Hey,
I spent most of yesterday writing a paper I'm pretty proud of. It's about the future and Brave New World, my new favorite book till I read another one. Sadly, I'm going to have to murder it to make it work as the paper I was supposed to write for my Brit Lit class, so I figured I'd throw it up on the blog in it's best form before I start BSing the changes. Enjoy, and don't blame me about any bad feelings you get. I was pretty depressed after writing it too.
Not a day goes by on the twenty four-seven cable news cycle without someone comparing a small loss of privacy to Nineteen Eighty Four. Orwellian is almost as common a word on the more sensationalist shows as Nazi or Elitist. The culture we live in today still has a deep fear for the totalitarian future proposed by Orwell, a world where the government controls and censors everything the common man touches. This fear, like many culturally popular movements, is misguided. The government, especially in a world where this fear is widespread and strong, would never use such an obvious tactic to control us. They would instead, and many would consider are, control the populous by subduing them and distracting them. They also have plenty of help from the technological revolution that sees every teen carrying around at least two gateways into the infinite time sink known as the internet. No, the future we have to fear is the future we are currently experiencing, the future accurately predicted by a less well known book, Brave New World.
In the book, author Aldous Huxley imagines a world where people are conditioned from birth to live lives of simple pleasure, with no burdens. Conditioned to escape reality whenever it becomes to frightening or painful. Conditioned to always seek out the new, and disregard the old in all things. They hear small catchy phrases thousands of times, until they come to know them as common sense sayings. They combine words to make them sounds more complicated. They shorten words to make them more cutesy. They worship no god, instead resorting to worship of a titan of industry. Worst of all, they are all trained from birth to be prejudicial against those people different then themselves and their peers. All these things are blown out of proportion for satiric effect, but I would argue that they are all present in some form of modern society, and only stand to get worse.
The novel starts out with an introduction to this strange society brought upon by the world controller. He leads a group of Alpha children, the highest caste in their system, through the place where humans are made. One of the rooms they visit during this sequence is the hypnopaedia chamber, where children are fed a repeating stream of rhymes as they sleep. This is how the society conditions their youth into staying in line with what the society requires of them. They are brainwashed into rejecting those of a lower rank then them in society, into never becoming jealous of those above them, and into thinking about the collective over the individual at all times.
“Save you 15% or more on car insurance” “S O G Double O D Good” “Now that's Progressive” These are just a few of the current phrases today's society is conditioned too. Not having the luxury of our developing minds as we sleep, advertisers today have to make do with the commercial time they are given on national TV, broadcast and internet radio, billboards, and of course internet advertisements adorning every website in existence. If you have enough money in America, you can pay to teach the American people any slogan you choose, and ninety five percent of the population will have that slogan subconsciously memorized in a week.
With this information in mind, take a look at those slogans again, and think of the ones you know as well. They're pretty positive, which only makes sense. What effect must that have on your judgment when you do go out to eat, or to buy your car insurance? Do you remember what Consumer Reports has said about which is the best deal? Or do you remember which advertising campaign was the best? Even if you have bad experiences with the company, you subconsciously remember the laughs a good ad campaign can bring you, and you forgive them, all in a split second. It must have been the clerks fault.
Of course, some advertisers do get to speak to our youth. Who among us doesn't remember that “Knowing is half the battle?” Or that Transformers are “More then meets the eye?” The 80s was the heyday of cartoons that functioned as nothing but advertisements for action figures. Many people have very fond memories of these cartoons, calling them classics of their day, even though the quality of the cartoons was barely passable and nowadays would be hard to watch. Many even cite the death of Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, as a seminal growing up point in their childhoods. 20 years later, these people in their 30s with kids of their own went with their families to see the big screen revivals of both Transformers and GI Joe. These films were ravaged by film critics, but financially they were all blockbusters, mainly due to the good feelings that years of Saturday mornings had brought countless movie goers.
Another thing to take into account is that both GI Joe and Transformers had already been on the big screen in the 80s. Why didn't movie studios just re-release the old films, perhaps for an anniversary? Because, much like the Alphas and Gammas of Brave New World, we live in a society that rejects the old and cherishes the new. Movies are a wonderful example of this phenomenon. A vast majority of the output by movie studios of the last decade or show has been remakes or reboots of older properties, in order to make them “speak to modern audiences”. One of the biggest upcoming movies this holiday season is Tron: Legacy, a reboot of a twenty year old film. Rumors fly around about Hollywood producing new sequels to Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars every year. Even dramatic masterpieces like Wall Street are being redone for the sake of the new over the old. Perhaps the most damning news of all in this trend is that Warner Brothers is looking to do a shot for shot remake of the Wizard of Oz, a film that even the most jaded person could tell you is a timeless classic.
Then again, why not make all these new versions of old films? Without new versions we would not be able to marvel at them with the new gadgets and technologies we have today. When we get to the theater, we pay five extra dollars for a pair of plastic 3-D glasses allowing us to marvel at the 5 minutes of screen time devoted to throwing things at the screen in order to make that new tech worthwhile. When we leave the theater, they helpfully put a bin out for you to recycle the glasses, because after all, recycling is good for society, you wont mind paying five more dollars next time. Then, six months later you might want to watch that movie again in 3-D. You look at your brand new HDTV and say to yourself, even though you just bought the thing, you'll have to replace it with one that supports 3-D. Of course, when you get to the store to purchase the Blu-Ray and 3-D TV, you also have to spend twenty five dollars on a special pair of glasses that wont work in the theater, but work well at home. Maybe you should pick up a couple of pairs for the kids as well.
Huxley saw this day of new gadgets and technology coming in an age where the television had barely begun broadcasting and the most complicated gizmo in a person's house might have been a radio or an icebox. In the second chapter of the book, he writes, “Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” If you think about it, there are many examples of this in modern society. Movies, in a world of digital downloads and two dollar DVDs, are surviving on gimmick add ons like IMAX and 3D, which are creepily similar to the feelies of Huxley's novel. A video game console is released to market, and a year later they release upgraded controllers and smaller initiations of the same console. Some games even require you buy huge bundle packs in order to receive the giant plastic guitars, skateboards, turntables, or guns required to play them. Cell phone manufacturers release slightly updated models of their products at least every two months, insuring that even the top of the line model is heavily outdated by the time your contract is ready to be renewed. Perhaps the worse case is the popular iPod. Apple releases slightly updated models every year, and when a new iPod product line is released, like the iPhone or iPad, they purposely leave out features such as forward facing cameras or wireless support. Of course, after a year or so of begging, Apple happily updates the device with these features, and makes sure that there will be something to update next year as well.
Why would anyone voluntarily buy these products year after year when they know the products are crippled technology? Why is Apple a beloved company despite these malicious deeds? I would argue that it is because of Apple's founder Steve Jobs. Jobs rarely makes public appearances, except when he announces a new press conference. These events have become seminal dates in the tech world, with Jobs always announcing his next magical device. People who live and breathe Apple products are jokingly called the Cult of Mac, and the worship at the giant glass temples known as Apple Stores, confessing the sins of how the broke their iPods at the genius bar. In fact, I would go far enough to say that if Huxley were to write his novel today, Jobs would take the place of Henry Ford as the great forefather of the society.
The Cult of Mac probably wouldn't be the only model that Huxley could go by were he to write the novel today. It seems like every TV show, movie, and video game franchise has a group of almost religious fans hanging on the every word of a producer or game designer. It's become common place to set up new franchises with a vast mythology to surround your concept, in order to get the more nerdy among us excited. Where only a few decades ago, a boat getting marooned on an island was enough set up for a successful TV show, now you either have to hook in with an existing storyline, or create a dense fiction just to tell the stories you want to tell. You then have to ask your fans to take time out of their days to not only watch your TV show, but read the tie-in book, watch the webisodes, participate in the viral marketing, follow your favorite characters on Twitter, all just to understand the story that is being told. That's a lot of hours devoted solely to entertainment, which is what breeds such religious fandom, which is exactly what they want.
While their main goal is only to eventually sell you shirts and DVDs, and to get you to keep watching the program, the real danger is another facet of Huxley's nightmare scenario. The Alphas and Betas of the novel always have a way to escape reality, called soma, an alcoholic beverage stripped of any risk of health defects or hangover. Of course, we have alcohol still in our time, but the more relevant metaphor to all this is that these countless universes set up by media companies serve as an infinite escape and an infinite distraction for those seeking life outside of the tedium of reality. There are encyclopedias of knowledge online about planets and species that do not exist, and every day several novels worth of fan fiction is published digitally based on the works of others. Even reality shows demand hours of your attention in order to gain escape. All of this time and effort is put into works that in all likelihood will not benefit anyone but the creators of these franchises. At least it's a distraction.
What if you're not one for the mythology of the next Star Wars, you of course still have distractions to devour your time. Most of these distractions are brought on by the technological marvel of our time, the World Wide Web. More effective at entertainment then anything Huxley could possibly dream of, the Internet is full of amazing ways to waste your time. Why should you go to bed at a decent hour when you can watch your favorite TV shows on Hulu? Why read a book when you can get the gist of it on Sparknotes and Wikipedia? Why go out with your friends when you can both can stay at home, IM each other, comment on the pictures of yourself you took in your bathroom on Facebook, and then tell random strangers about it on Twitter? Why go out to shop when there is an endless supply of options and sellers online willing to ship things right to your door? Why be humble when you can egotistically post where you are, what you're eating, what musician your listening to, for the whole world to see? The internet is the soma of our time, sucking us into hours and hours of amusement that distracts us from the challenges and even some of the enjoyment of our lives.
At this point in many essays, you might expect a solution to the grand problem laid out above. Alas, I have racked my brain, and know of no easy answers. Like the Alphas and Gammas in the novel, I too am stuck with the conditioning in my head. I have a Twitter account I update every day, my smartphone buzzes every twenty minutes to let me know of new advertisements in my email inbox. I know more about Halo and Xbox then any man has the right to know, I've seen the original Star Wars trilogy at least 15 times. Yet, I'm jobless, and when I think about what I really want to accomplish in life, I think of the novel in my head waiting to be written, I wonder when I'm ever going to have time for it. So the next time you hear a talking head speak of Orwell or 1984, think instead of what Neil Postman wrote is his book Amusing Ourselves to Death about the two visions of the future.
In the book, author Aldous Huxley imagines a world where people are conditioned from birth to live lives of simple pleasure, with no burdens. Conditioned to escape reality whenever it becomes to frightening or painful. Conditioned to always seek out the new, and disregard the old in all things. They hear small catchy phrases thousands of times, until they come to know them as common sense sayings. They combine words to make them sounds more complicated. They shorten words to make them more cutesy. They worship no god, instead resorting to worship of a titan of industry. Worst of all, they are all trained from birth to be prejudicial against those people different then themselves and their peers. All these things are blown out of proportion for satiric effect, but I would argue that they are all present in some form of modern society, and only stand to get worse.
The novel starts out with an introduction to this strange society brought upon by the world controller. He leads a group of Alpha children, the highest caste in their system, through the place where humans are made. One of the rooms they visit during this sequence is the hypnopaedia chamber, where children are fed a repeating stream of rhymes as they sleep. This is how the society conditions their youth into staying in line with what the society requires of them. They are brainwashed into rejecting those of a lower rank then them in society, into never becoming jealous of those above them, and into thinking about the collective over the individual at all times.
“Save you 15% or more on car insurance” “S O G Double O D Good” “Now that's Progressive” These are just a few of the current phrases today's society is conditioned too. Not having the luxury of our developing minds as we sleep, advertisers today have to make do with the commercial time they are given on national TV, broadcast and internet radio, billboards, and of course internet advertisements adorning every website in existence. If you have enough money in America, you can pay to teach the American people any slogan you choose, and ninety five percent of the population will have that slogan subconsciously memorized in a week.
