With his plans to wire the US House of Representatives to the Internet and make government documents electronically accessible, Speaker Newt Gingrich (georgia6@hr.house.gov) has staked his claim to the electronic frontier. It's a political territory formerly owned by Al Gore, and, at first blush, seems a strange place to find a Baptist from Georgia. It seems less strange when you know that Gingrich has been a friend of futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler since the early 1970s, back when Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was riding the bestseller lists and Gingrich was a history professor. Since then, the Tofflers have become an integral part of Gingrich's brain trust and a clear influence on Newt's vision of the future. Although Gingrich's views on cultural issues like abortion and homosexuality are well to the right of the Tofflers' and can seem more antediluvian than futurist, Alvin Toffler is adamant that Gingrich is a 21st-century figure. "Those are religious issues," Heidi Toffler adds, "they cannot be argued rationally."
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