2011: A Brave New Dystopia
By Chris Hedges
Global Research, December 31, 2010
truthdig.com 31 December 2010
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.
more here:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/2011-a-brave-new-dystopia/22581
================================================================
Huxley Vs. Orwell: Infinite Distraction Or Government Oppression?
Posted on August 24, 2010
The Huxley vs Orwell comic is originally from Recombinant Records: Amusing Ourselves to Death, adapted from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman.
When I read this comic, I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Brave New World:
“It’s curious,” he went on after a little pause, “to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled–after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”
There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.
comic here:
http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/08/24/huxley-vs-orwell-infinite-distraction-or-government-oppression/
================================================================
2014: A Brave New Dystopian "1984" World
Tyler Durden's picture
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/30/2014 14:24 -0400
While many have pointed out that the Middle-East/Far-East are drifting to a more "Orwellian" world and the West is a more "Huxleyan" environ, the merger of the two dystopias is seemingly growing each day. As The Guardian previously noted, Huxley's dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug - the rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp.
The most striking parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free.
Both Big Brother’s world and the Brave New World are ruled by authoritarian elites of a basically socialist/communist nature, whose only real purpose is the maintenance of their own power and privileges.
We discussed this a year ago but it seems an opportune time - with the world's brainwashing and control accelerating - to revisit the two
Decades ago they saw it all coming...
As The Guardian so appropriately summed up,
Huxley's dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug – soma – that is less damaging and more pleasurable than any narcotic known to us. The rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude.
Which brings us back to the two Etonian bookends of our future. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp. And indeed for a long time, for those of us who worry about such things, it was the internet's capability to facilitate such comprehensive surveillance that attracted most attention.
In the process, however, we forgot about Huxley's intuition. We failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by the likes of Apple and Samsung – allied to our apparently insatiable appetite for Facebook, Google and other companies that provide us with "free" services in exchange for the intimate details of our daily lives – might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic as soma was for the inhabitants of Brave New World. So even as we remember CS Lewis, let us spare a thought for the writer who perceived the future in which we would come to love our digital servitude.
more here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-30/2014-brave-new-dystopian-1984-world
================================================================
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
1984 v. Brave New World
In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction.
Fantastic.
Trivia: In 1917, long before he wrote this letter, Aldous Huxley briefly taught Orwell French at Eton.
Wrightwood. Cal.
21 October, 1949
Dear Mr. Orwell,
It was very kind of you to tell your publishers to send me a copy of your book. It arrived as I was in the midst of a piece of work that required much reading and consulting of references; and since poor sight makes it necessary for me to ration my reading, I had to wait a long time before being able to embark on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Agreeing with all that the critics have written of it, I need not tell you, yet once more, how fine and how profoundly important the book is. May I speak instead of the thing with which the book deals — the ultimate revolution? The first hints of a philosophy of the ultimate revolution — the revolution which lies beyond politics and economics, and which aims at total subversion of the individual's psychology and physiology — are to be found in the Marquis de Sade, who regarded himself as the continuator, the consummator, of Robespierre and Babeuf. The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. I have had occasion recently to look into the history of animal magnetism and hypnotism, and have been greatly struck by the way in which, for a hundred and fifty years, the world has refused to take serious cognizance of the discoveries of Mesmer, Braid, Esdaile, and the rest.
the complete letter, here:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/1984-v-brave-new-world.html
================================================================
The dystopia of 1984 is no longer relevant
2/24/14 10:10am | Annalee Newitz
In our era of ubiquitous surveillance and data-gathering online, pundits often use the scifi icon Big Brother to explain what's happening. But journalist and academic Zeynep Tufekci, who participated in Turkey's recent protests, says we need a new dystopian story to explain our lives.
Illustration by Steve Squall
Tufekci writes about how social media is used in protests — but also, how data-gathering on those same social networks is used by governments to control its citizens in often subtle ways. In a terrific essay on Medium, she says we have to understand that coercion in this day and age doesn't look like cages full of rats attached to our faces, they way it does in Orwell's classic Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most of us don't live in a world of forceful coercion and fear. Instead, our politicians use social media's personalized tools of persuasion, based on your Facebook "likes" and tweets.
So what comes after Nineteen Eighty-Four as our dystopian tale? Tufekci believes it has to be a story that explores how media manipulation and persuasion control our political decisions without us even realizing it.
She writes:
As revelations about the scale of NSA surveillance flowed, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's dystopian novel, shot up 6,000 percent on Amazon. Many came to see Oceania, the novel's massive, fearsome surveillance state, as the model of the modern digitally-empowered state. Nineteen Eighty-Four had finally arrived, it was said—just off by 30 years or so.
But this is the wrong way to understand what's happening. Deep and pervasive surveillance is real. It is likely worse than what we know, and is becoming more pervasive by the day. But Nineteen Eighty-Four has very little to do with it.
Others turned to a different metaphor: the Panopticon, a thought experiment invented by the 18th-century social reformer Jeremy Bentham and later popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Bentham imagined a prison with a tall tower at its center, located so that guards in the tower can peer into each prisoner's cell. The gaze of the guards—all-seeing, but invisible to inmates—would make prisoners internalize the discipline of the prison, Bentham thought. Foucault later extended the idea by adopting it as a metaphor for the impact of surveillance on society.
