When Future Shock Meets Mass Formation Psychosis
In 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler released the first of three seminal books about the trajectory that America, and the world was on. They published them at roughly decade intervals: Future Shock (1970), Power Shift, (1984), and Third Wave (1991). There were others (like War & Anti-War and Revolutionary Wealth), but those three laid out what was coming down the pipe and they were largely correct about it because their core premise was so simple:
The rate of change was accelerating.
That was it. But it affected everything. The ramifications went beyond cycle theory or long waves because it meant that cycles and long waves would themselves accelerate.
As this acceleration accelerated, it would begin to overwhelm the coping mechanisms of both individuals and institutions alike. Nobody would be exempt, and everybody was facing a kind of technological and cultural shell shock, which they called: Future Shock:
It is impossible to produce future shock in large numbers of individuals without affecting the rationality of the society as a whole. Today, according to Daniel P. Moynihan, the chief White House advisor on urban affairs, the United States “exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown.” For the cumulative impact of sensory, cognitive or decisional overstimulation, not to mention the physical effects of neural or endocrine overload, creates sickness in our midst.
Of course, the “today” in the above passage was in 1970.
The Tofflers probably underestimated how bang-on they were, and the pace of change we’re experiencing just over the past few years (since “The Jackpot” event of 2020) probably would have dazzled both of them (Alvin passed away in 2016 and his wife Heidi in 2019).
I have long ascribed the kind of rampant “mass formation psychosis” (to use the Dr. Peter Malone term) to one thing above all else: Future Shock.
While the Tofflers exhaustively explored the coming breakdown of our prevailing systems of government, education, military and business, there a few additional catalysts at play today – since the Jackpot – which are converging, and adding even more instability and disruption to the future shock.
I can think of three:
#1) We’re in a Crack-Up Boom
The first Future Shock book dropped right on the cusp of the Fiat Era. Less than a year later, the Nixon Shock would rug-pull the concept of “money”, and set in motion yet another accelerant: compounding debt and money creation.
Take all the cognitive dissonance and social breakdown that the Tofflers said future shock would cause, and add to that a doom-loop of money-printing and Cantillon Effect (if you don’t know what that is, just think of it in terms of accelerating wealth inequality).
All fiat currencies throughout history have gone to zero, no exceptions and as they approach their final glide path, society starts to experience the effects through ever accelerating inflation (sound familiar?)
There have been close to a dozen hyperinflations over the course of the 20th century, and there have already been a few in the 21st (the Venezuela and Zimbabwe) and a couple that have been teetering on the precipice (Argentina still struggling with 104% inflation in 2024, Turkey, Nigeria).
Usually when this occurs, it’s isolated to a single currency and there at least theoretically exists the option for capital flight into other currencies.
But owing to the global debt super-bubble, and rampant money creation of the fiat era, which accelerated through The Jackpot (Covid), high inflation is now happening pretty well everywhere (the only country I note that is experiencing deflation right now is Afghanistan).
Most significantly, the currency experiencing inflation (albeit officially “under control”) is the US dollar, the global reserve currency.
For months in The Bitcoin Capitalist (since that 50bps cut in September), we’ve been tracking how the Fed has lost control of the yield curve, and this portends a massive crisis regardless of what the official CPI is.
This is also why whenever we see something like a memecoin rocket from zero to stratospheric valuations, we don’t think of it in terms of a crypto bubble, we rather suspect what the Austrian School economists called “Katastrophenhausse” – literally “Catastrophic boom” or “Crack-up Boom“.
When a currency is in a real hyper-inflation territory, the crack-up boom becomes a flight to safety of “anything but“ the currency, which is in the process of disintegrating (see: It’s the Denominator, Stupid“)
We aren’t there yet. We may be a few years away from that – and so the pile-in to these memecoins isn’t about the preservation of purchasing power. But I suspect it is about financial nihilism: and the realization the the current system is doomed; that the path for “getting ahead” lies in being early on crazy moonshots and only needing to be right once.
