In 1970 the American writer and futurist Alvin Toffler used the term “future shock” to describe the disorienting effects of accelerating technological change. But is there an antonym for future shock – a term that describes the opposite condition, capturing how it feels to be confronted with a technological breakthrough and to be underwhelmed by it? “Future shrug”, perhaps.
I had a bad case of future shrug as a teenager in the early 1990s, on an expedition to the cyberpunk kindergarten that was the Trocadero Centre in London to try out the first generation of virtual reality (VR) headsets. Two minutes of jerky, flickery, motionless “flight”. Was that it? Even the few exercises in Hollywood utopianism that accompanied VR’s first outing were curiously underpowered.
Take, for instance, The Lawnmower Man (1992), in which a scientist played by Pierce Brosnan uses VR to massively boost the intelligence of the simple fellow who cuts his grass. The leisure options offered by Brosnan’s home VR rig are laughably limited: floating, flying, falling. Brosnan’s wife, after finding him trying out a private leisure activity in the rig, acidly suggests he adds another f-word to the list. But that doesn’t just look unappealing, it’s actively ridiculous: a lot of thin-air groping, like a pervy mimeshow: floating, flying, falling … fumbling.
