Comment by cbcoutinho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cbcoutinho | Hacker News Reader

This is great time to mention one of my favorite books on the media and public discourse: Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman. In the book, the two infamous dystopian novels of the 20th century (1984 and Brave New World) are compared to determine which one our world most closely resembles.

The two books differ in how they describe the source of the dystopia. It's been a while so please excuse any inaccuracies - in 1984 the world is controlled by authoritarian governments through fear, misinformation, and endless distractions, whereas in Brave New World the world is controlled by an authoritarian government through mind-numbing pleasure and shallow entertainment. The governments in these books both rely on citizens being reduced to their lowest common denominator. I think people during the cold war could most easily imagine, and thus be most afraid of, a world that resembled 1984. The book I mentioned in the beginning of this post argues the view that we should have actually been more worried about a world more closely resembling Brave New World.

Today we are constantly fed a mind-numbing amount (mis)information that we also simultaneously look for because it makes us feel better. Unfortunately, this media barrage also robs us of our attention and ability to critically think about important issues affecting our society. If anyone is interested in reading a book written before the age of social media (published 1985) and exploring these ideas, I highly recommend this one.

I definitely think it looks like a bit of a mixture of both. From what I remember in reading Brave New World, the focus wasn't so much on the authoritarian tendencies of the government itself. The government was authoritarian in the sense that it determined what people would be like through genetic engineering but seemed to basically leave them alone otherwise. Since they were perfectly suited for the tasks that their caste was bred for. Including being perfectly happy in them. For instance the "Betas" didn't want to be "Alphas", and in their mind it was certainly a lot better than being an "Epsilon". They didn't mind being in a lower caste because they didn't think they could handle the responsibilities of being an "Alpha". It is kind of interesting that most of the book deals with the world of the top rung of society and kind of glosses over the world of the lower castes.

Really though we don't need to go to fiction to see what is happening in society. We just need to go to Ancient Rome. "Bread and circuses" was a tactic used by the patricians (elites) to keep the plebeians (masses) appeased. Give people a minimum standard of living so they can continue to live, and distract them from injustices and corruption through entertainment.

May want to check out "Technopoly" by Postman as well. It's got some of the same points but goes deeper into technology in general. It opens with a story from Phaedrus by Plato where a king is arguing with a god over the utility of writing. The god says it's amazing and allows all knowledge to be stored, etc. But the king says the god is too enamored with his invention and can't see downsides like knowledge being decoupled from instruction and loss of memory since everything is written down.

Lesson of course is all technologies have up sides and down sides, but we rarely ever discuss the down sides.

The problem is that the up sides of new technologies are typically immediately obvious, while the down sides are subtle and can take a very long time to make themselves evident.

Example: let's make watch faces that glow in the dark by painting them on with radium-based paint! (Which was a real thing: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls)

Up side: everyone can now read their watches in the dark! Hooray! An instantly clear improvement.

Down side: radium is, well, radioactive, so the workers painting the watch faces slowly start having their bones rot and their jaws fall off. It takes a decade for the link to be recognized between these symptoms and unsafe procedures for handling radium-based paint. Nobody really knows how many of the workers employed handling such paint eventually died from related illnesses.

I guess this inspired Stuart Mcmillen with this strip: https://therionorteline.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/huxley-v...

Thanks for the recommendation, I will take a look at it.

This kind of reminds me how I felt when I was reading both those books. I had already seen all the memes about 1984 not being an instruction manual, and it left me kind of confused, because the direction the west is moving towards doesn't really resemble what was described in the book (at least, not yet). Then I read Brave New World and it certainly read like something more relevant to our current situation. Both are horrifying stories though, and it pains me that US, a nation that once prided itself for being 'free' has 2 conflicting mainstream ideologies, both of which call for a bigger government in an attempt to oppress the other side.

I had already seen all the memes about 1984 not being an instruction manual, and it left me kind of confused, because the direction the west is moving towards doesn't really resemble what was described in the book (at least, not yet).

I have often wondered if we aren't a bit inoculated by 1984. "Red scare" and all that, and much of Orwell's work (1984, Animal Farm) was an obvious swipe at the Soviet Union and the like. Apple's first TV ad played on it. We're on the lookout for Orwellian things because we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

Poor ol' Brave New World, OTOH, never got much press. I mean, amongst my middle-aged crowd I don't know too many that have actually read it, but we all read 1984 in high school. So whereas we're all on the lookout for oppressive government actions, we kind of ignore the influences of other aspects of our lives.

Memory holing is easier now than in the book.

Brave new world is not comparable to 1984, quite simply, because ... one is about lack of empathy, the other lack of information.

It's extraordinary how relevant this book still is. Postman was a student of McLuhan, but wrote in a much more accessible style.

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