Orwell v's Huxley

[P3nT4gR4m]

1984 and Brave New World. I've had lots of conversations where these two classics are juxtaposed. I prefer 1984 but that's just personal taste. I've read it dozens of times, always scares the shit out of me. What Winston goes through really tugs my heartstrings but that's an aside. I was bored at work the other day so I read BNW and I got to wondering - which is the most effective paradigm for controlling the masses? Both have real world parallels. Perhaps not as far gone as in the novels but you can see it if you choose to look.

Personally I can't see Big Brother's state ever getting that far without an uprising of some sorts but maybe...

Huxley's vision, on the other hand doesn't seem so far off. Western civilisation seems hell bent on swallowing as much soma as it can get hold of, in all of it's pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical guises.

Is one more practical than the other? Is a synthesis possible? It could be argued that there's crossover between the two author's visions to begin with. Newspeak and doublethink dovetail nicely into Huxley's civilisation. Likewise the rigidly enforced class structure.

If one were inclined to take the bull by the horns and put the finishing touches on the enslavement of humankind, which approach would be most effective?

[Triple Zero]

Pretty sure it's Huxley, mainly because I agree that we're already farther on the road in that direction than to 1984.

But in addition, it also needs two equivalent parties, one of which hates aborting babies

[BabylonHoruv]

I definitely think that the world is far closer to BNW than 1984.  I think part of this may be due to 1984 being a better, and more frightening, book, so more people have read it and taken the warnings in it to heart.

[Worm Rider]

It has recently occurred to me that Big Brother did not need to exist, people only needed to think he did. Once you have everyone believing there is an all powerful being who is watching you all the time and can read your thoughts, it's game over -you can do whatever you want. Which gets us to the current state of fundamentalist religious nonsense happening in the USA (God bless it). It doesn't matter if God exists, if everyone believes he does, and if the president is the God-appointed leader, then, well, what can the government not get away with?

I need to re-read 1984, but I think big brother doesn't actually exist -and it doesn't matter. In which case 1984 is not really a distopic vision of the future, but a reality in any fundamentalist fascist state, past, present, and future. The only twist is that Big Brother is explained as a technological reality, instead of a transcendental one. In either case belief is all that matters for crowd control. I think the 1984 route has proven to already be effective in this sense. However, Eris has saved us from any system of crowd control working too well. Hail fucking Eris.   

[Cain]

Pretty sure it's Huxley, mainly because I agree that we're already farther on the road in that direction than to 1984.

But in addition, it also needs two equivalent parties, one of which hates aborting babies

So far as I can see, Orwell got some of it right, with the ubiqitous use of surveillance and Newspeak (or, as Steven Poole would have it, Unspeak.

On the other hand, his vision of the future is relentlessly grim and depressing, even to the protagonist.  Seriously, it's like two steps off the WH40k Universe at times.  People seem to have so little to lose than I could very easily see some kind of uprising happening, even though it'd probably be more Warsaw Ghetto than Tahrir Square.

So I think Huxley was the more creative, and possibly more accurate thinker.  As you say, there sure is a lot of soma going around these days.  I would argue that, unlike in Orwell's world, which tends to a form of political desensitisation, the current world we live in is more like an information overload, a sugar-rush of facts, theories, ideas and stories. 

Huxley based his view of the Brave New World around Fordism, a variant of Taylorism that was very popular both in the Soviet Union and in the capitalist west.  There are some Adam Curtis documentaries who deal in part with this theory, which are well worth watching.  While in many senses we are in a post-Fordist world, that just means Fordism in a new guise, that of service and the knowledge economy, rather than production and manufacturing.

Orwell, for all the credit he got as a writer and for recognizing the nature of the Soviet Union, was not a very deep political thinker.  Huxley, by contrast, through luck or skill, put his finger on one of the major organising principles of modern society and extrapolated from that in a way that was quite prescient.