With this information in mind, take a look at those slogans again, and think of the ones you know as well. They're pretty positive, which only makes sense. What effect must that have on your judgment when you do go out to eat, or to buy your car insurance? Do you remember what Consumer Reports has said about which is the best deal? Or do you remember which advertising campaign was the best? Even if you have bad experiences with the company, you subconsciously remember the laughs a good ad campaign can bring you, and you forgive them, all in a split second. It must have been the clerks fault.
Of course, some advertisers do get to speak to our youth. Who among us doesn't remember that “Knowing is half the battle?” Or that Transformers are “More then meets the eye?” The 80s was the heyday of cartoons that functioned as nothing but advertisements for action figures. Many people have very fond memories of these cartoons, calling them classics of their day, even though the quality of the cartoons was barely passable and nowadays would be hard to watch. Many even cite the death of Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots, as a seminal growing up point in their childhoods. 20 years later, these people in their 30s with kids of their own went with their families to see the big screen revivals of both Transformers and GI Joe. These films were ravaged by film critics, but financially they were all blockbusters, mainly due to the good feelings that years of Saturday mornings had brought countless movie goers.
Another thing to take into account is that both GI Joe and Transformers had already been on the big screen in the 80s. Why didn't movie studios just re-release the old films, perhaps for an anniversary? Because, much like the Alphas and Gammas of Brave New World, we live in a society that rejects the old and cherishes the new. Movies are a wonderful example of this phenomenon. A vast majority of the output by movie studios of the last decade or show has been remakes or reboots of older properties, in order to make them “speak to modern audiences”. One of the biggest upcoming movies this holiday season is Tron: Legacy, a reboot of a twenty year old film. Rumors fly around about Hollywood producing new sequels to Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars every year. Even dramatic masterpieces like Wall Street are being redone for the sake of the new over the old. Perhaps the most damning news of all in this trend is that Warner Brothers is looking to do a shot for shot remake of the Wizard of Oz, a film that even the most jaded person could tell you is a timeless classic.
Then again, why not make all these new versions of old films? Without new versions we would not be able to marvel at them with the new gadgets and technologies we have today. When we get to the theater, we pay five extra dollars for a pair of plastic 3-D glasses allowing us to marvel at the 5 minutes of screen time devoted to throwing things at the screen in order to make that new tech worthwhile. When we leave the theater, they helpfully put a bin out for you to recycle the glasses, because after all, recycling is good for society, you wont mind paying five more dollars next time. Then, six months later you might want to watch that movie again in 3-D. You look at your brand new HDTV and say to yourself, even though you just bought the thing, you'll have to replace it with one that supports 3-D. Of course, when you get to the store to purchase the Blu-Ray and 3-D TV, you also have to spend twenty five dollars on a special pair of glasses that wont work in the theater, but work well at home. Maybe you should pick up a couple of pairs for the kids as well.
Huxley saw this day of new gadgets and technology coming in an age where the television had barely begun broadcasting and the most complicated gizmo in a person's house might have been a radio or an icebox. In the second chapter of the book, he writes, “Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” If you think about it, there are many examples of this in modern society. Movies, in a world of digital downloads and two dollar DVDs, are surviving on gimmick add ons like IMAX and 3D, which are creepily similar to the feelies of Huxley's novel. A video game console is released to market, and a year later they release upgraded controllers and smaller initiations of the same console. Some games even require you buy huge bundle packs in order to receive the giant plastic guitars, skateboards, turntables, or guns required to play them. Cell phone manufacturers release slightly updated models of their products at least every two months, insuring that even the top of the line model is heavily outdated by the time your contract is ready to be renewed. Perhaps the worse case is the popular iPod. Apple releases slightly updated models every year, and when a new iPod product line is released, like the iPhone or iPad, they purposely leave out features such as forward facing cameras or wireless support. Of course, after a year or so of begging, Apple happily updates the device with these features, and makes sure that there will be something to update next year as well.
