"The great growling engine of change - technology"
About this Quote
Toffler’s phrase doesn’t romanticize progress; it mechanizes it. Calling technology “the great growling engine of change” is a warning dressed as a metaphor: change isn’t a sunrise, it’s a machine in the next room, loud enough to rattle the walls and indifferent to whether you’re ready. “Growling” matters. It suggests appetite, friction, a kind of barely contained force. Technology isn’t framed as a neutral tool we politely pick up and put down, but as a powered system with momentum - something that can drag societies forward, chew up institutions, and keep running long after the people steering it have lost the plot.
The intent is classic Toffler: make readers feel the speed of modernity in their nervous system. He wrote in the era when automation, mass media, and computing were beginning to reorder work, family life, and politics. In Future Shock and later The Third Wave, Toffler argued that the real crisis wasn’t change itself, but the human inability to metabolize it at the pace machines enable. This line compresses that thesis into a single image: the engine is “great” (scale), “growling” (threat), and “of change” (unstoppable).
Subtext: if you treat technology as destiny, you’ll become its passenger. The engine metaphor quietly shifts the debate from gadgets to governance - who builds it, who fuels it, who gets run over. It’s not anti-tech; it’s anti-complacency. Toffler is telling you the noise you’re hearing isn’t background hum. It’s history accelerating.
The intent is classic Toffler: make readers feel the speed of modernity in their nervous system. He wrote in the era when automation, mass media, and computing were beginning to reorder work, family life, and politics. In Future Shock and later The Third Wave, Toffler argued that the real crisis wasn’t change itself, but the human inability to metabolize it at the pace machines enable. This line compresses that thesis into a single image: the engine is “great” (scale), “growling” (threat), and “of change” (unstoppable).
Subtext: if you treat technology as destiny, you’ll become its passenger. The engine metaphor quietly shifts the debate from gadgets to governance - who builds it, who fuels it, who gets run over. It’s not anti-tech; it’s anti-complacency. Toffler is telling you the noise you’re hearing isn’t background hum. It’s history accelerating.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|---|
| Source | Alvin Toffler , line attributed to his book Future Shock (1970): "The great growling engine of change , technology." |
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