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Comment by doctor_eval | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t understand this at first as Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent” discussed media consolidation many years ago. But of course the problem is that we’ve gone from a small number of companies controlling _the news_ to a small number of companies controlling _all media_. It’s less Chomsky and more Orwell.

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> It’s less Chomsky and more Orwell.

As Neil Postman pointed out, it's less Orwell and more Huxley.

“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.""

Here’s that same sentiment in webcomic form. https://biblioklept.org/2010/12/14/huxley-vs-orwell-the-webc...

Simply substitute Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc for soma and you're there.

Also in the end we didn't need eugenics, the lack of social mobility has achieved that stratification it set out to achieve.

> it's less Orwell and more Huxley.

This point comes up so often when discussing Orwell/1984 it's almost meta in itself. 1984 seems more scary to us for some reason, perhaps because it's more foreign/further from our reality than Huxley's fears/Brave New World?

Nobody wants to be controlled.

Everybody wants to be entertained.

In a democracy, this is a recipe for mediocrity, because reaching consensus and buy-in is so difficult, it is easier to ignore hard problems than to solve them.

Have you heard of Bounded Rationality? There is an upper bound on what the chimp brain can do. No big diff with a group of chimps. There is always an upper bound.

Pretending there is no bound leads to a big trap.

Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work. All that it archives is make them feel useless or angry and plants the seeds for pointless blame games.

Huxley and Orwell are irrelevant as they focus on things beyond the bound. Naturally they have no workable solutions out of the trap.

Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems. Thats how the ants thrive.

> Bounded rationality however does recommends a way out of the trap - work on simple problems

Climate change is a simple problem, reducible to just one number - the percentage of C02 in Earth's atmosphere.

What is difficult is not the technical challenge of how to reduce C02 emissions. We have known that for thousands of years, and all societies practised it until recently. They went about their business without burning fossil fuels.

What is difficult is to get people to walk back from convenience. Once you've driven on the freeway to the beach in 30 minutes, stopping by the supermarket on the way to pick up a bbq chicken and a can of asparagus imported from Argentina for $1.50, nothing will convince you to go back to the old way of living.

Most people would say the pursuit of convenience is at the core of their definition of rationality. If that's the case, we aren't limited by an upper bound on rationality so much as condemned by our perpetual desire to exceed it.

It's complicated. CO2 and other greenhouse gases raise evaporated water concentrations and initial warming, which trigger several one-way thresholds that we can never undo. It gets complicated/impossible after each threshold breakage, as warming will mostly drive itself and chaotic flux from there on.

>Its like telling second graders they can solve tenth grade problems. They cant no matter what they are entertained by, how well they built od consensus or how hard they work.

Child prodigies exist.

And they're few.

It's beyond that. Arguably Huxley's vision of the future is closer to reality. The thing is Huxley's vision is ego syntonic - it's compatible with our self-conception. The characters in Brave New World aren't struggling against anything, their self-conception has adapted so much that they accept the brave new world as right and natural. Orwell's vision is ego dystonic - there is still a "me" in Winston that recognizes the world he lives in as corrupt and struggles against it. In that way the characters of Brave New World are farther gone than Winston and Julia. There is no need for a Thought Police in Brave New World, because everybody has so internalized the value system of the World State that it's not necessary.

It's a bit of both.

Jay Leno spent years showing us clueless Californians who couldn't tell us why the 4th of July is a holiday. These types would seem to confirm Huxley's suspicions, but they don't make up the entire country.

For people who aren't controlled by their base desires, where soma and orgy porgy failed, today, deplatforming and "fact checkers" are stepping in to finish the job.

In a way, the fact checkers and deplatformers are a regression to Orwell-world. These stick out as something out of place or even wrong. More subtle methods like hellbanning and promoting irrelevant content aren't as noticeable. I almost have a little hope, that the bastards have to show their hands now, even if only a little bit.

Yes, sorry I didn't make that clear. "Fact checking" and deplatforming are the Orwellian knockout punch to finish the job begun by the Huxleyan MTV (and similar influences in that vein) a few decades ago.

It's clear that not everyone will be so easy to control like some kind of oversexed zombie. But most don't have the fortitude to continue questioning when challenged by a determined opposition.

I suppose in a sense Huxley and Herman/Chomsky were saying something similar. The horror of “Manufacturing Consent” was that the behaviour emerged from the system, rather than intentionally; I recall Herman and Chomsky writing something along the lines that “nobody wakes up in the morning and says ‘how am I going to make the world worse today?’”. The interplay of advertising, money and government simply make criticism of the government very expensive, and therefore much riskier, to produce. You can see this play out on a smaller scale if you ever make the mistake of saying something political on Facebook. Much easier to upvote baby photos and Jackass videos.

But entertainment, drugs and distraction are even cheaper to produce than apolitical news, and once we started to clamour for the creativity-free, trope-laden SFX trollop of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I suppose it was just a matter of time.

It’s been decades since I read brave new world but I think it’s time to read it again.

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