Why would anyone voluntarily buy these products year after year when they know the products are crippled technology? Why is Apple a beloved company despite these malicious deeds? I would argue that it is because of Apple's founder Steve Jobs. Jobs rarely makes public appearances, except when he announces a new press conference. These events have become seminal dates in the tech world, with Jobs always announcing his next magical device. People who live and breathe Apple products are jokingly called the Cult of Mac, and the worship at the giant glass temples known as Apple Stores, confessing the sins of how the broke their iPods at the genius bar. In fact, I would go far enough to say that if Huxley were to write his novel today, Jobs would take the place of Henry Ford as the great forefather of the society.
The Cult of Mac probably wouldn't be the only model that Huxley could go by were he to write the novel today. It seems like every TV show, movie, and video game franchise has a group of almost religious fans hanging on the every word of a producer or game designer. It's become common place to set up new franchises with a vast mythology to surround your concept, in order to get the more nerdy among us excited. Where only a few decades ago, a boat getting marooned on an island was enough set up for a successful TV show, now you either have to hook in with an existing storyline, or create a dense fiction just to tell the stories you want to tell. You then have to ask your fans to take time out of their days to not only watch your TV show, but read the tie-in book, watch the webisodes, participate in the viral marketing, follow your favorite characters on Twitter, all just to understand the story that is being told. That's a lot of hours devoted solely to entertainment, which is what breeds such religious fandom, which is exactly what they want.
While their main goal is only to eventually sell you shirts and DVDs, and to get you to keep watching the program, the real danger is another facet of Huxley's nightmare scenario. The Alphas and Betas of the novel always have a way to escape reality, called soma, an alcoholic beverage stripped of any risk of health defects or hangover. Of course, we have alcohol still in our time, but the more relevant metaphor to all this is that these countless universes set up by media companies serve as an infinite escape and an infinite distraction for those seeking life outside of the tedium of reality. There are encyclopedias of knowledge online about planets and species that do not exist, and every day several novels worth of fan fiction is published digitally based on the works of others. Even reality shows demand hours of your attention in order to gain escape. All of this time and effort is put into works that in all likelihood will not benefit anyone but the creators of these franchises. At least it's a distraction.
What if you're not one for the mythology of the next Star Wars, you of course still have distractions to devour your time. Most of these distractions are brought on by the technological marvel of our time, the World Wide Web. More effective at entertainment then anything Huxley could possibly dream of, the Internet is full of amazing ways to waste your time. Why should you go to bed at a decent hour when you can watch your favorite TV shows on Hulu? Why read a book when you can get the gist of it on Sparknotes and Wikipedia? Why go out with your friends when you can both can stay at home, IM each other, comment on the pictures of yourself you took in your bathroom on Facebook, and then tell random strangers about it on Twitter? Why go out to shop when there is an endless supply of options and sellers online willing to ship things right to your door? Why be humble when you can egotistically post where you are, what you're eating, what musician your listening to, for the whole world to see? The internet is the soma of our time, sucking us into hours and hours of amusement that distracts us from the challenges and even some of the enjoyment of our lives.
At this point in many essays, you might expect a solution to the grand problem laid out above. Alas, I have racked my brain, and know of no easy answers. Like the Alphas and Gammas in the novel, I too am stuck with the conditioning in my head. I have a Twitter account I update every day, my smartphone buzzes every twenty minutes to let me know of new advertisements in my email inbox. I know more about Halo and Xbox then any man has the right to know, I've seen the original Star Wars trilogy at least 15 times. Yet, I'm jobless, and when I think about what I really want to accomplish in life, I think of the novel in my head waiting to be written, I wonder when I'm ever going to have time for it. So the next time you hear a talking head speak of Orwell or 1984, think instead of what Neil Postman wrote is his book Amusing Ourselves to Death about the two visions of the future.
“What Orwell feared were 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 wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited,the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
Ford help us all.
-Pudge
