3 ms·

Both ended up far wrong because they overestimated government's cohesiveness. Most first world governments are far too inept to accomplish anything so difficult

Both ended up far wrong because they overestimated government's cohesiveness. Most first world governments are far too inept to accomplish anything so difficult as either book prognosticates. We've seen nothing but a slide toward increasingly ineffective democracies since their era.

daveguy 11y ago
We have seen a shift toward increasing corporate influence which may eventually take government anti-roles similar to a Gibson dystopia. Most of what was in both books required significant advances in biotech and automation. The advances we are seeing around crispr-cas9 and IoT may provide those tools. I am not a Luddite and I think advancement of tech is almost always beneficial (who uses that tech and how is the question). However, it may be premature to say they both ended up far wrong. They are still very important books to demonstrate the wrong ways to use technology. Edit: not that governments couldn't take the anti-roles back, but it would need a combination of increased technology and acceptance along with unfettered surveillance using that technology -- zero day Alexa bug for the NSA?
chippy 11y ago
Both were not predictions of their immediate future, but fiction which have a message for today.
peatmoss 11y ago
I tend to find the dystopian vision of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil the most utterly believable. In it, we have benign or benevolent actors, who are guilty of nothing more than incompetence. Evil is an emergent property of the system rather than a conscious act. People give up autonomy and privacy for retention of their bourgeois lifestyle, and mostly ignore the economic underclasses. A small number of malcontents are branded as terrorists and the government ineffectually tries to treat the symptom rather than the underlying disease.
- ricksplat 11y ago
  > benign or benevolent actors This was Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" theory that she developed post WW2 when everybody was trying to figure out what happened. Evil acts are perpetrated by dumb people "just doing their job".
gedy 11y ago
Aside from the infant and sleep conditioning details, Brave New World has proven incredibly accurate.
scalio 11y ago
Very true that government is not cohesive, it appears not to be so almost by definition ;) But power seems to be sliding more and more into the hands of massive corporations, also thanks to most politicians' inherent inability to grasp the concept of responsibility. Google, Facebook, Apple et al. are pushing an industry which (in my mind) has a very real potential to turn into mankind's most perversely decadent apogee so far, say, over the course of this century. I'd tend to set the bar a bit lower than that because a lot can happen in a single century, and the 20th has been pretty unprecedented in terms of stuff happening to humanity. Anyhow, Cloudflare for example are enabling surveillance and legitimising it all at once by ssl-mitm'ing an increasingly large part of the public internet. CF makes it normal to stumble upon a page that you can't access because your connection is supposedly being used for nefarious purposes. Granted, that mostly happens to Tor users, but my point stands: non-proxied connections directly from home also get the CF treatment, but completely transparently. Which is worse, come to think of it. Also, by making browsing through Tor tedious, its use is discouraged for everyday Joe, making the haystack smaller, making it easier to target specific groups of people. Why does half a dozen ad networks have to be there at every turn? I personally don't see them anymore, but the requests are still made. Very few people go through my hassle of continually adjusting umatrix, and that is perfectly understandable, but only underscores the issue: the surveillance infrastructure/apparatus that would have been so loved by the Stasi is already up and running, happily chugging snap after snap after like after tweet after brainfart after snap. The impression that the big Orgs aren't doing anything too nasty today is no guarantee that they still won't tomorrow. Skynet is ready for action, if you will, and flexing its muscles every now and then (newsfeed manipulation?). Both Brave New World and 1984 ended up wrong in the sense that a truly global war would probably not work for very long and truly global peace is still way, way, way off. Still, BNW's peace of mind can be created artificially by just not telling people about stuff, which, incidentally, is very easy to do if you have complete control over what people look at 24/7 because they do so through your platform(s). As long as nothing is visibly wrong in somebody's day-to-day life and the guilty are always found, no point in looking for them any more, right? My point being that while yes, 1984 and BNW have got it wrong with the government, I think the government should be seen as the source and sink of power over people regardless of its actual implementation as e.g. dictatorial state or capitalist corporate structures. That way, the books' ideas can still be applied to today's politics.
PavlovsCat 11y ago
Well, it takes time, but steady does it. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwell-s-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwe... > Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. Remember when Saddam Hussein was a great guy when he was at war with Iran and gassed some people on the side, but then later was not such a great guy because he "used gas against his own people"? Or how Saudi-Arabia and the US funded Al-Quaeda, and the US bombed the Middle East to bits, where now IS flourishes, which is such a big problem that obviously, now Syria has to be regime-changed as well, to make it better? How people are so concerned about murder and terrorism they can't even fathom the idea of one's own war criminals being arrested and tried? How Obama got a peace nobel prize, then continued with his surveillance / kill lists drone stuff, which is made terribly cute with a mic drop? How stuff constantly gets advertised as being "new" or having "more X"? Slavery is freedom, just like drinking Coca-Cola ist being popular and good at sports. More advertising follows such patterns than not. And of course, there's plenty of telescreens and microphones to go around. You never know if anyone is watching or listening, but you know they always could, just like in the book. We live in a world where people claim "privacy is dead, get over it" and don't even blush.

