12 tweets · August 2022 · 157 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
Just read Huxley's Brave New World, all in one sitting. Nothing in particular on my mind to say but figured if I wrote a thread and said the obvious, it would be interesting to someone. The main thing that struck me was "damn, he wrote this in 1932?"
In some ways, Brave New World is a deutschian dystopia, which is to say a world in which technological advancement is consciously used in service of propagating anti-rational memes and perpetuating a static society (David Deutsch's terms)
While aspects of the dystopia are disturbingly familiar, and I agree with Huxley that sedating/enculturating the masses is more likely than subduing with violence (which he wrote in a 1949 letter to Orwell re 1984) ...I don't find Brave New World to be a likely attractor.
I think Huxley, at least at the time, didn't understand evolution and memetics well enough (no fault to him—the concept of memetics hadn't been invented/discovered yet!) and was thus overestimating the workability of top-down statically-controlled culture.
It makes sense though: modern man writes modern dystopia.
The improbability of this dystopia is oddly encouraging. When I imagine infants being raised in the ultra-sterile atomistic procedural conditioned ways they are in BNW, they all come out stunted with attachment disorders, no rationalistic intellectuals nor obedient servants.
It makes me wonder what a more contemporary extrapolated-future dystopia would look like. I'm recalling Circle by Eggers, but it's still too near-future. Is shit too weird now to imagine such an extremely distant future? Maybe. On the gripping hand...
So I'm also ultimately more interested in sincere eutopian or protopian visions like Huxley's later book Island. As incomplete they'll inevitably be, they plant seeds of a future worth moving towards.
It occurs to me that some of these could also be based on extrapolation of current technology! Someone write a novel in which the protagonists are succeeding at deploying therapeutic reconsolidation at scale and successfully dealing with opposition or challenges.
Someone write a novel in which a new form of blockchain-based governance is put to the test and needs to evolve in order to keep up. Someone write a novel in which automation has freed us from doing jobs we don't like, and somehow we still find meaningful stuff to do.
For more, search twitter for "white mirror" or "black mirror" and if you follow cool people like @speakerjohnash, @TylerAlterman, @PlayNiceInst, @Altimor you'll get various threads of suggestions twitter.com/search?q=black…
In retrospect I guess I came to disagree with my own initial conclusion—of COURSE it was written in the 1930s! Later on it would have seemed closer but perhaps less plausible. Certainly by now nobody could write it.