Alvin Toffler

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 and wrote the introduction to Anticipatory Democracy, edited by Clement Bezold. The history of anticipatory democracy in foresight and anticipation starts with his work.