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Comment by mceachen | Hacker News Reader

There was a comment on the site about this article being a "rip off" of Huxley (once again, wikipedia delivers in spades): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_wit...

"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."

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Also, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Postman references Huxley/Orwell in the introduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Postman's book is fantastic. I read the book > 10 years ago and still talk about it. One of his points that stuck with me was that if television were actually entertaining we would never be able to leave it.

Also, have a look at some of his more famous quotes: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41963.Neil_Postman

Just want to add that A Brave New World is one of those books that doesn't get as much attention as its counterpart 1984. The latter seems to have become a talking point, a reduced to a symbol thrown around in arguments.

One of the latter's more enduring motifs actually ended up as the title for the type of TV show Orwell coined the word prolefeed for...

Brave New World is probably actually the more relevant book to today's hedonistic, rampantly consumerist world. Even if the slightly tongue-in-cheek references to 'his Fordship' seem a little quaint we certainly haven't lost our tendency to worship distantly superrich media personalities. Then again, we're probably too busy checking our Facebook feeds to go back and read it

You know, when I read Brave New World 15 years ago I couldn't help but say to myself that it would be a great world to live in if the lower castes were actually replaced by robots.

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