The Tofflers never talked about how a global hyperinflationary event would effect their thesis. I can fill in the blanks: it’s like pouring accelerant on it.
#2) The Singularity Has Already Happened
The Tofflers never came out and said that the accelerating pace of change would result in humanity evolving into something else entirely; just that the effect of this ever quickening change would have profound effects on the collective psyche.
The pronouncement that it would result in an evolutionary quantum leap would be made by others, in later decades. “We will merge with machines”, was the overall theme. We will upload our consciousness into the cloud. We will transcend our physicality, we will experience a “post-biological” existence. We could even become …immortal.
What would make all this possible is the virtuous cycle created by digital computer networks, powered by Moore’s Law, incessantly halving their physical footprint while doubling their processing power – eventually we would achieve, and then surpass, the interconnectivity and the processing power of the human brain itself.
When that happened, all bets were off.
The assumption is that somewhere along this continuum, when the right thresholds of parallelism and power were surpassed, “mind” itself would leap out of the process – emerging with a vengeance and folding back in on itself, forking off subprocesses even more intelligent than itself, and so on, ad infinitum.
“Our final invention” will then survey the world, with all its deficiencies and inefficiencies, and being infinitely smarter than all human minds combined, will deftly solve everything.
At that point there will be little left for us clunky, slow-witted humans to do.
We can then retire into a life of leisure, experiencing anything existence has to offer courtesy of the super-intelligent beings we had engineered into existence. We can even shed our mortal coils and experience it all from within the safety and comfort of an artificial computer generated construct. Our own personal, chrooted universes where we could experience anything our minds desired.
The likes of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamondis posit this oncoming event as “The Singularity”. Kurzweil (who turns 77 next month) thinks it’ll happen by 2045, and reputedly guzzles about 300 capsules per day of various nutrients and supplements in a bid to keep his mortal coil alive long enough to make the leap into immortality.
There are various problems with this scenario, in fact back before Covid (“The Jackpot event“), I started writing a book about it which has since languished on the back-burner (my focus over 2025 will be to finish the CBDC Survival Guide).
As a general rule, things never play out along the lines of the best forecasts. I’ve written about this before, and borrowed the term recipriversexclusion from the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy to describe it. In the Douglas Adams book, it meant a number whose value could be anything but itself (i.e “The given hour for a dinner party is the one moment in time that it is impossible for any of the guests to arrive”).
In our context, it’s that consensus estimates and expert forecasts describe the single timeline that is impossible to occur.
I’ll go one further. I think that we are already in the post-singularity era. Right now.
It happened within the last couple years with the AI wave – of third major technological wave of this century (internet, crypto, now AI) and the eighth major technological leap since the industrial revolution (electricity, radio/TV, telephones, semi-conductors, personal computers).
Now we’re past the point where the code is coding. The feedback loop there is already underway, and it too is accelerating…
#3) We’re in a bizarro-verse alternate reality
We crossed into it on July 13, 2024.
At that moment, our entire reality phase-shifted into another timeline. This happens constantly (JFK assassination, 9/11), but sometimes, the most monumental shifts are the result of almost accidental “hinge moments” (there’s an excellent book by that name that lays out a few of them over the past thousand years).
Hanging chads in 2000 US election. Trump turning his head to point toward a chart at a key moment…
(That’s a Bill McClintock mash-up, btw, be sure you crank it loud)
So now, we’re in an ever-accelerating technology loop, amidst an Austrian School Crack-Up Boom, taking place within the early innings of a global hyper-inflationary event, in the early days after the technological Singularity.
And, we’ve flipped timelines, into what looks like some kind of bizarro-verse.
At least that’s what it feels like.
This is one of the symptoms of Future Shock.
And the craazy thing is, we’re aren’t even in the parabolic acceleration phase yet. We’re still just rounding the corner, in the inflection point:
