Amusing Ourselves to Death: Orwell vs. Huxley in 2023
The best of times, the worst of times...
Or the worst of times, the craziest of times...
Or, the Time of Orwell; the Time of Huxley...
Or perhaps it's simply the most decadent + vapid of times, contrast with the simultaneous truth that it is also greatest time of information, self-awareness and cultural awakening...
If this video is even allowed to be seen in your slipstream of reality, would you bother to watch it?:
Any way you slice it, the critical changes are upon us, and people seem more polarized than ever before. Politics are beyond steamy; trigger words and identity politics are incendiaries in the online culture where anything goes, until it doesn't. Cancel culture and censorship follow. The marginals are predictably marginalized even further beyond the bounds of acceptability. Too much to think again. (We know that refrain.)
Are we living through 'Collapse of Rome' levels of decadence, or are we witnessing a new digital order to build better systems above the clouds of the problems of the past?
Are we becoming 'more human than human,' or still trapped in the same human-problems we've never really untangled, and could hardly transcend via a handy toolkit of buzzwords and feel-good phrases? Has the wisdom of the ages been burned once-and-for-all on the scrap-heap? Does anyone even care anymore, anyway?
Postman's forward sets up the familiar comparisons and contrasts between Orwell and Huxley, updating them for the lens of a society revolving around 24/7 electronic media... and beyond.
While noting the propensity of an increasingly technological and centralized society to repress information and stifle dissent, in line with Orwell's forecast, Postman tends towards Huxley's antithesis, favoring the view that advanced societies of the near future 'won't need to burn books, because people won't be interested in reading them.'
Instead, a vapid culture non-unlike H.G. Well's Eloi would become so self-centered and obsessed with entertainment and immediate gratification that it would fail to notice issues of substance, much less understand them.
While Postman's argument holds plenty of merit, and appears to reflect the society that we do live in to a significant degree, it isn't the whole picture; and the Orwell-Huxley debate is hardly resolved.
Those of us who've seen our videos, ideas, posts and discourse buried in the algorithm, penalized and censored for no good reason; our means of support evaporated; our audiences behind a wall of 'visibility filter', all while being trolled on social media by shadowy government agencies and their collaborators in social media and academia (in actuality,
as the Twitter Files demonstrated, and not merely inside of an imagined paranoid-noosphere of police state-isms).
While there seems to be less influence than ever by individuals on the entrenched institutions (your vote definitely counts, though), online communities and viral ideas have proved to have so much influence that the powers-that-be have felt the need to restrict anything and everything that passes through their net. Obviously ideas and knowledge and discourse still rank somewhere on the power-scale; they must have some effect, or the system wouldn't be so concerned about what is said, what is published, and what is seen.
Controlling the message is perhaps one of the most central aims of the entire system, and that speaks counter to the idea that we are all just wasting away in pure-bliss & ignorance, as Huxley would suggest.
Perhaps we are not so powerless after all, in spite of obstacle after obstacle, even as the system of hyper-capitalistic financial blocs, oligarchical collectivism and misguided A.I. social-management systems become hyper-dominant in our lives in ways that we never dreamed of, not even in Orwell's grittiest nightmares.
Please share / watch:
https://youtu.be/dH_omJrPHNs?feature=shared
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The debate goes on, and so does our work. Maybe, just maybe, we can shed some new light...
(Much more on the way)
In Liberty,
Aaron and Mel