 1948. Born in 1929 in New York and from a reasonably middle class background, she ended up at Long Island University and got a bachelor’s degree in English. She also got involved in radicalism and this is how they met. Somehow and this is really crazy, while Heidi Toffler has a long New York Times obituary, she does not have a Wikipedia entry. It’s all about him. This seems, um, problematic. Their first date was a concert of Wagner pieces. She encouraged him to get serious and finish college.

The young couple moved to Cleveland in 1950 to live their politics. They took jobs in factories in order to organize the proletariat toward the revolution, of course. But it didn’t quite go that way. They seem to have politically drifted in similar ways at similar times, which makes sense since they were a politically engaged and intellectually vigorous couple, but it doesn’t always work that way with couples. Well, the revolution was not going to happen. Instead, what they saw was the amazing reality of mass production. They were both still strong labor people at this time, in fact Heidi was shop steward in her union. They worked in the factories until 1955, when Alvin started writing more. He started writing for a union newspaper in 1955, became a union correspondent in Washington in 1957, and then the White House correspondent for a Pennsylvania paper in the late 50s.

By the 60s, the Tofflers had really lost any connection to the labor movement. Alvin worked for Fortune at this time and was known for his interviews there and at other rags, including a famous 1964 with the vile Ayn Rand at the vile Playboy. He also interviewed Vladimir Nabokov there, giving the “I just read it for the interviews” people a high falutin’ claim there. What he really became was a thinker about the future. IBM hired him to consider the impact of computing, and this all led to the publication of Future Shock in 1970.

Now, I haven’t read anything the Tofflers wrote and I have no intention of doing so. I have read about them plenty though. So have at it; when you people complain that your favorite author like Octavia Butler isn’t covered precisely as you would like, first you are complaining about free content in what is almost certainly the longest running serious series of historical posts by one person in the history of the entire internet and second, I have a real job and this is entertainment, so quit complaining and just talk about what you think is important about this person in comments.

It’s also worth noting here that Heidi was working with Alvin on all this stuff, under his name, yes, but with a more equitable partnership on this stuff than, say, Robert Caro, whose wife has served strictly as secretary for decades. But what the Tofflers became was the Big Thinkers for Shallow Readers niche that someone like Malcolm Gladwell mines effectively today. Future Shock took the pop psychology floating around the intellectual world in these days (and thank God we are mostly beyond that absurdity) and applied it to the massive changes taking place in our economic world. He popularized the term “information overload” here. There’s no doubt that in a sense they were right–we do deal with a lot of information and he could see that coming. My issue here is with someone like Newt Gingrich, a huge fan and the ultimate in shallow minds, seeing them as prophets that would drive his disgusting politics. Of course they also became personal friends. The Tofflers did the pseudo-intellectual thing superbly–writing the big stories that take us back to the beginning of time and providing facile histories that bring us to the present and presumably the future. Speaking of people who have mined that facile type of writing in recent decades, the popularity of Jared Diamond is extremely frustrating to myself and many environmental historians.

I do admit though that I kind of want to watch the Orson Welles narrated film essay about Future Shock.

Every ten years, another similar book came out that blew the minds of the shallow–The Third Wave in 1980 and Powershift in 1990. They continued with their obscenely broad overgeneralization about society and the future. Did they have some insights? Sure, they were smart people. They did their research, to a certain extent. But were they also appealing to the pocketbooks of the powerful? Oh you bet they were. It paid off too. They became super rich. They reached their pinnacle with the decline of the Soviet Union and the belief that they could advise both capitalist and ex-communist nations on the transition to the future. Alvin got paid huge money to give talks, especially in the ex-Soviet Union and the Asian Tiger countries, who leaders also saw themselves as future leaders who remade society through capitalism and their own personal charisma. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was especially a fan, as much as Gingrich. In the Deng Xiaoping era of China, Toffler also had huge fans in the Chinese government, especially Zhao Ziyang. As a famous discussion of Toffler’s influence in Asia noted, whereas previous generations of Asian leaders wanted to reshape their nations through Marx, now they wanted to take Toffler’s ideas about capitalism and remake their nations through importing their own version of Silicon Valley tech companies.

Will it surprise you that the Tofflers remain popular with the horrible Silicon Valley techbros who rule our lives today? It will not!

But you can’t overstate their influence. Hell, the term “techno” in techno music comes from Juan Atkins, who coined the term to describe the music he made after reading the Tofflers! Curtis Mayfield wrote a song called “Future Shock”! Herbie Hancock covered that song using electronic keyboards!!

Their last book–and by this time Heidi was getting title credit, which Alvin had to convince her to take–was 2006’s Revolutionary Wealth, which is remains a huge influence on crypto-idiots and the need to replace the monetary system with something new because of reasons. Of course, this opens up so many possibilities for LoomCoin to become the accepted currency of the global elite! Oh, and there’s also speculation about creating mass settlements in space because why not says Elon Musk.

Alvin Toffler died in 2016 at the age of 87. Heidi Toffler died in 2019, at the age of 89.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler are buried in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California. I had no idea they were there went I wandered over there. To say the least, it was a good belly laugh moment.

At some point, Toffler was named an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. If you would like this series to visit other Americans who have achieved this honor, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Richard Serra is in Orient, New York and Richard Miller is in Oberlin, Ohio. Suffice it to say that Jerry Lewis received this honor, but he was evidently cremated and is not in a cemetery, though who knows. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.