The diversity of novel experiences arrayed before the consumer will be the work of experience-designers, who will be drawn from the ranks of the most creative people in the society. The working motto of this profession will be: 'If you can't serve it up real, find a vicarious substitute. If you're good, the customer will never know the difference!' This implied blurring of the line between the real and the unreal will confront the society with serious problems, but it will not prevent or even slow the emergence of the 'psyche-service industries' and 'psych-corps.' Great globe-girdling syndicates will create super-Disneylands of a variety, scale, scope, and emotional power that is hard for us to imagine.
We can thus sketch the dim outlines of the super-industrial economy, the post-service economy of the future. Agriculture and the manufacture of goods will have become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow's best and most resourceful entrepreneurs.
The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the widow or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. Based on banks of detailed data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product.
Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experiential terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experience industries as it begins to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to students. The communications and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their soft-ware as well. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioral technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic – if not the basic – sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete.
The essence of tomorrow's economy, declares the Stanford Research Institute in a report by its Long Range Planning Service, will be an 'emphasis upon the inner as well as the material needs of individuals and groups.' This new emphasis, SRI suggests, will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. 'In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourths or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy.'
It is this convergence of pressures – from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing – that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future.
The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the world may not stand idly by as the world's favored few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of mankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could defer the arrival of experientialism, could maintain a more conventional economy for a time by maximizing traditional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign aid programs.
By creaming off 'excess' productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. A fifty- year campaign to erase hunger from the world, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future.
Such a pause might give us time to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one's life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity.
One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non- vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six months every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instant access to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. But what happens to emotional development as the ratio of vicarious experience to 'real' experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, retard it?
And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experiences for their own sake, experiences that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?
We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do – and perhaps even if we do – service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of man's elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a 'gut' economy to a 'psyche' economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied.
Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely man's relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once bought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from him, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades.
For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today's economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture that most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience.
Chapter 11
THE FRACTURED FAMILY
The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself.
The family has been called the 'giant shock absorber' of society – the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-industrial revolution unfolds, this 'shock absorber' will come in for some shocks of its
