I suppose in a sense Huxley and Herman/Chomsky were saying something similar. The horror of “Manufacturing Consent” was that the behaviour emerged from the syst

I suppose in a sense Huxley and Herman/Chomsky were saying something similar. The horror of “Manufacturing Consent” was that the behaviour emerged from the system, rather than intentionally; I recall Herman and Chomsky writing something along the lines that “nobody wakes up in the morning and says ‘how am I going to make the world worse today?’”. The interplay of advertising, money and government simply make criticism of the government very expensive, and therefore much riskier, to produce. You can see this play out on a smaller scale if you ever make the mistake of saying something political on Facebook. Much easier to upvote baby photos and Jackass videos. But entertainment, drugs and distraction are even cheaper to produce than apolitical news, and once we started to clamour for the creativity-free, trope-laden SFX trollop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suppose it was just a matter of time. It’s been decades since I read brave new world but I think it’s time to read it again.