My high school teachers assured me, at the end of the 1960s, that the future could probably be found in one of two novels: "1984," by George Orwell and "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley. In those days it was fashionable to have students discuss which future was more likely.
Orwell, who also wrote "Animal Farm," expected a new Dark Ages in which "Big Brother is Watching," public opinion is dictated, dissidence is suppressed, and being a free thinker is an even gloomier enterprise than not being one. The world will have three huge countries, constantly shifting alliances so two can temporarily gang up on a third.
Huxley, whose novel is brighter and has erotic scenes, thus capturing the teen vote, expected that people's sensual needs will be so well catered-to that we will be too busy getting our massages to be dissidents to any important degree. In his world, all we care about is our own comforts.
Orwell had been a propagandist during World War II and had certain views about the dangers of such manipulation, especially by totalitarians. Huxley was making more of a commentary on society than on the powerful and the political.
To these two visions of the future, let's add a third, that of "Max Headroom," a 1987 British TV series in which surveillance cameras and hackable computers are everywhere, but they are double-edged technologies that can be used by subversives, like reporters, as easily as by officials bent on repression and concealment of scandal. I was in my thirties when "Max Headroom" came out as a U.S. television series and I thought it was sensational.
Others must have agreed, because current day TV series from "NCIS" to the new "Hawaii Five-0" feature omnipotent geeks who summon up live surveillance cameras or hack into the most well-defensed computers in the blink of an eye.
In 1983, people began writing commentaries on "1984" and "Brave New World," most of them suggesting that the latter book turned out to be more accurate, an assertion which usually turned out to be a platform for bemoaning declining interest in news, and in voting.
In retrospect, I am inclined to say that they were right, although I'm not sure we're any more hedonistic than, say, affluent people were in the Roaring Twenties. Certainly the current generation of doctors has been trained to solve every ill with a pill, and we patients are propaganized similarly, as with the sign I told you about in my hospital room two years ago: "You have a right to be free from pain." We've only recently learned that we have a right to erections. Who'd have thought it? And to think your driver's license is still only a privilege.
Then again, if most people had to choose between automotive mobility and seminal motility, they'd go out and buy a bus pass. But I digress.
I do think "Max Headroom" got the future, which is to say the present, more accurately than the other books, perhaps because Huxley, in his own way, was as intent as Orwell on foretelling a world that was worse than the one they lived in. They saw us as being in the Hades Handbasket and wanted to warn us. "Max" postulated instead a world in which good guys and bad guys are about the same as they always were, but technological progress changes the game. And technology, as Firesign Theatre would say, is a power that can only be used for good or evil.
Look at all those traffic cameras! When the monsoons came, we brought the story to you by punching a few buttons, and live pictures magically appeared from all over. And thanks to modern cell phones, everyone becomes a reporter, emailing full-motion video. When citizens do this, it's called reverse surveillance, since you can watch Big Brother if he should relax his guard and beat the crap out of Rodney King in a public place. A favorite quote of mine applies here. The slick Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau) in the 1966 movie "The Fortune Cookie" says, "You can build a better mousetrap. But the mice get smarter."
Ironically if there is anything that increases the risk of totalitarianism today, it is not technology at all, it is a people problem: lack of staffing in for-profit news organizations, and, so far at least, the absence of sufficient alternative mechanisms for keeping an eye on Big Brother.
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