Future Shock

Backed by mass media promotion and sophisticated marketing, such fads now explode on the scene virtually overnight – and vanish just as quickly. Sophisticates in the fad business prepare in advance for shorter and shorter product life cycles. Thus, there is in San Gabriel, California, a company entitled, with a kind of cornball relish, Wham-O Manufacturing Company. Wham-O specializes in fad products, having introduced the hula hoop in the fifties and the so-called Super-Ball more recently. The latter – a high-bouncing rubber ball – quickly became so popular with adults as well as children that astonished visitors saw several of them bouncing merrily on the floor of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. Wall Street executives gave them away to friends and one high broadcasting official complained that "All our executives are out in the halls with their Super-Balls." Wham-O, and other companies like it, however, are not disconcerted when sudden death overtakes their product; they anticipate it. They are specialists in the design and manufacture of "temporary" products.

The fact that fads are generated artificially, to a large extent, merely underscores their significance. Even engineered fads are not new to history. But never before have they come fleeting across the consciousness in such rapid-fire profusion, and never has there been such smooth coordination between those who originate the fad, mass media eager to popularize it, and companies geared for its instantaneous exploitation.

A well-oiled machinery for the creation and diffusion of fads is now an entrenched part of the modern economy. Its methods will increasingly be adopted by others as they recognize the inevitability of the ever-shorter product cycle. The line between "fad" and ordinary product will progressively blur. We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.

The turnover of things in our lives thus grows even more frenetic. We face a rising flood of throw-away items, impermanent architecture, mobile and modular products, rented goods and commodities designed for almost instant death. From all these directions, strong pressures converge toward the same end: the inescapable ephemeralization of the man-thing relationship.

The foreshortening of our ties with the physical environment, the stepped-up turnover of things, however, is only a small part of a much larger context. Let us, therefore, press ahead in our exploration of life in high transience society.

Chapter 5

PLACES: THE NEW NOMADS

Every Friday afternoon at 4:30, a tall, graying Wall Street executive named Bruce Robe stuffs a mass of papers into his black leather briefcase, takes his coat off the rack outside his office, and departs. The routine has been the same for more than three years. First, he rides the elevator twenty-nine floors down to street level. Next he strides for ten minutes through crowded streets to the Wall Street Heliport. There he boards a helicopter which deposits him, eight minutes later, at John F. Ke

Four nights a week Robe lives at a hotel in Manhattan. The other three he spends with his wife and children in Columbus, 500 miles away. Claiming the best of two worlds, a job in the frenetic financial center of America and a family life in the comparatively tranquil Midwest countryside, he shuttles back and forth some 50,000 miles a year.

The Robe case is unusual – but not that unusual. In Califomia, ranch owners fly as much as 120 miles every morning from their homes on the Pacific Coast or in the San Bernardino Valley to visit their ranches in the Imperial Valley, and then fly back home again at night. One Pe

Never in history has distance meant less. Never have man's relationships with place been more numerous, fragile and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characterized as "the people of the future," commuting, traveling, and regularly relocating one's family have become second nature. Figuratively, we "use up" places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.

In 1914, according to Buckminster Fuller, the typical American averaged about 1,640 miles per year of total travel, counting some 1,300 miles of just plain everyday walking to and fro. This meant that he traveled only about 340 miles per year with the aid of horse or mechanical means. Using this 1,640 figure as a base, it is possible to estimate that the average American of that period moved a total of 88,560 miles in his lifetime. (* This is based on a life expectancy of 54 years. Actual life expectancy for white males in the United States in 1920 was 54.1 years.) Today, by contrast, the average American car owner drives 10,000 miles per year – and he lives longer than his father or grandfather. "At sixty-nine years of age," wrote Fuller a few years ago, "... I am one of a class of several million human beings who, in their lifetimes, have each covered 3,000,000 miles or more" – more than thirty times the total lifetime travel of the 1914 American.

The aggregate figures are staggering. In 1967, for instance, 108,000,000 Americans took 360,000,000 trips involving an overnight stay more than 100 miles from home. These trips alone accounted for 312,000,000,000 passenger miles.

Even if we ignore the introduction of fleets of jumbo jets, trucks, cars, trains, subways and the like, our social investment in mobility is astonishing. Paved roads and streets have been added to the American landscape at the incredible rate of more than 200 miles per day, every single day for at least the last twenty years. This adds up to 75,000 miles of new streets and roads every year, enough to girdle the globe three times. While United States population increased during this period by 38.5 percent, street and road mileage shot up 100 percent. Viewed another way, the figures are even more dramatic: passenger miles traveled within the United States have been increasing at a rate six times faster than population for at least twenty-five years.

This revolutionary step-up in per capita movement through space is paralleled, to greater or lesser degree, throughout the most technological nations. Anyone who has watched the rush hour traffic pileup on the once peaceful Strandvëg in Stockholm ca

In addition to the increase in everyday movement between one's home and various other nearby points, there is also a phenomenal increase in business and vacation travel involving overnight stays away from home. Nearly 1,500,000 Germans will vacation in Spain this summer, and hundreds of thousands more will populate beaches in Holland and Italy. Sweden a