Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell | Hacker News Reader

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell

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75 pointseplanit17 comments

Just below this post is "Tips for Gamifying Your Mobile App".

Why is it either/or? Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 depicts a dystopian future full of both bookburning and constant information. I think Huxley and Orwell both had it right (though the authoritarian disinformation and suppression of information may be more subtle at the moment than Orwell imagined).

When we become overwhelmed by trivial information, we start to hate substantial/meaningful information, and both what we hate and what we love conspire to bring our ruin. (Not that I am that I'm a cynic or anything ;)

Yes they were all right, unfortunately.

Thanks for an insightful comment.

"When we become overwhelmed by trivial information, we start to hate substantial/meaningful information, and both what we hate and what we love conspire to bring our ruin."

Is it hatred, or simply a desire to get the "cheaper" information? It seems like human brains are wired to assume a kind of information parity, in which "Kim Kardashian buys a soda" is equal in value to "Germany annexes the Sudetenland". Understanding the latter has a lot of prerequisites, each of which is also a piece of information that has to be acquired, and so the latter is rightly seen as requiring more work than the former. And so, if you have a greedy information-gathering algorithm, you'll prefer the Kardashian data to the WWII data. This is why I admire people like Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, and all the other great popularizers of complex subjects, because instilling that passion and showing why some data are more important than others is a really hard job.

"When we become overwhelmed by trivial information, we start to hate substantial/meaningful information"

Doubtful. When the media can overwhelm us with trivial information, ~they~ start to hate substantial/meaningful information that requires investment of time and quality journalists.

Well, I was interested in the book that inspired this comic, but I followed the link to the original [1] which states that the "comic was respectfully removed in March 2012 due to the wishes of the copyright holders of the text."

1) http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

Please don't let something like that keep you from reading a book. If you don't want them to get your money, get it from a library.

Brilliant! Libraries... I remember them... And much more ethical than the method I was considering.

If this sort of thing is enough to keep you away from the book, note that the author of the book died in 2003, so you can't really blame him.

There have been states since 1984 was published that seem to have used it as a template. See Czeslaw Milosz's comments about the book's impact behind the Iron Curtain. Or just consider the DPRK today. Both authors got it more or less right, in other words.

But Orwellian states are eventually falling, because people rebel against oppression. Perfect totalitarian state can be a one of which citizens are not aware.

You mean most western countries?.

Your first sentence conspicuously relies on the word "eventually". And there's no reason to assume that history is a linear march forward. Orwell's words may again be relevant, "even" in the west.

When I first saw the film Clockwork Orange many years ago, I found Ludovico Technique very disturbing. Now it's just another day on the internet. "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is a great book, but I haven't read it in so long I can't say if it's still relevant or just come to pass and now unremarkable.

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

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

Huxley also had thought drugs can only make us dumb (like soma in Brave New World) - until someone shown him psychedelics.

He even wrote later a book describing utopia (Island) which contained similar things as in Brave New World (drugs use, assisted reproduction, sexual openness, exposing children to death), but used in positive way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607098 (2012)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476 (2009)

Read the book...

http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com