People had been concerned, back in the fifties and sixties. Movie producers had made films about atomic holocausts and the last families left on earth. Writers wrote about the future, with apocalyptic riots and famines. But when the change came, it hadn't come with riots and revolutions. It came with business phones that weren't answered until the fifteenth ring, with misspelled words in The New Yorker, with new cars that inexplicably lacked a spare tire, with sudden losses of sound on television. Nothing about it would have seemed unusual in 1952, in France.
Michael Halberstam, The Wanting of Levine, (1979)