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Chapter 2 tells the story of how the trend forecasting business arose in the United States. The commercial trend business grew in the wake of popular frenzy about “future shock,” a term made famous by Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book of the same name. Toffler’s book also coincided with the birth of futurology--techniques developed among military strategists, long-range planners, and the like to study and better prepare for the future. In the hands of entrepreneurial futurists, futurological and social scientific methods became useful in consulting private enterprises on how to better prepare for the future. The trend business exploded during the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to famous futurists such as Faith Popcorn, John Naisbitt, and Edie Weiner.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 eliminated the Cold War imperatives that had maintained America’s fragile class compromise and narrowed the ideological space for political dissent. The triumph of the neoliberal order was secured not by the Republican Party that had nurtured its ascent but by the acquiescence of Democratic president Bill Clinton to the policy regime they had established. Clinton became the Democrats’ Eisenhower under the influence of political strategist Dick Morris and senior cabinet members who favored supply-side economics, deregulation of telecoms and financial industries, and a balanced budget. By the end of the 1990s, neoliberals within the Treasury, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, had decisively outmaneuvered more progressive reformers such as Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Clinton and his fellow New Democrats produced a new ideological fusion that combined a dynamic high-tech economy, free market ideology, and multiculturalism.

The Introduction to Sonic Overload explains the motivations for the book and sets in play its general themes. Taking stock of the contemporary overabundance of information, the introduction asks how we reached this point. It focuses on the late USSR for an answer by first looking at paradoxical accounts about information overload in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and early 1980s. Valentin Silvestrov and Alfred Schnittke serve as guides for considering further how information overload affected and was affected by music in the USSR. Schnittke’s and Silvestrov’s evocations of the past range across a spectrum from overmuch to not enough. Each composer engaged with overabundance, using music as a means to articulate a sense of self amid the often overwhelming sensations of too much. The introduction presents the main premises of the book by defining polystylism and style before tying style to fundamental senses of identity, purpose, and meaning both within and against society. The remainder of the introduction discusses the overall argument of the book, from embracing to rejecting polystylism, as well as the contents of each chapter and its role in the ongoing narrative.