What if I told you a 50 year old bestseller predicted our current digital nightmare?
Here's the thing about forgotten cultural artifacts: sometimes they're the most prophetic ones. Alvin Toffler's 1970 bestseller "Future Shock" didn't just predict smartphone addiction, choice paralysis, and algorithmic curation. It diagnosed the exact psychological vulnerabilities that tech companies would later turn into trillion-dollar business models.
Welcome to Tunnel Vision—the podcast companion to Down the Rabbit Hole magazine. Each season, we pick one decade and tunnel deep into the cultural moments that shaped how we live today. Not the obvious stuff everyone remembers, but the things that slipped through the cracks of popular memory but still left a cultural imprint on our current moment.
Season 1 explores the 1970s—the pivotal decade that shaped America in untold ways. When the social and racial upheavals of the '60s transformed from protest into permanent features of how we live. The decade when we first learned to live with permanent instability.
In Episode 1, I argue that we're not just living in the world Toffler predicted—we've built an entire economy around keeping people in a permanent state of future shock. My co-host Roz Ali thinks I'm giving a 50-year-old book way too much credit.
One of us is probably right.
