Amusing Ourselves to Death Tuesday, Jul 27 2010
Aldous Huxley and George Orwell… which was right?
Categories:
- aerospace (1)
- AI (162)
- animal rights (14)
- anthropics (5)
- articles (2)
- BCI (7)
- bioethics (9)
- biology (22)
- brain (13)
- chemistry (3)
- comics (4)
- cryonics (28)
- cybernetics (4)
- environmentalism (3)
- ethics (7)
- events (70)
- friendly ai (91)
- futurism (118)
- humor (16)
- images (54)
- intelligence (37)
- interviews (14)
- IQ (7)
- life extension (55)
- lifeboat (10)
- manufacturing (5)
- math (2)
- me (9)
- meta (51)
- nanotechnology (118)
- nuclear (18)
- philosophy (56)
- physics (10)
- policy (5)
- politics (11)
- random (67)
- rationality (12)
- religion (7)
- risks (132)
- robotics (46)
- science (19)
- SIAI (60)
- singularity (237)
- space (39)
- superintelligence (25)
- technology (93)
- transhumanism (190)
- treaties (2)
- uploading (8)
- videos (74)
- warfare (3)
- web 2.0 (12)
Monthly:
- August 2010 (40)
- July 2010 (32)
- June 2010 (40)
- May 2010 (45)
- April 2010 (25)
- March 2010 (14)
- February 2010 (40)
- January 2010 (39)
- December 2009 (48)
- November 2009 (85)
- October 2009 (72)
- September 2009 (65)
- August 2009 (53)
- July 2009 (34)
- June 2009 (70)
- May 2009 (48)
- April 2009 (40)
- March 2009 (52)
- February 2009 (20)
- January 2009 (20)
- December 2008 (1)
- November 2008 (2)
- October 2008 (4)
- September 2008 (15)
- August 2008 (14)
- July 2008 (1)
- June 2008 (16)
- May 2008 (59)
- April 2008 (31)
- March 2008 (45)
- February 2008 (27)
- January 2008 (3)
- December 2007 (5)
- November 2007 (7)
- October 2007 (30)
- September 2007 (18)
- August 2007 (11)
- July 2007 (24)
- June 2007 (20)
- May 2007 (23)
- April 2007 (27)
- March 2007 (29)
- February 2007 (11)
- January 2007 (26)
- December 2006 (22)
- November 2006 (44)
- October 2006 (27)
- September 2006 (28)
- August 2006 (39)
- July 2006 (9)
- June 2006 (6)
- May 2006 (9)
- April 2006 (6)
- March 2006 (9)
- February 2006 (3)
- January 2006 (16)
Kill your TV!!! Chop mickey mouse’s head off!! Don’t you see he’s controlling your braaaaaaaaiiiiiin???!!?!
But seriously, what exactly did people used to do with their spare time that was so important to the foundation of a free society? If memory serves me, they just got drunk all the time.
I completely agree with that assertion. I am glad you said it.
You’re not wrong. The point is that we’re creating spare time where it should be useful.
I think, before radio, they mused to sit around and play music together. Read books. You know, self improving type things… well except in America where they used to have sex with animals and drink, ahhhh, the “wild west” ;-)
Candycane is to some extent right, the gutter press and streams of mindless distraction have always been with us.In many ways the average worker is more informed and engaged than they were in 1900, when the only meaningful outlet would be something like trade unionism.
However, it may be that the middle class has had a trivialisation of culture to some extent. Where public lectures, learning of musical instruments or technical topics, and discussion of important political issues used to be of importance among the lower ranks of professionals, now there is a certain dumbing down of public discourse, made worse by the massive growth in this demographic.
I can’t honestly say, though, that twitter commentary is worse than any offhand remark at a dinner gathering, or that the Political commentary of Assassins Creed 2 is worse than the satire of Gilbert and Sullivan. We must remember that to a great extent only the very best works of the previous decades survive.
The belief that the things that entertain us will lead to our destruction is basically misanthropy in a fancy hat.
