"We were keeping our eye on 1984. when the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares..."
The year is now 2023. Almost 40 years since Orwell's prophecy expired and a perpendicular one fully rendered. We are caught up amidst hype cycles and disruptive innovations. We have accommodated our lives to the plug and screen. In Neil Postman's time, the screen was large, the plug stationary. Today, the screen is pocketable, ubiquitous, and targeting each user’s unique brain patterns. What this shift indicates has only been uncovered by very few willing to admit their own culpability in the state of the world.
"But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another- slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World..."
Huxley paints a picture of a self-enslaved people. He envisions a world where we have come to love our captivity. We struggle even to see the point of breaking our chains because it's more convenient, clean, and nice to simply wear them. The savagery that would overtake us without the protection of our bonds and narcotics terrifies our addled minds.
Are we not the same, in our love of the very technologies that undo our capacities to think?
"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one... Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture..."
A prudent observer of cultural trends and idiosyncrasies discerns the truth. What Postman did to elucidate this and excavate it for an age dedicating itself wholly to the first-wave of entertainment technology, the TV, has been lost. We are in a moment where we need to proceed, in his words, "with eyes wide open." The mental health crisis, political polarization, misinformation, digital addiction, overwork, environmental degradation- all problems correlated to the improper use of digital technology in one way or another. This ever-growing list of potentially catastrophic risks is easier to access in our minds today because of the internet. In spite of its persistence, have we become too trivial to make meaningful progress on any one of these? Does distraction rule us with more power than discipline? Are we so incapacitated that the solutions of the online era are blockaded by their harms?
"...we are in a race between education and disaster... For in the end, Huxley was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking..."
