Yep, you did.

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• IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Nah.

  Telescreens were mandatory.

  In the real world, people would voluntarily install them, and pay for the privilage of doing so.

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  • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah, more like this guy was right.

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    Every day Huxley is proven more correct than Orwell because through the magic of SOMA (addictive phones hitting dopamine rushes), people can be surrounded with the truth and completely ignore it, and as you said, pay for the privilege of being lied to because it feels nice.

    Huxley understood our desires could break us more than our hate.

    I can’t find it, but I recall an interview with Zizek around when Snowden dropped his leaks, and it was about how it really changed nothing, and he was noting how the revelations of torture had changed nothing either. He thought disclosure was a moot point now, society was checked out. He was right.

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    • deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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    • TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      In 2019, Giorgio Agamben gave a week of lectures in Berlin. In the middle of it, he suddenly paused and said: “I hope that everyone in this room realizes that all political action has become impossible.” He meant that political action is no longer possible because we are governed by economic powers.

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    • Rookwood@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      They were both right. I wouldn’t say either was more right actually. If you merge both of their worlds, you get pretty close to what we’re living in.

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  • FantasmaNaCasca@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Brave New Wolrd and Farnheit 451 with Handmaid’s Tale…I mean, even Zuckeberg with Meta is trying to be the villain ceo of Ready Play One.

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    • SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Good callout to Fahrenheit 451. I think Beatty’s monologues are pretty important because they’re strongly argued. His positions aren’t wholly irrational, he has given it careful, deliberate thought for a long time. The first time I read it I recall feeling compelled and almost convinced by his arguments, which is such a beautiful way to express it. Bradbury literally argues against the existence of the book Fahrenheit 451 itself, his own competing ideas that someone else would want to erase, through Beatty’s monologues. He made a compelling argument for it, too.

      Knowing how to be psychologically resilient against such arguments is important, I think.

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    • anamethatisnt@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Now that we’re adding more dystopian books to the thread I’d like to shout out to Kallocain (1940) by Karin Boye. It’s more of a totalitarian state similar to 1984 but has an aspect of truth drugs, a hot topic back then, and thought criminalization.

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  • Embargo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    …and they line up around the block to get the new ones that can see and hear them even better. Our timeline’s version has access to our fingerprints, can identify our faces from millions of others, know our hobbies, our work schedule, our political leanings, etc, etc. We’re deep in this nightmare.

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  • RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I think Orwells Animal Farm describes the current situation in the US better. There might be less communism but some things (like the TikTok ban) seem to be stolen directly from the book.

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  • Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    TikTok. Yet people are begging for someone to spy on them if it means feeding their addiction to short form content.

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    • Maggoty@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      And Meta, X, Alphabet, etc…

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yelling at a homeless person for owning a telescreen.

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• Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  No man, not all at.

  Not only that, but Orwell has become a dog whistle of the right complaining about social justice issues of the left.

  Orwell predicted big brother that was an allegory for communism. Where they threw you in jail for wrong think. Hence why the far right love talking about him.

  Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire. The overall process is decay, where it’s like a free for all and crabs in a bucket mentality.

  Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

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  • Urfgurgle@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Orwell was a leftist who wrote from a leftist perspective. 1984 is about Stalinism specifically and totalitarianism generally. It is not about communism, unless your definition of “communism” only includes the Soviet variety.

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    • Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      “We’ve never seen REAL Communism!!”

      That line is older and more tired than my 92 year old uncle.

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    • BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Here’s where you point out credible alternatives at national scale, where the powerful machinery of state which even Lenin requires doesn’t get taken over by dictatorial narcissist psychos

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    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I’m not saying Orwell is only about communism, I’m actually agreeing that Orwell’s book was something rather specific that doesn’t apply 100% to today.

      Today’s situation is shaping to be more like the Wild West where anything goes as long as your rich enough instead of a single omnipresent entity having full control.

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    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Orwell was a leftist

      Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar). The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire. Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population. Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, much of the wealth was in the hands of Europeans. As colony it was seen very much as a backwater. Under the British administration, the people of Burma were at the bottom of social hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, Indians, Chinese, and Christianised minorities in the middle, and Buddhist Burmese at the bottom

      He was a liberal who operated as an agent of an oppressive fascist government and developed pangs of remorse, which he then translated into his writings.

      Also, not to be totally essentialist, but…

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      Come on. The dude even looks like Hitler.

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  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Animal Farm is the allegoric tale about communism in Russia.

