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Mark Kennedy's avatar

Then they're frauds... but knowing this doesn't make their motives any less opaque to me. What's the point of 'socially engineering' fellow citizens whose intelligence you don't trust, and whose right to arrive at their own judgments and make their own decisions you hold in contempt? What kind of society can would-be social engineers expect to create from such unpromising material, and who are the supposed beneficiaries? Even when I try seeing things from the censors' side, their activities and what they offer as justifications for them refuse to sum to a coherent worldview or an intelligible project. There's something missing.

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Basil Rathbone's avatar

Of course they're frauds, but they are unwitting frauds. They believe they're doing, at least the secular equivalent of, "God's work." They're establishment fundamentalists, adherents to the self-professed expertise only elitist insiders feel entirely comfortable claiming for themselves. They're "protecting democracy and freedom" by abolishing both. Orwell explains the whole perverse psychodynamic in "1984." Huxley does much the same in "Brave New World."

What these assholes today are delivering is actually existing totalitarianism, not the mere fictionalized prophetic version of yesteryear, accurate as those predictions were.

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Mark Kennedy's avatar

Those predictions were actually very different, as Neil Postman persuasively argues in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

“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". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

“This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

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Basil Rathbone's avatar

Great points. I've never forgotten Postman's book (though I lost my copy years ago, loaned it to someone, never got it back) since I reviewed it for a magazine I worked for in the '80s. It's one of the best critiques of modern social deterioration and collapse I've ever read. But I had forgot that he made this comparison of Orwell and Huxley, not having a photographic memory.

And it totally makes sense, though I tend to think what we're being ushered into by these brave new cleansers of disinfo, misinfo and malinfo from the woke social fabric they believe they're creating is a combination of both Orwell and Huxley, contradictory as that may sound. I think they were both right, and we'll be seeing aspects of both dystopias playing out all over the place. If Orwell proposed that "we'll be overcome by an externally imposed oppression," all these institutes, organizations, commissions and agencies the Twitter Files have uncovered are maybe the first wave of that externally imposed oppression.

And the very likely embrace by millions of these censors and cancellers and deplatformers would fulfill Huxley's prophecy that people will "come to love their oppression and adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." AI will be leading the way in that respect.

So, I think they're ensnaring us in a kind of double dystopia, if we don't overthrow the entire system that has spawned these authoritarians.

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Mark Kennedy's avatar

Yes, your judgment coincides with my own. We now have the worst of both worlds, an apathetic, easily diverted citizenry, and all-too energetic behind-the-scenes authoritarians who understand that the narrative control technological advance has brought within reach is the key to masquerading their mission as something else entirely. The 'medicine' they prescribe for our safety is sufficiently sugar-coated to seduce people into taking it; and its addictive properties are such that victims willingly collaborate in their own subjugation, denouncing those who suggest they should consider weaning themselves from the stuff.

As a retired reference librarian whose career consisted of connecting people with reliable, relevant information to the best of my ability, I find this development quite frightening. The internet, so eagerly anticipated by myself and my colleagues in the 1980s and 90s, not only revolutionized the information commons it also destroyed the old one, and there's no going back now. It's disconcerting to realize that the same potential threats to information diffusion that were discussed then, with a view to determining what safeguards might help counter abuses, were seen instead by authoritarians as step-by-step guides to closing loopholes to becoming monopolistic abusers themselves.

One thing we were in no position to anticipate, of course, was the surveillance competence of algorithms, which make possible the instant identification of dissenting opinion and the almost equally immediate discrediting of it. This is a uniquely powerful tool in Big Brother's arsenal, and it's unclear how electronic communication can ever evade its monitoring and reporting functions.

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Maenad's avatar

I learned so much from the Dewey Decimal System, dictionaries, and the direction of caring competent librarians who took their work seriously, in ways I hadn’t yet understood. One thing led me to another, just as a good newspaper had me reading articles I never would have sought on my own. I can’t imagine a life devoid of insatiable curiosity.

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May 24, 2024
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Mark Kennedy's avatar

How does such a 'philosophy' avoid the charge of authoritarianism? Logically, it entails a two-tiered society of nudgers and the nudged, something you'd presume anyone qualifying for university admission couldn't fail to see. How compatible is a willingness to suppress people's ability to make choices, selfish or otherwise, with a claim to be defending democracy? The mission still makes no sense: every time I try to bring its 'ideal' into focus, something else goes out of focus.

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