The idea that the observer knows far more about what’s good for society than the “stupid,” “deluded,” or “unenlightened” masses themselves is basically the seed of tyranny itself. I’ve never read Brave New World, but if this really is Huxley’s conclusion, then he favors tyranny. Orwell hated people like that. So do I.
That which brings mankind joy will never be its downfall. Those who despise mankind for their worldly pleasures have historically been enemies of freedom.
I’m not sure I understand where you’re coming from, Ryan. You’re saying nothing people enjoy could ever be harmful?
“That which brings mankind joy will never be its downfall.”
You can’t be serious. What mankind are you living in?
You’ve obviously never lived in a Casino town. Or watched a friend flunk out of college because he partied instead of studied. Or seen a teenage pregnancy wreck her life and her family’s life. Or known people who took to crime to support their drug habit.
Naive hedonist is naive. Equating joy to entertainment is … sad.
Remember the Roman Empire and the Colosseum and the gladiator games?
Anything that dumbs down people is bad, whether it is pain or pleasure.
Yeah dude, I hear you! I invested in these things that only sorta kinda existed and I was totally ROLLING in dough! And then I wa—OHSHI-
“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
In defense of Ryan’s aphorism. There is a difference between man and mankind. Drink may be the downfall of a man, but it will not be the downfall of mankind. Nor will gambling, drugs, television, the internet, etc.
Have you never heard of heroin? Or alcohol?
Unfortunately both were right: In USA/EU we have fascist surveillance society which is hidden beneath overflowing amounts of entertainment.
Why settle on one worst case scenario when obviously both are true?
As the Aussies say: TOO RIGHT!
[...] Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. Cartoon comparison of Huxley and [...]
@Candycane Man;
Great observation. Read this well-documented opinion by Clay Shirky. http://bit.ly/3vYPt9
One thing that isn’t mentioned above – people today have more free time than ever before. What do people do with their free time? They seek out distractions. What are we going to do when all of our time – thousands and thousands of post-human years – is basically free time?
Also, the idea that the masses are somehow more ignorant today than they were hundreds of years ago doesn’t really hold water.
Excuse me, but what PLANET do you live one where modern humans have ‘more spare time than ever before’? Your ancestors from before the industrial revolution would laugh at such a notion.
We must be kept distracted, kept in line, yes, but most of all, we must be kept WORKING ourselves to death, running our bodies and minds into the ground until the very wheels fall off. This is why the average wage has been dropping, not rising, and why places like the US have no universal health care – you aren’t educating yourself, or organizing, or what have you, so long as you’re working fingers to the bone from dawn ’til dusk just trying to survive. A TV or a car is not ‘quality of life’.
Of course, if we use slave labor to put cheap iPhones in the pockets of such people, and give them all manner of cheap toys and trinkets, then they’ll come up on the internet making claims about how great it is to be alive in this time, about how much ‘spare time’ they have. I think both Huxley and Orwell would be going ‘SEE??!!’ right now.
There are mistakes to be made in either direction. Authority and community need each other to survive.
I figure the culture will lurch back into a more authoritarian mode sometime in the next 50 years. People have been killing themselves and each other for as long as there have been people. Today we just do it on a far grander scale.
Good question from Arnie. My thought is that when all of our time is free time, distractions will cease to exist.
Actually, Kurt Vonnegut was right — check out the book Player Piano. The smartest people have their ideas productized by capitalists and built by robots while everybody else slums along in effective serfdom. (See also: http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-ou%20t-here%27s-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html)
Beyond that, one point that Orwell was right about is that the continued focus on increasing worker productivity necessitates the destruction of wealth in order to allow productivity to be consumed, even if it isn’t effectively utilized. For as much as I didn’t like 1984 (it wasn’t that well written and taught even worse), chapter 9 (iirc) was astonishingly lucid in the limits of economics.
Beyond that, Huxley was right in that control of an empire relies more on bread and circuses to distract the masses than on military might to oppress them. (Though even Orwell had some of that with the continual orchestrated anger against The Other; it’s just difficult to maintain is all.)