[Triple Zero]

Another thing that may explain why I'm seeing BNW happening over 1984 is that BNW is actually, surprisingly, the more realistic scenario. I say surprisingly, because it's got a lot more science-fictioney stuff in it, whereas all the elements that make up 1984 were already there 20 years ago.

Or maybe I'm just hoping that.

What I think is that this complete information control surveillance state in fact doesn't actually work. Thing is, we got ECHELON, and it's just too much data to dig through. All the security cameras in the UK, but who is going to watch them? Only after the fact, right? Phones are tapped in NL in absolute numbers more than in the US (for srs!) but I dunno what they actually do with it, doesn't seem to be keeping a lid on the citizens though.

All this data is all over the fucking place, people are slowly realizing the privacy implications, but I don't quite see the surveillance state emerging yet. The ingredients are surely there, but they don't quite seem to fit together into the world that Orwell envisioned.

One thing that may change this is if the ubiquitous street cameras improve their image quality by a ton so you can actually zoom in on a face. This is very expensive, all the cameras are already there, need to be replaced, and it's "slow technology", not like computer capacity or something, which doubles every 1.5 years, you can't just wait a year and get a better quality camera lens for the same price.

Additionally, that's not going to solve the problem of "who's going to watch all these camera feeds?" so for that you need a bunch of supercomputers with advanced machine learning / computer vision algorithms doing facial recognition and tracking everyone from one camera to another. The state of the art isn't quite there yet, though. Whether it's actually even theoretically or practically possible, I'm not sure. It'd need a fuckton of computing power, but it's hard to guess whether it's prohibitively much, or just in the "wait a few years" category. I fear it's the latter, because it's a typical problem that can be parallelized easily, so you can just throw more cores and GPUs at it, which is the direction computing power is going anyways.

But then still, say you [the oppressive gvmt] got a full complete picture of the physical location of everybody. And in addition you can tap all of their communications. Well they're just going to encrypt part of the communications and there's pretty much nothing you can do about that, but even then. It's just far too much data, far too many people, making far too many problems, and not enough dudes watching the feeds to go around.

[Cain]

Thinking to the distant future though, technology could and probably will act as "force multiplier", allowing less people to keep tabs on increasing numbers of others.  I'm thinking here of a hi-tech version of Bentham's panopticon, with advanced facial recognition software and behaviour-recognition which allows it to detect certain categories of act and flag them for human analysis (for CCTV) and similar linguistic analysis software for phone taps.  The trend of the moment does seem to be towards accumulation rather than reducing false positives, but that is because, in part, they're not just looking at terrorists, foreign spies, hackers etc by gathering more information on everyone, you can analyse social trends and demographic patterns which allow for a continuation of the status quo.

But no doubt eventually spooks will get tired of interviewing the 900th Afghani goatherder who shares a similar tonal inflection to a suspected insurgent commander, and press for such changes.

I still think it will be large and unwieldy, overall, but it will get smarter and more streamlined than it currently is.

[Cainad (dec.)]

Fuck all, slow this conversation down until I've had my coffee. No fair, what with you Eurospags being several hours in the future and all.

j/k, proceed. I'll catch up in a bit

[Triple Zero]

Thinking to the distant future though, technology could and probably will act as "force multiplier", allowing less people to keep tabs on increasing numbers of others.  I'm thinking here of a hi-tech version of Bentham's panopticon, with advanced facial recognition software and behaviour-recognition which allows it to detect certain categories of act and flag them for human analysis (for CCTV) and similar linguistic analysis software for phone taps.  The trend of the moment does seem to be towards accumulation rather than reducing false positives, but that is because, in part, they're not just looking at terrorists, foreign spies, hackers etc by gathering more information on everyone, you can analyse social trends and demographic patterns which allow for a continuation of the status quo.

But no doubt eventually spooks will get tired of interviewing the 900th Afghani goatherder who shares a similar tonal inflection to a suspected insurgent commander, and press for such changes.

I still think it will be large and unwieldy, overall, but it will get smarter and more streamlined than it currently is.

