[pessimizer]

I always thought that the most terrifying thing in the book 1984 (and the most relevant to the pending future) was that people weren't allowed tools to write anything down, they had to use the "speakwrite," which would monitor the user and refuse to write things that weren't allowed to be written.

Orwell wasn't prescient enough to imagine the type-remember, where you kept your entire perception of the world on machines that weren't controlled by institutions with your best interests at heart.

That had to wait for Fahrenheit 451 to create an entire administration and police force to get rid of your old encyclopedias.

[ohduran]

I always thought that Brave New World was more prescient than 1984: you won't be forbid to write, we'll instead give you something more fun and distracting to do instead.

[asdff]

So many parallels between Brave New World and our current world. It's honestly disturbing. The class divide between rich and poor is in there. The intellectual divide between knowledge workers and laborers is in there. The dopamine consumption cycle that stymies creative thought of the masses is in there. The willful ignorance of there being any problems at all is in there. That book is disturbingly prophetic.

It's honestly worse in real life, because in the book the savages and intellectuals on islands live peacefully outside the regime. There is no option to not participate in our world, given that climate change will affect the entire planet; there is no safe refuge from the regime because it directly affects even those not participating in it.

[jp57]

It's almost as if these things have always existed.

[hyperbovine]

And yet not.

[SstnMbgty]

"It's almost as if" -

I want to say something ideological, interpreting a given piece of evidence in a simplistic way to assert that it can be reduced to my own assumptions, but I also want to sound clever about it.

I half feel like making a bot that goes through reddit and just says "it's almost as if" whenever it detects anyone has made an assertion of fact of any kind, in increasingly implausible and unconnected ways.

[mofosyne]

Why not both? Brave New World for the masses and 1984 for the few that rock the boat.

[WarDekar]

Brave New World Revisted [0] has several references and comparisons to 1984. BNWR was written by Huxley in 1958, 26 years after BNW was published (1932) and 9 years after 1984 (1949).

It has been a few years for me, but there were several prescient chapters when I last ready it during the rise of populism around the globe (2015), namely sections IV, V, VI, and VII:

  Foreword
  I Over-Population
  II Quantity, Quality, Morality
  III Over-Organization
  IV Propaganda in a Democratic Society
  V Propaganda Under a Dictatorship
  VI The Arts of Selling
  VII Brainwashing
  VIII Chemical Persuasion
  IX Subconscious Persuasion
  X Hypnopaedia
  XI Education for Freedom
  XII What Can Be Done?

Would recommend the read to anyone that found 1984, BNW, F451, etc. interesting.

[0] https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ (full text)

Edit: formatting

[sidpatil]

Huxley wrote a letter to Orwell arguing the same.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/aldous-huxley-george-orwe...