daveguy 11y ago

We have seen a shift toward increasing corporate influence which may eventually take government anti-roles similar to a Gibson dystopia. Most of what was in both books required significant advances in biotech and automation. The advances we are seeing around crispr-cas9 and IoT may provide those tools. I am not a Luddite and I think advancement of tech is almost always beneficial (who uses that tech and how is the question). However, it may be premature to say they both ended up far wrong. They are still very important books to demonstrate the wrong ways to use technology. Edit: not that governments couldn't take the anti-roles back, but it would need a combination of increased technology and acceptance along with unfettered surveillance using that technology -- zero day Alexa bug for the NSA?

chippy 11y ago

Both were not predictions of their immediate future, but fiction which have a message for today.

peatmoss 11y ago

I tend to find the dystopian vision of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil the most utterly believable. In it, we have benign or benevolent actors, who are guilty of nothing more than incompetence. Evil is an emergent property of the system rather than a conscious act. People give up autonomy and privacy for retention of their bourgeois lifestyle, and mostly ignore the economic underclasses. A small number of malcontents are branded as terrorists and the government ineffectually tries to treat the symptom rather than the underlying disease.

ricksplat 11y ago
> benign or benevolent actors This was Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" theory that she developed post WW2 when everybody was trying to figure out what happened. Evil acts are perpetrated by dumb people "just doing their job".

gedy 11y ago

Aside from the infant and sleep conditioning details, Brave New World has proven incredibly accurate.

scalio 11y ago

Very true that government is not cohesive, it appears not to be so almost by definition ;) But power seems to be sliding more and more into the hands of massive corporations, also thanks to most politicians' inherent inability to grasp the concept of responsibility. Google, Facebook, Apple et al. are pushing an industry which (in my mind) has a very real potential to turn into mankind's most perversely decadent apogee so far, say, over the course of this century. I'd tend to set the bar a bit lower than that because a lot can happen in a single century, and the 20th has been pretty unprecedented in terms of stuff happening to humanity. Anyhow, Cloudflare for example are enabling surveillance and legitimising it all at once by ssl-mitm'ing an increasingly large part of the public internet. CF makes it normal to stumble upon a page that you can't access because your connection is supposedly being used for nefarious purposes. Granted, that mostly happens to Tor users, but my point stands: non-proxied connections directly from home also get the CF treatment, but completely transparently. Which is worse, come to think of it. Also, by making browsing through Tor tedious, its use is discouraged for everyday Joe, making the haystack smaller, making it easier to target specific groups of people. Why does half a dozen ad networks have to be there at every turn? I personally don't see them anymore, but the requests are still made. Very few people go through my hassle of continually adjusting umatrix, and that is perfectly understandable, but only underscores the issue: the surveillance infrastructure/apparatus that would have been so loved by the Stasi is already up and running, happily chugging snap after snap after like after tweet after brainfart after snap. The impression that the big Orgs aren't doing anything too nasty today is no guarantee that they still won't tomorrow. Skynet is ready for action, if you will, and flexing its muscles every now and then (newsfeed manipulation?). Both Brave New World and 1984 ended up wrong in the sense that a truly global war would probably not work for very long and truly global peace is still way, way, way off. Still, BNW's peace of mind can be created artificially by just not telling people about stuff, which, incidentally, is very easy to do if you have complete control over what people look at 24/7 because they do so through your platform(s). As long as nothing is visibly wrong in somebody's day-to-day life and the guilty are always found, no point in looking for them any more, right? My point being that while yes, 1984 and BNW have got it wrong with the government, I think the government should be seen as the source and sink of power over people regardless of its actual implementation as e.g. dictatorial state or capitalist corporate structures. That way, the books' ideas can still be applied to today's politics.

PavlovsCat 11y ago

Well, it takes time, but steady does it. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwell-s-letter-on-why-he-wrote-1984.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/george-orwe... > Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. Remember when Saddam Hussein was a great guy when he was at war with Iran and gassed some people on the side, but then later was not such a great guy because he "used gas against his own people"? Or how Saudi-Arabia and the US funded Al-Quaeda, and the US bombed the Middle East to bits, where now IS flourishes, which is such a big problem that obviously, now Syria has to be regime-changed as well, to make it better? How people are so concerned about murder and terrorism they can't even fathom the idea of one's own war criminals being arrested and tried? How Obama got a peace nobel prize, then continued with his surveillance / kill lists drone stuff, which is made terribly cute with a mic drop? How stuff constantly gets advertised as being "new" or having "more X"? Slavery is freedom, just like drinking Coca-Cola ist being popular and good at sports. More advertising follows such patterns than not. And of course, there's plenty of telescreens and microphones to go around. You never know if anyone is watching or listening, but you know they always could, just like in the book. We live in a world where people claim "privacy is dead, get over it" and don't even blush.