---
id: people/alvin-toffler
about:
  label: Alvin Toffler
  depiction: people/alvin-toffler.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Vern Evans, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.'
  description: >-
    American writer and futurist (1928 to 2016), author with Heidi Toffler of
    Future Shock, which proposed anticipatory democracy: public forecasting
    joined to citizen participation.
  tags:
    - futures studies
    - anticipatory democracy
    - forecasting
person:
  affiliation: Toffler Associates
  role: writer and futurist
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Alvin Toffler - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler'
    - title: 'Alvin Toffler, futurologist guru, dies at 87 (BBC News, 2016)'
      url: 'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36670572'
    - title: >-
        Anticipatory Democracy and Aspirational Futures (Clement Bezold, Journal
        of Futures Studies 15(2), November 2010)
      url: 'https://jfsdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/152-S06.pdf'
    - title: Institute for Alternative Futures
      url: 'http://www.altfutures.org/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Alvin Toffler was an American writer and futurist, born in New York City on 4 October 1928 and died at his home in Los Angeles on 27 June 2016.[^1,2] He wrote most of his books with his wife, Heidi Toffler.[^1,2] Before the books he was a factory worker, a Washington correspondent and a labour columnist at Fortune, and IBM hired him to research and write a paper on the social and organisational impact of computers.[^1] Future Shock appeared in 1970, The Third Wave in 1980 and Powershift in 1990.[^1] He popularised the term "information overload".[^1,2] In 1996 the Tofflers and Tom Johnson co-founded Toffler Associates, an advisory firm.[^1]

In Future Shock he argued that representative government was the political technology of the industrial era, and that new forms were needed to cope with a crushing overload of decisions.[^3] His answer was anticipatory democracy, which he later defined as "a process for combining citizen participation with future consciousness".[^3] He asked Clement Bezold to edit a book reviewing experiments of that kind.[^3] The Institute for Alternative Futures, founded in 1977 by Toffler, Jim Dator and Bezold to promote foresight and anticipatory democracy, closed at the end of 2019.[^4]

He is the author of [Future Shock](/media/future-shock/) and wrote the introduction to [Anticipatory Democracy](/media/anticipatory-democracy/), edited by [Clement Bezold](/people/clement-bezold/). The history of anticipatory democracy in [foresight and anticipation](/terms/foresight-and-anticipation/) starts with his work.