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Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

When you think about technology critics none seems more relevant today than Aldous Huxley.

The traditional Hollywood criticism on technology goes along the lines of Frankenstein, Metropolis, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Terminator and Matrix: technology will control us. I find it dumb, frankly.

Then there is the political criticism along the lines of George Orwell and some Luddites: technology is a tool for control and domination either by governments or evil capitalists. It is not totally wrong (e.g.: China, Turkey) but not the exact true sometimes.

But the Huxley criticism is, for me, the most interesting: technology will entertain us to stupidity, apathy and alienation. This seems to be very much the case in here.

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We are in a society that has the distractions of Huxleys world with the surveliance of Orwell. The only thing different is the fact that no one expected our computers to get so small . That we would stare at screens that watch us every hour of every day. The anime psycho pass is much more relevant .

I think it's easy to get hung up on the means (that each authored). But as we know, the prediction business is a tough one.

For example, Orwell (in 1984) focused on the filtering, manipulation, constriction and reconstruction of information in order to continuouly redraw the history / truth. But today the truth is something that's often just as fuzzy because we're overwhelmed with too much information and too many distractions. Different means, same ends (read: confused and manipulated proles).

But it's the ends that matter. Both Huxley and Orwell have warned us. The irony is, at this point, too few are paying attention.

The truth has always been fuzzy/slippery. There never was a golden age of unbiased nothing-but-the-correct-truth journalism. The only change now is it's a little more obvious.

> The truth has always been fuzzy/slippery. There never was a golden age of unbiased nothing-but-the-correct-truth journalism. The only change now is it's a little more obvious.

And IMO that realization is a sort of "coming of age" that isn't in any way unique to modern generations.

When you become an adult and realize that the people running the show are just humans like you...

And that anyone selling you a simple "one right perspective" is only selling you part of the truth.

Or you realise that anyone selling you anything is merely wanting your money.

These days media organisations cause outrage for the sole purpose of getting you mad, only to read the article and realise the title is nonsense and you've just given them ad money.

I think you're wrong in a tiny but important point. It's not "All media organisations offer you senseless outrage and clickbait", it's "Some media organisations". There are plenty of meaningful, in-depth, well-written articles which provide new viewpoints on topics that it's important to talk about. You just have to find mediums. And I find it important to honor them instead of claiming "all media provides bullshit", which fuels a certain, toxic "truth is no where in media" atmosphere.

No disagreement here. The arc of my point is for those who look at 1984 and believe we're a long ways from there. On the contrary, we ARE there. The same ends, just different means.

I find lots of people miss Asimov with the Hari Seldon's Psychohistory. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, all manner of services now collect enough information to predict with relative accuracy what we like, want, and how we will behave in the imminent future or when presented with a certain situation. Google knows us better than we know ourselves.

If their targeted ads are the yardstick, no, they do not. They may have a lot of data but cannot use it well.

Orwell wasn't criticizing technology. "Animal Farm" is not about animals or farms and "1984" is not about TVs with cameras. He took the lust for power and turned it to eleven (hence the dystopian setting) to write a book about oppression.

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

Have you read Huxley's sequel to Brave New World? It's called "The Island." In it all of the technologies from BNW are used to set people free; to enhance the human condition.

I stand with Nir (and Huxley). These technologies are powerful, but that doesn't make them evil. They can be used for good.

Another one in the same vein: Ira Levin, This Perfect Day.

Seems like you've read 'Amusing ourselves to death' by Neil Postman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Just read that last week. Postman's critique of TV and media largly holds up. He would be glad about the iminent demise of TV, but apalled by what its successor technologies are doing to a still largely uncritical populace.

>Then there is the political criticism along the lines of George Orwell and some Luddites: technology is a tool for control and domination either by governments or evil capitalists.

I would not describe it like this. Proponents of technology but critics of the rationality it has created exist, most notably Marcuse. He criticises the development both in the capitaliat countries abd the USSR from a Marxist perspective in One-Dimensional Man, a widely acclaimed analysis of the rationality of creating false needs. Please read it, you may like it given your viewpoint. He very well integrates the last paragraph of your comment. Man is one-dimensional due to the rise of technological rationality in all expression, sexual, artistic and leisure. Nothing remains undominated, not even the great unknowns of nature and the human mind. Everything is integrated and rational through paradoxical irrationality of overproduction and false manufactured needs through advertisement.

Remember the startup mantra I've heard pg and others state: make stuff people want.

This is true locally, but globally and taken to the extreme it's a nightmare. People don't know what they want, and if you were to give them everything they wanted, you would destroy them. Take a look at anybody who's suddenly come into a lot of fame and fortune. The results are usually appalling.

Give children what they want - bright lights and shiny things, sugar & fat in equal measure, autonomy without responsibility, you'll end up with unhealthy sociopathic children.

We're all children and eschew what is good for us, just as adults we're cognisant of that failing.

Companies use our gluttony and greed to develop a desire in us, then fulfill that desire. The most financially profitable companies don't just give us what we want, they tell us first what we want, then sell it us.

Viz: You want to be lusted after by women, seen as powerful, make men jealous; our watch will do that for you; buying our watch will give you all you want.

Yes, agreed, globally is pathological, but it achieves the ends of Capitalism, making the rich richer off the backs of the poor man's labour.

The adaptations to a world of scarcity that made us successful as a species make us vulnerable in this world of abundance that we have created for ourselves.

We developed our own environment into a state in which we are not optimally adapted to it anymore.

Speaking of Hollywood, did someone notice that nearly every Hollywood movie made the 50s contained at least one scene in which the male star forces the female star to kiss him until she surrenders? At that time it was considered an obligatory part of the plot, now for such a thing you could go to jail. Wasn't that psychology manipulation as well? Or is it now? Or both?

If she didn't resist initially, what kind of woman would she have been? Not right sort for the leading man, surely.

Locker Room Genre

I laughed, and then I sighed.

You might also find the work of Marshall McLuhan to be interesting:

>Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.

-The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)

> a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence,

Sounds like the current media panic about terrorism, etc.

> [...] technology is a tool for control and domination either by governments or evil capitalists [...]

> [...] technology will entertain us to stupidity, apathy and alienation [...]

Perhaps a combination of both. The whole concept is as old as the Roman empire, [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

Huxley vs Orwell:

http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/huxley-or...

>I find it dumb, frankly.

I find your comment rather ignorant. It's entirely possible that the scenarios can in some way coexist. I'd also argue that for 2001 and The Matrix, technological danger is not the main subject.

I'll go with: d) All of the above.

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