In the words of Frank Zappa:
Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold
(“The Slime In the Video”)
[...] imagens ora divulgadas apareceram originariamente no blog Accelarenting Future e o autor utiliza como título o nome de uma obra de Neill Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death, [...]
[...] via Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. [...]
I would propose that there currently exist a third reality: a combination of the two scenarios described in the comics. An authoritarian state which restricts materials that are hazardous to the state’s health, but also encourages huge debt taking/mindless consumption that zombifies the majority of the population.
Case in point: US. It restricts information that would undermine its authority as the world’s dominant power, such as BP spill, bankruptcy of its banks/cities/states, ineffectiveness at resolution in afghanistan, etc. The government offers discounts/low rates for large home mortgages, expensive cars, and big student loans that would shackle the majority of the population in debt chains. It also condones mindless consumption such as reality TV, sports, celebrity news, and facebook games by not taxing them as addictive hazards.
Case in point: China. It restricts, well, pretty much anything it doesn’t want the people to know with the great internet firewall and state news programs. It also encourages huge risk taking in mortgages, which recently has seen home prices go up to 30X average income. It encourages its citizens to forget about the abysmal living condition by allowing internet game cafes to spread like wildfire and trapping the players in pointless alternative realities. So they don’t realize they are doing slave labor at $1/day to make ipads.
I further propose that this will continue as long as these governments worldwide can keep feeding its citizens at a minimum (food stamps, unemployment benefits, carb/sugar loaded cheap food), while offering cheap, mind-numbing entertainments to keep people at home, so they don’t go out and riot on the streets.
Until oil is at $150/Iran is attacked/North Korea attacks/US defaults on SS and medicare/Japan defaults on its bonds/food prices double/Israel is attacked/automation renders most of population useless, anyways.
My thoughts exactly. Thank you for posting this.
You consider sports addictive hazards? Someone was picked last in gym class…
I concur: Pretty much spot-on!
Nice article on disconnecting distraction: http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html somewhat related to this topic
Well, it is interesting to see things only as black or white, literally in the case of this comic.
Perhaps they both had legitimate concerns, and one can be right without the other being wrong?
What’s ironic, that that all this is just an intellectual talk without any action. Maybe some of you are “doing” something to change the situation, it is nearly irrelevant without having leverages..
Proof that Huxley was right: This blog.
Not all dystopias are equal. If I was limited to choosing only between the two of them, the “brave new world” scenario is far preferable to the “1984″ one.
To be honest, I fail to see why this “brave new world” as presented in this comic strip is even a problem. As long as the freedom and tools (computer based engineering, DIY biology) are available to those who do want to accomplish “great things” (cure aging, fusion power, space colonization), I fail to see what the problem is with the rest of humanity just wanting to party all the time.
Perhaps the real fear of the “brave new world” scenario is that all of those party people may turn into the “marching morons” problem.
I, for one, am perfectly comfortable with a world consisting of transhumanists and party people.
But you said it: Many if not most “party people” (as that is meant as contentually-implied, anyway) R (more-or-less) Marching Morons!
[...] this an invitation to do so. Stuart McMillen’s cartoon provides a superlative window (h/t Michael Anissimov) into the central theme of Neil Postman’s classic [...]
[...] Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death. [...]
I glanced at the headline and looked at the nice comic strip pictures, but Entertainment Tonight is coming on soon so I didn’t bother to read any of the text or comments. Nevertheless, I’m sure this is important, and that everyone made very cogent points. I’ll just leave it to you guys to figure out who was right. I’ll go along with what everyone thinks.
I agree with 4. Thomas, both where right.
[...] via acceleratingfuture.com Comments RSS feed [...]
