From LitHub, June 24, 2022:
Andrew Keen Investigates Dual Literary Visions of Society’s Collapse
Some books, with their seemingly timeless messages and warnings, never go out of fashion. During the COVID pandemic, for example, Albert Camus’s La Peste became so memetic that I had to ban my Keen On guests from talking about it in the recommended books feature at the end of the show. There are those twin pillars of 20th-century dystopianism, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
And then there’s Neil Postman’s 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which warns that we can’t have both our Huxley and our Orwell and requires us to choose between them.
Neil Postman told us that we had it wrong. He argued that we expected to be living in Nineteen Eighty-Four but actually found ourselves in Brave New World. So he made our choice for us. Huxley was right and Orwell wrong, Postman believed. In the mid 1980s, when everyone was glued to their television screens, the New York University media scholar believed, we lived in an Age of Show Business rather than of Big Brother.
Fast forward to today and nothing much has changed. In the age of Donald Trump, Xi Jingping and the internet, we still need to make our choice. We still need to identify the nightmare in which we think we are living. We still need to choose between the narcotic of Show Business and the threat of Big Brother, between Orwell’s ubiquitous politics and Huxley’s absence of politics.
Orwell, I fear, is the easier choice. The Big Brother narrative requires less imagination than that of Big Show Business. Its totalitarianism is more reassuringly all-encompassing. Its systematic appropriation of everything makes sense—maybe too much sense. The medium, then, is as much the message of dystopian fiction as it is of real life.
Donald Trump is more Berlusconi than Mussolini. He’s a classic television villain—exactly the kind of buffoon who, in 1985, Neil Postman imagined would amuse us to death.Take the internet. Most of the contemporary critics (including myself) of the digital revolution have gone the Orwellian route. Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism, now the gold standard of digital dystopianism, is a clever remix of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Instead of Big Brother, Shoshana Zuboff gives us Big Tech. Instead of a camera in every dingy post-war London apartment, we have smartphones in all of our pockets. Instead of the Ministry of Truth, we have fake news. Instead of Winston Smith, we have billions of social media users. Instead of Newspeak, we have fake news.
As Zuboff told me when she came on Keen On, we’ve all become the unavoidable products of Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. They watch us with seemingly affectionate intimacy because they make their money from our personal data. Such inevitability mimics the logic of totalitarianism. Big Tech is as much a prisoner of surveillance capitalism as we are. All roads lead to a digital Nineteen Eighty-Four. Zuboff’s imaginary medium is her message....
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If so inclined, see also:The Tropes You'll Need To Know When Writing Your Dystopian Movie Script
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