    1984 is more general about totalitarianism, still based on stuff that went on in Nazi Germany + Soviet union + wartime England, but it wasn’t a full allegory of things that had already happened. It was more like a science-fiction prediction of the bad things that could happen in any nation if democracy and human rights were not protected.

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  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

    That’s the only thing that gives me hope about us coming out the other side of this as recognizably the same nation that went into it.

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    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I mean, yeah, most cautionary tales have common themes.

      In most terrible situations, you’ll often find tyranny in some shape or form.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Imo what we are seeing is far closer to the slow collapse of an empire.

    Which, in fairness, 1984 effectively documents.

    But Orwell clings to the idea that this collapse (a collapse that his own country of England was already sliding down) was something that could carry on forever. You could keep cutting those chocolate rations year after year and keep throwing away your youngest generation in war after war and keep churning out revisionist history after revisionist history and nothing would ever really change.

    Orwell could predict the fall in the States (because, again, England in the 1950s was in the thick of exactly this revanchist totalitarian Red Scare crisis) but he couldn’t see where it all would end.

    Bottom line is, things are falling apart due to incompetence, not a very competent entity taking full control.

    One could argue that the consolidation of power into an increasingly remote and schloratic aristocracy will inevitably produce incompetent leadership. As voting districts get larger and elected leaders become more insulated from their constituents, they stop responding to the material conditions in their domains.

    And as residents grow more hostile to the fumbling, self-important bigots managing the territory, you see vigilante acts that cause the leadership to retreat further and imposing increasingly stringent loyalty tests on their deputies and bureaucrats.

    The focus of effort becomes suppressing dissent rather than fixing underlying economic conditions. So more and more resources go into policing, spying, fencing, and propagandizing.

    This isn’t a single individual’s failure (even of you could find a host of singularly foolish, craven, or incompetent individuals) but a function of an aristocracy consumed by paranoia in a society with a shrinking supply of economic goods to spread around.

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• HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Mostly the part where words don’t mean anything and reality is crafted by the oppressor.

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  • Grail@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Reality has always been crafted by the oppressor. It’s an inherently oppressive concept. soulism.net

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• DarkCloud@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I don’t feel like Orwell or Huxley are even close.

  Orwell was about the party, we have a problem with Capitalist nihilists who aren’t party specific. They’d be doing the same thing if Trump were a corrupt Dem (and he was for a while).

  …as for Huxley, we live in a sexually repressed society nothing like Brave New World. The outlets aren’t done collectively in church like structures, and there’s no wild-man sanctuaries to escape to.

  So no, neither of them present the model for the current circumstances.

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  • greenskye@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Honestly feels like we got the worst of both options. The petty censorship, puritanism and lies of 1984 mixed with the lesser and trivial entertainments of Brave New World.

    I feel like especially in the last few years at least the part of the left that was so concerned with certain issues with problematic media and addressing issues with overly sexualizing women has joined in some unholy union with the prudish and moralists on the right to spawn a general censorship of a vast swath of concepts backed up by both the lefts moral high ground and the rights religious teachings.

    Where before there was the nuance to recognize that women were too often presented as sexual objects in popular media, as well as the fact that we shouldn’t kink shame consenting adults or the sex workers providing what should be seen as legitimate service. Now that nuance is lost in favor of simple discrimination and censorship, only disguised in the original movements language.

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  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I don’t think either were a perfect fit, but personally I don’t think they need to be. V for Vendetta lines up great in some ways, much less so in others, but I think it scratches the same itch. They are all cautionary tales about the ways we allow or encourage or accept the government to use their power, and how those pressure points can be exploited to create various authoritarian and/or dystopian outcomes.

    Been awhile since I’ve read any of those, but I definitely have always felt they resonate with each other, and IMO they resonate with current events also.

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• samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Image

  “What am I, chopped liver?”

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  • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    😆

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• PixellatedDave@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think Brave New World is a better depiction of where we are at.

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  • tempest@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Orwell - "the party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”

    Huxley - “the perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would be basically a prison without walls, in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essential be a system of slavery where, through consumption of entertainment, the slaves will live their servitude”

    I would agree

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    • Gammelfisch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Exactly like the PRC and Russia. WTF AmeriKa.

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  • x0chi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    1984 is obviously influenced by brace new world

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Orwell lived through the fucking holocaust and couldn’t call a future of eugenics. Embarrassing.

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  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    We read both of those during the same year of school and then compared and discussed. To be honest, there’s elements of both that describe our times.

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• Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think that’s Michael Palin.

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• bruhduh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Chat, is this real?

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