[...] a Brave New Reality Jump to Comments I think this is a pretty interesting little editorial cartoon about how the future was envisioned by both Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. Orwell’s paradigm [...]
rofl. that is funny.. but at least in Huxley’s reality we have the option of not being totally distracted…
You can go live on a farm in the middle of nowhere…
You can go back-packing for 3 months…
and so on and so forth. :)
I think we have to consider that Orwell inoculated us against the future he feared.
i think this has missed the vital metaphoric subtleties in the work of orwell – particularly the notion of DOUBLE THINK . which, brings forth an argument relating to truths and the distortion of truths through double think, that really disembowels the premise of the above theory. its dangerous to trifle with generalisations of such seminal works. Perhaps Orwell has the last laugh, LOVE IS HATE AND HATE IS LOVE , so no one is right. They’re but reflections of the same essential idea.
[...] Amusing Ourselves to Death [...]
[...] news less amusing Posted on July 29, 2010 by Emily For anyone who’s been a J201 TA, this comic (thanks to Hans for sending me this link) speaks to what we spend the first few weeks of the course [...]
Ironically, I would never have read this had it not been presented in cartoon form.
[...] is awesome, so I’m stealing it – from here, originated here. Turns out, they were both [...]
I think the real threat is and will always be “1984″. People will whine and whinge about how awful it is that too many people are wasting their lives on “frivolous stuff” and will argue that some sort of top-down paternalism is necessary to prevent this. This, of course, leads to the “1984″ scenario.
The “brave new world” scenario is a red herring.
[...] to Accelerating Future for the heads up! Amusing Ourselves to [...]
Orwell and Huxley both were writing about dystopic conditions that they foresaw to come about. Both talk about conditions that are like the two sides of the same coin. Orwell’s nightmarish vision of Stalinist world of Thought Police, Big Brother and Newspeak etc. consisted in throttling free flow of information and , while Huxley’s revisionist notion of Brave New World ( à la Shakespeare’s sanguine Renaisance pronuoncement) foretold the state of affairs of the post-capitalist, contemporary so called information society, where the profusion of irrelevant knolwedge and information would silence the voice of reason and truth. No wonder, the the media rule us and their copius stream of news and views that are trivial and irrelevant create a smoke screen to hide the truth. To me the later conditions of living, from which we suffer in the contempprary world, are more insidious and tyrannical than the Stalinist ones, and therefore more hopeless. Hence perhaps Habermas and Jean Baudrillard are so important for us.
[...] An interesting comparison between Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 – in comics form [...]
[...] your endless debate of choice, how about who was right about the nature of our future dystopia? Huxely or Orwell? Recombinant Records provides the key talking [...]
Awesome. I’ve read 1984 but not the Brave New World. Its instantly entered my “to read” list.
Thanks for this immensely entertaining cartoon strip.
[...] Accelerating Future ÉrdekesJövő, Kép, Utópia ← Fejlődik az világ… Leave a comment0 [...]
WOW. I just found an old paper I did in college on Amusing Ourselves to Death, and realized I should read it again. How weird that I saw this on the same day. Love it. Very, very cool!
[...] Amusing Ourselves to Death What Orwell feared was those who would ban books… What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one. (tags: comics culture media politics books book) [...]
[...] http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusing-ourselves-to-death/ [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSFx0yntuY#t=5m53s
[...] Accelerating Future » Amusing Ourselves to Death Aug 1st, 2010 by NPTO. via acceleratingfuture.com [...]
[...] Interesting comic adaption by Stuart McMillen of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death posted on Accelerating Future: [...]
Orwell and Huxley describe the two main methods of controlling populations. Brave New World describes the carrot method (control by trivial desire), while Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts the stick method (control by fear).
This blog is fails to point out that in Western society both methods of population control complement each other in order to be effective. The terms “government” and “cybernetics” both come from the Greek kybernan, “to steer” or “to control”. Cybernetics deals with maintaining an equilibrium in systems, often by applying two opposing forces.
If you attempt to control by trivial desire alone, the control subject eventually becomes distracted and bored, wanting to focus its desire on personal matters that do not benefit the controller. If you attempt to control by fear alone, the control subject eventually breaks down, becoming too emotionally crippled to benefit the controller.
For the two control methods to work effectively, the control subject (on a micro scale the individual, on a macro scale the combined populations of states that share common values) needs to be aware of the existence of its alternative and to be able to find some degree of middle ground between the opposing forces. Finding that middle ground between desire and fear is precisely what defines the acclaimed freedom of Western civilisation in the context presented to us by the powers that be.
