While I appreciate the warnings and allusions to important books that predicted a lot of the cultural phenomena today, those books and authors were reacting to

While I appreciate the warnings and allusions to important books that predicted a lot of the cultural phenomena today, those books and authors were reacting to a very specfic strain of totalitarian movement that was expanding out of the mere nation states it used as hosts (artifacts of the 18th and 19th centuries) and to expand around the world. In the case of Orwell writing in 1948, he was writing about the war propaganda machine he had just spent the last decade experiencing both fighting Franco and surviving the Nazis - but also living in post-war England, and Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in years later in 1953, just as the Cold War (that would persist for at least 40+ years) against the global spread of soviet totalitarianism was well into its initial stages. It's great that writers are still recognizing there is a viral ideology that moralizes destruction, and both social and cognitive disorder for its own purposes, but talking about it in terms of these older books may be too polite a euphemism that only lands with others who would have been old enough to read them and already see the issue. The reason the meme takes hold is that it appeals to people who didn't grow up reading those authors and being innoculated against totalitarian meta-ideologies, and in truth, those works of fiction were powerful, but they did not address the roots of what allows them to compromise and bind the human spirit. I don't think the article is persuasive to someone who would benefit from having their mind changed, and it's too easy to wrap these old authors in a thought terminating talking point. It's going to take new and deep writing, art, and tech that irrevocably moves perspective. The author is as brave as he can be while maintaining access to his platform, but art without risk and sacrifice is just entertainment, and I don't think we entertain ourselves out of something we have entertained ourself into. However, his closer is where I would start: > There are elements of Orwell’s, Huxley’s, and Bradbury’s dystopian visions in our present reality, but perhaps we prefer to describe them all as “Orwellian” because it implies that our circumstances have been imposed upon us against our will. It is painful to accept that we are complicit, and that we are currently living out perhaps the darkest of those visions by demanding to live in ignorance. Yet it is precisely because we have chosen this fate that we have the ability to alter it. Interesting times.