Left Behind

A fond farewell to 209 once-common things that are either obsolete or well on the way

In his 1970 book, Future Shock, futurist Alvin Toffler warned that the last few decades of the 20th century would bring a widespread physical and psychological overload. "When we lived in an agrarian world as peasants, life was set by the seasons, and things were slow. Terribly slow," says Toffler. "You still had the same plot of land your whole life. Your son's life wasn't going to be that different than your father's." A drastically accelerating world, he predicted, was more than humans would be able to process.

Nearly 40 years later, things have changed dramatically -- but aside from the annoyance of having to learn a new cellphone every six months, we all seem to be holding up surprisingly well. When The Washington Post Magazine asked experts, celebrities and average Joes to cast their minds back to objects, habits and paradigms that have been left behind just in the past couple of decades, we came up with those that follow.

Future shock? That's what we got when we asked teens to talk about what they thought has become passe in their lifetimes.

Smoke and mirrors have long had a place in romance. For ages, we've made ourselves up and shaved ourselves down; we've surgically enhanced the things we can and covered up the things we can't. We've courted each other in the forgiving light of candles and become experts in various scripted untruths: Yes, it was good for me. Really, I've never felt this way before. No, you don't look fat.

"When we lived in an agrarian world as peasants, life was set by the seasons, and things were slow. Terribly slow," says Toffler. "You still had the same plot of land your whole life. Your son's life wasn't going to be that different than your father's."

Toffler learned his history from the comic books.

Looking back at the history of my own family, you see over the last two hundred and fifty years a family moving further west with each generation, each one breaking new ground, no two doing the same things at all, gaining and losing fortunes, gaining and losing them again, and the cycle continues. The whole thing puncuated by wars and depressions and constant but overall happy struggle.

Solid, salt-of-the-earth, but never static not for an instant.

I've no doubt they are just like Americans everywhere in their millions and millions over the many generations. We never fit Toffler's "paradigm", never could, never would, and never would want to.

I would disagree about demographics. There are parts of the more eastern US where the astute eye will still note tiny settlements just within walking distance of each other. A big tip-off is that each has its own cemetery. The last group I saw were in rural northern Arkansas. Unchanged from a time before the Civil War.

While most of these settlements have long been absorbed into much larger, more modern communities, or died out, in early America, they were the norm. Often tied together by “itinerant preachers” who would travel a circuit and bring news.

World War I was the real death knell to rural America, with the answer to the question, “How do you keep Johnny down on the farm after he has seen Paris?”, being “You don’t”. In a few short years, and climaxing with the Dust Bowl, the US experienced an incredible transformation from rural to urban. This continues through today, when most rural communities have faded away.

Ironically, some of the wilder environmental fanatics want to continue this process in an extreme way, eventually forcing almost all people from the heartland of the US to mega-cities on both coasts.

When Toffler wrote “Future Shock”, “The Third Wave”, and “Powershift”, he proved to have a lot better grasp for sociological change than the technologies and fashion propelling it. Fortunately, he did not suggest such changes were good or bad, just that they seemed probable.

The very expression “Future Shock” started to develop in the 1980s, but was renamed “information overload”, in which so much data was being produced that people could not keep up with it and would become overwhelmed with bizarre results.

The Internet actually prevented what could have been a catastrophic intellectual situation otherwise, by making concise and organized data accessible without the 99.999% of “junk” information intermingled with it. The effect was the same as the difference between a library where books are stored randomly, versus one that is ordered.

I think we would all agree that Google and other search engines make the Internet an incredible reference resource compared with trying to obtain the same information elsewhere. It is also a massive archive of information that would otherwise almost have to be discarded or lost.

Looking back before 1980, you will suddenly note that there is a sharp and steep decline of information. Much of it has already been lost, or is so hidden that it will likely never be recovered. Even the vast majority of early computer records are unrecoverable due to lost coding and formats.

Toffler’s “Powershift” seems to be where we are now, in a conflict between nation states and alternative organizations, some good and some very bad, like al-Qaeda.

It has no nation or effective patriarchal organization as governmental organizations do; it, oddly enough, is more like a matriarchal organization. Decentralized, ad hoc, unstructured, yet interested in the same general goal. In an odd way, al-Qaeda behaves much like the Rainbow Family by dint of this unusual organization.

Yet such matriarchal patterns or organization may in the future supplant patriarchal systems such as national governments. This is because there is no interface between patriarchal and matriarchal organizations. The latter have no leader, and decisions are made by ad hoc groups of those who are interested.

Patriarchal organizations have no way to relate to them, like playing chess with someone whose pieces are all rooks. There is no king to checkmate, no direction to your attack.

Unfortunately, the magazine article pettily ignored the sociology, and emphasized unimportant obsolescence.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.