In the post-communist brave new nineties the attention of the Western consumerist population started to drift too far away from matters that benefited the controllers. Thus people needed to be made aware again of the alternative to desire. Enter the PNAC with its disaster spectacle of 9-11.
[...] Huxley was right: “Amusing Ourselves to Death“ [...]
[...] 2. “Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell” [...]
[...] – I’m not going all Brave New World on you. I don’t think that we should amuse ourselves to death. But I do think that there’s merit in doing what you love, even if it has no real purpose. If you [...]
The (so-called) Power Elite(s) are deploying BOTH Huxleyan & Orwellian methods of keeping the “masses” “in their place”.
So true. Both the white and the black, the alpha and the omega, have the same effect.
Aristotle said we should live our lives at the halfway between satisfaction and need.
[...] Huxley vs. Orwell (via John Cook). Do not miss. Related: Too Much Information. [...]
Both were right and we are currently living it. But what would be the alternative?
More widespread conscience of it? Better education? A smaller gap between rich and poor? More democracy?
[...] If Neil Postman had been a cartoonist, we’d be even more amused than we already are. (Hat tip to [...]
Very nice. We gave up TV a long time ago. Still are some pining for the “normal”. Thanks for your site.
Sherman
The author of this article was right in showing everyone what two different authors foresaw in our future. His assertion at the end is erroneous though. We are going both ways simultaneously and he’s blinded himself to the realist of both outcomes occurring consecutively because of his desire to pick on over the other.
We ARE distracting, and allowing ourselves to be distracted, through a government and the media controlled by those with money.
The other side of the coin is easily apparent in an ever increasing police state… once again controlled by those with money.
When are you people going to wake up? Police are MURDERING citizens DAILY and getting off scott-free under the phony call of “doing their lawful duty”. Unarmed citizens are being MUR-DERED by the very people SWORN to protect YOU!! Murdered because they had the effrontery to question these tax-trough swilling, power-tripping, government-costumed crusaders for their own self-aggrandizement!! Murdered because they believed THEY were the people being wronged by the Judicial System’s Armed Military!!
A policeman can murder a citizen, then claim a “right” that protects him from being tried and convicted as a murderer. His testimony is only used internally to find out what happened and then gets “lost” when the officer’s actions are called to account. EVERY STINKING TIME!!!! Police should be as suseptible to the laws of the land as citizens are. THAT’s ALL they are is citizens given the J O B of keeping the PEACE!! Not enforcing the law like “Dirty Harrys”!! At least Dirty harry didn’t MURDER anyone. He had a legitimate excuse of defending himself. He didn’t carry a throw-away weapon to plant on an innocent, unarmed citizen’s dead body!!
My friend pointed this tremendous comic strip out after reading a recent article I’d written:
Gaming for Survival
http://technorati.com/entertainment/gaming/article/gaming-to-survive/
Anyway, very well done.
Dr L
[...] to Accelerating Future for this one; how has life changed towards that of these two prophets? 1984 and Brave New World [...]
Sorry for enquiring you this question on this post, but I couldn’t find a contact page on first sight so I reckoned I ask here. What is the hosting provider you use, mine will not care wordpress for some cause and I for one want to change to wordpress from blogengine since wordpress has so many more features and themes existing for download. I on the contrary hope you can help me out on this one, this is a wordpress blog right? Sorry for my English btw. Best regards, James
Very entertaining and insightful, especially the part about the truth not being denied us, but buried in a sea of lies…the schizophrenic and sensationalistic popular media leaves us wondering what the truth is until we give up and go play Xbox or something. Y’all may disagree, but I get the idea that most of the previous commenters are reasonably intelligent and thus not representative of the masses who these designs may be targeted at…no one can quell a thinker’s curiousity and willingness to question anything but him. I almost shared this on Facebook, but then realized nobody wants to hear this shit…no offense, it just proves your point.
Bold statement I’d say personally in their own respects they were both right.