Vodkapundit is right. William Gibson's "The Road to Oceania" is today's required reading.
Vodkapundit is right. William Gibson's "The Road to Oceania" is today's required reading.
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Like many people more interested in domestic than international affairs, I find 'Brave New World' a much closer dystopia to our current state of affairs, partly because it predicted what Orwell failed to foresee: what technology would make of us.
Huxley thought that science could change us much more fundamentally than Orwell did. In an Orwellian world, there's not much difference between getting your propaganda via radio or TV or PalmPilot; in a Huxleyan world, being able to create new people meant one could create a new world.
I think Gibson made a mistake in failing to point out the relative powers that various actors have in their access to information.
Government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, so its access to information about you that it finds problematic has a different effect than your access to information about the government.
Moreover, the free flow of information can be stifled by government power -- witness our lack of knowledge about who is being detained, for what reason or for how long. Even if the governmenmt has put this information into a database, the penalty for hacking into it must be enormous.
PG -
As I noted below, there's a material point missing in your "monopoly on the use of physical force" point...what Weber really said was "the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it."
I agree re BNW, but largely because I think Huxley caught the tone of the era better - not fear and grim dispair, but a kind of mindless attraction to the trivial and the pleasurable.
A.L.