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> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just s

> My only theory is that since these books have been published, the core ideas have worked their way through our culture so throughly that reading it now just seems like 'duh'. This is the way I felt reading Ayn Rand and not a single interesting thing there popped out at me as new or novel. Either that, or the ideas are presented within the pages as interesting and novel, but they're actually simple takes on simple questions. You get all the aesthetic of intellectual challenge and none of the challenge, and then you get to congratulate yourself for understanding something so highbrow. Kind of like literary video games. I put a lot of hacker-culture sacred cows (Vonnegut, Twain, Huxley, Orwell) in this category. An alternate hypothesis is that being raised by two professors of literature turned me into an insufferably snobby twat.

davidmathers 16y ago
Orwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter. Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellectuals, to everyone. In the most clear, straightforward and plain way possible so that the greatest number of people could read and understand what you wrote. Now try to imagine a book better at that than Animal Farm.
- neutronicus 16y ago
  I was referring more to 1984 that Animal Farm. The only thing 1984 does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.
  - davidmathers 16y ago
    It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer. So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons. -- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html 1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue". Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral. EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
    - neutronicus 16y ago
      1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people". And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance. EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.
      - davidmathers 16y ago
        "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people" 1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization. Like Jonas Salk and polio. Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist. In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds. Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.
        neutronicus 16y ago
        "1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization." You're still just coming up with synonyms for "got them to do what I want." I'll thought experiment you back. If 1984 were largely ignored, would you still think it worth reading? You claim that this book influenced the behavior of a world ripe for totalitarian domination. That's a big claim in and of itself, but let's let it stand for the sake of the point I really want to make. Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect on a bunch of people you don't respect (you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"). Even you are treating it basically as a remedial text for political idiots. You don't even mention anything you got out of reading 1984. So, if it weren't effective at convincing people you don't respect of your viewpoint, would you care at all? Would this book be worth reading if you were the only person ever to read it? That last is my measure of quality, and 1984 falls short - sure, it's an important cultural phenomenon, but I could have reaped the benefits of the cultural phenomenon without ever reading the book.
BrandonM 16y ago
I'm curious why you chose to put Twain and Vonnegut in there. My take on their writings is that they were amazing storytellers. Twain used simple language and local color to produce wonderful imagery with an expertise that few achieved before him. He whisks us away and drops us into a place in history that we otherwise never could have experienced. Vonnegut lets us in on the insane parts of his mind. He tells interesting stories and frames them in a way that I, personally, never would. Even if I had some of his crazy ideas, I wouldn't think about them at all like he does. I've never seen another author break down the fourth wall the way Vonnegut did; after reading a few of his books, I felt like I understood a lot about the way he thought. (Another author who did this was Douglas Adams, whose output was markedly less than Vonnegut's, and Adams wasn't quite as "out there" as Vonnegut.) In other words, I've never really heard of reading Twain and Vonnegut for their ideas or philosophies. While I would argue that their beliefs were rather anomalous for their times, I wouldn't consider their philosophies to be the main virtues of their writings.
- neutronicus 16y ago
  Plenty of people treat Vonnegut/Twain as insightful political criticism, which I think is giving it way too much credit.

davidmathers 16y ago

Orwell is revered precisely because he was both simple and correct. Whoever told you that Orwell was supposed to be some sort of intellectual challenge or deep philosophy did you a great dis-service, because that's entirely missing the point. He cut through complex or pretentious intellectual bullshit like a chainsaw through butter. Imagine your job was to explain the Bolshevik revolution to humanity. Not to intellectuals, to everyone. In the most clear, straightforward and plain way possible so that the greatest number of people could read and understand what you wrote. Now try to imagine a book better at that than Animal Farm.

neutronicus 16y ago
I was referring more to 1984 that Animal Farm. The only thing 1984 does a chainsaw/butter number on is nuance.
- davidmathers 16y ago
  It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand - in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer. So, I set out to conduct an experiment - to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme...and perhaps to curtail the glib Nazi comparisons. -- Mike Godwin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html 1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. He developed viral antibodies for totalitarianism and then injected them into our culture. It worked so well that people say "Orwellian" to mean "totalitarian-esque" in the same way they say "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissue". Making ideas as simple as possible, but not simpler requires some amount of creative genius. Nuance is not viral. EDIT, a thought experiment: Your job is to write a short book that if it could somehow be read by the population of North Korea would cause the Kim Jong-Il regime to collapse. Could such a book be written? I think 1984 would do it.
  - neutronicus 16y ago
    1984 may be the most successful memetic engineering project in history. Dressing down your prose a little, you're saying "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people". And that is, in a nutshell, why I don't like it much. Orwell does not treat his reader as a peer. There's no respect there, just manipulation, because the author doesn't trust the reader with nuance. EDIT (in response to yours): Luckily for me, I am nobody's minister of propaganda. I would (were I a much better writer than I am) tell it like it is, nuances and all, and let them do with that what they will.
    - davidmathers 16y ago
      "1984 successfully manipulated a lot of [gullible] people" 1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization. Like Jonas Salk and polio. Although.. I saw Victoria Jackson on a Fox News clip once ranting about how Barack Obama is a socialist and she mentioned how she had read 1984 multiple times and therefore understood how the socialists work and how they are coming to get her. I wonder what will happen in her brain when someone explains to her that George Orwell was a socialist. In other words it looks like some people are so dim that the vaccine can't work on their minds. Tangent: I also wonder what would happen to Sarah Palin's brain if someone explained to her what a kibbutz is.
      - neutronicus 16y ago
        "1984 successfully vaccinated a lot of people and helped stop certain diseases of the mind from spreading and causing more damage to civilization." You're still just coming up with synonyms for "got them to do what I want." I'll thought experiment you back. If 1984 were largely ignored, would you still think it worth reading? You claim that this book influenced the behavior of a world ripe for totalitarian domination. That's a big claim in and of itself, but let's let it stand for the sake of the point I really want to make. Basically, you care about 1984 from the perspective of its effect on a bunch of people you don't respect (you think their "minds" are weak enough to need "vaccination" against a "disease"). Even you are treating it basically as a remedial text for political idiots. You don't even mention anything you got out of reading 1984. So, if it weren't effective at convincing people you don't respect of your viewpoint, would you care at all? Would this book be worth reading if you were the only person ever to read it? That last is my measure of quality, and 1984 falls short - sure, it's an important cultural phenomenon, but I could have reaped the benefits of the cultural phenomenon without ever reading the book.

BrandonM 16y ago

I'm curious why you chose to put Twain and Vonnegut in there. My take on their writings is that they were amazing storytellers. Twain used simple language and local color to produce wonderful imagery with an expertise that few achieved before him. He whisks us away and drops us into a place in history that we otherwise never could have experienced. Vonnegut lets us in on the insane parts of his mind. He tells interesting stories and frames them in a way that I, personally, never would. Even if I had some of his crazy ideas, I wouldn't think about them at all like he does. I've never seen another author break down the fourth wall the way Vonnegut did; after reading a few of his books, I felt like I understood a lot about the way he thought. (Another author who did this was Douglas Adams, whose output was markedly less than Vonnegut's, and Adams wasn't quite as "out there" as Vonnegut.) In other words, I've never really heard of reading Twain and Vonnegut for their ideas or philosophies. While I would argue that their beliefs were rather anomalous for their times, I wouldn't consider their philosophies to be the main virtues of their writings.

neutronicus 16y ago
Plenty of people treat Vonnegut/Twain as insightful political criticism, which I think is giving it way too much credit.