But that's also wrong. The Panopticon has little to do with most surveillance in liberal democracies.
And these metaphors aren't just wrong—they can be profoundly misleading.
the conclusion, here:
http://io9.com/the-dystopia-of-1984-is-no-longer-relevant-heres-wh-1529808588
================================================================
When dystopian fiction became reality TV
These stories were once anxious warnings of grim possible futures. Not they're everyday realism
Damien Walter
theguardian.com, Friday 8 November 2013 02.00 EST
Brave contemporary world … CCTV surveillance screens in 2009 Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian
It seems a bit rough to accuse modern Britain of being a dystopia when it's also such an excellent source of tea, roast dinners and well-tailored clothing. But then the really disturbing thing about any dystopia is that for every Winston Smith resisting the machine, there are thousands of content consumers quite happy with Big Brother.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most influential dystopia of the 20th century, but George Orwell's vision of Britain as totalitarian state was, thankfully, not quite accurate. Our mid-level bureaucrats are more likely to face early redundancy for their thought crimes than Room 101. And it's not like we're engaged in an endless war against an unspecified enemy in the name of which our basic rights are stripped away. Oh. Wait.
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has always been the hipper vision of dystopia. A nice job in the corporate hierarchy, unlimited psychotropic drugs and no-strings-attached sex. Worryingly, Huxley's satirical novel reads more like a handbook for a career in the creative industries than a dystopian warning today. And Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 doesn't fare much better. As Bradbury himself said, you don't have to burn books to destroy culture, just stop people reading them. And with libraries closing all over the country, we might start to wonder how much time remains to our culture.
Granted we aren't making our young people fight, Hunger Games-style, to the death – just yet. But there's still something unnervingly familiar about the adventures of Katniss Everdeen as penned by Suzanne Collins. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find that desperate X-Factor producers have considered gladiatorial death-matches in the face of plummeting ratings. Stephen King's The Long Walk sees bands of young men force-marched across America at gunpoint for cheering television audiences. I don't want to be guilty of putting ideas in to the tiny bald head of Ian Duncan Smith, but if he isn't already considering this as a replacement for Jobseekers' Allowance, it's surely only a matter of time.
Dystopian visions used to present dire warnings of futures to come, now they seem more like pale reflections of reality. Today dystopia is just another category of light entertainment, a marketing niche for ebooks which even has its own channel on Netflix. Is this because we no longer have anything to fear? Or have our dystopian nightmares simply become reality?
here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/08/dystopian-fiction-reality-realism-damien-walter
===========================================================
November 7, 2013
Are Computers Making Society More Unequal?
Posted by Joshua Rothman
Ever since inequality began rising in the U.S., in the nineteen-seventies, people have debated its causes. Some argue that rising inequality is mainly the result of specific policy choices—cuts to education, say, or tax breaks for the wealthy; others argue that it’s an expression of larger, structural forces. For the last few years, Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and a widely read blogger, has been one of the most important voices on the latter side. In 2011, in an influential book called “The Great Stagnation,” Cowen argued that the American economy had exhausted the “low-hanging fruit”—cheap land, new technology, and high marginal returns on education—that had powered its earlier growth; the real story wasn’t inequality per se, but rather a general and inevitable economic slowdown from which only a few sectors of the economy were exempt. It was not a comforting story.
“Average Is Over,” Cowen’s new book, is a sequel to, and elaboration upon, “The Great Stagnation.” In many ways, it’s even less comforting. It’s not just, Cowen writes, that the old economy, built on factory work and mid-level office jobs, has stagnated. It’s that the nature of work itself is changing, largely because of the increasing power of intelligent machines. Smart software, Cowen argues, is transforming almost everything about work, and ushering in an era of “hyper-meritocracy.” It makes workers redundant, by doing their work for them. It makes work more unforgiving, by tracking our mistakes. And it creates an entirely new class of workers: people who know how to manage and interpret computer systems, and whose work, instead of competing with the software, augments and extends it. Over the next several decades, Cowen predicts, wages for that new class of workers will grow rapidly, while the rest will be left behind. Inequality will be here to stay, and that will affect not only how we work, but where and how we live.
If we want a preview of work in the twenty-twenties and twenty-thirties, Cowen writes, we should look to the areas where computer intelligence is already making a big difference: areas like dating, medicine, and even chess. This interview with Cowen has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
In “Average Is Over,” you argue that inequality will grow in the U.S. for the next several decades. Why?
There are three main reasons inequality is here to stay, and will likely grow. The first is just measurement of worker value. We’re doing a lot to measure what workers are contributing to businesses, and, when you do that, very often you end up paying some people less and other people more. The second is automation—especially in terms of smart software. Today’s workplaces are often more complicated than, say, a factory for General Motors was in 1962. They require higher skills. People who have those skills are very often doing extremely well, but a lot of people don’t have them, and that increases inequality. And the third point is globalization. There’s a lot more unskilled labor in the world, and that creates downward pressure on unskilled labor in the United States. On the global level, inequality is down dramatically—we shouldn’t forget that. But within each country, or almost every country, inequality is up.
more here:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/when-machines-replace-humans-at-work.html
===========================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.