's gotta be quite a distant future though.

friend of mine is working on a piece of AI to detect "aggressive behaviour" from a combination of camera feed + sound. Mostly sound, though, tone of voice is very well possible to classify. it's not just random scientific research, but for an actual security company, so I'm guessing they're getting decent results.

that's behaviour recognition, or "sentiment analysis", but I can't yet see it getting a lot more advanced than that, and of course "aggressive behaviour" is probably the easiest sentiment to classify. also it's already pretty hard for a human to get a clear idea what's going on from a camera feed.

and so far, any "similar linguistic analysis software", really is going nowhere. it's a littlebit of an elephant in the room of AI research. we were really supposed to have talking computers by now, but there's some ... ontological problems  that turn out to be nearly impossible to solve. and the technology you describe is actually really multiple parts, there's phonetic anlysis, converting audio to phonemes, and then there's the linguistic processing to parse it into words and sentences and then there's the problem of converting that to a machine-processable representation of a piece of knowledge.
it's a huge problem, none of these components are really making much useful progress, and if you try to chain them together, the inaccuracies just stack and multiply.

anyway, enough about AI specifics.

the point is that the 1984/panopticon scenario relies on technology and it really needs to jump quite a few very non-trivial technological hurdles.

while on the other hand, the BNW scenario pretty much just "hacked" the human behavioural component of the equation, controlling the population using a piece of hardware/software/wetware that is already there, has been there for 100,000 years, and isn't bound to change or go away any time soon either.

[Placid Dingo]

It's a bit hard to read because it gets a little preachy, but Ben Elton wrote a very very interesting work in the style of 1984/BNW, called Blind Faith which touches on the kind of contemporary FB culture/use of information etc.

This thread also reminds me of a scathing review of V for Vendetta describing it as juvenile, because when fascism hits it WONT LOOK LIKE FASCISM. While the aesthetic of BNW is still pretty socially acceptable because by it's very nature it's the essence of mass appeal, like Cain kinda said, 84 LOOKED like fascism. Post 84 (post WW2 maybe) you can't package total control in that wrapper and have it accepted.

[BabylonHoruv]

I just wanna say I am enjoying the hell out of the back and forth between Trip and Cain here.  Threads like this are one of the biggest reasons why I love PD.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Funnily enough I never saw BB's surveillance apparatus as being something that detected dissidents. Even in my early teens, when I first read the book, the whole notion struck me as impractical and unrealistic in an otherwise realistic context. To me the main purpose of surveillance was as a deterrent. If you know you can be watched at any time then, as illustrated in Winston's story, you'll have to go out of your way to do anything ____-crimey. The primary purpose of such a mechanism would be to breed paranoia, to back it up with the risk of being caught. When the exercise chick pulls Winston up during the morning workout, I figured that was more likely to be someone just channel hopping, looking for anything out of place and then jumping down their throats. Driving the point home, rather than trying to detect any deviation.

Once you have a suitably paranoid populace, who are equally concerned about being found complicit in a crime, you have a nation of grasses, ready to shop anyone over the slightest little - out of the ordinary - behaviour. The surveillance would therefore react to reports by the citizenry, rather than instigate proceedings of it's own accord. Kinda like how it works now, with the detectives mainly investigating reported crimes, just a fucking sight more effectively since no warrant or legwork is required and the suspect given no warning they are under suspicion and, therefore, no opportunity to cover their tracks.

[Cramulus]

One thiing that I didn't like about 1984 ----

the villains were villains - when it came time to show their hand, they explained to Winston that they really were in it for control, crushing freedom, doing evil .. it was a self aware power trip.

And in my mind, the people who are currently pushing us into a dark and claustrophobic future  - in the real world - are doing it with the best possible intentions. The guys performing these sketchy black site interrogations, the people tapping our phone lines, really believe they are protecting us.

And if they're not in it for altruism, they're in it for self interest. Pharmaceutical companies aren't intentionally trying to make a zombie state, they're just trying to make a buck. If they want everybody hooked on drugs, it's not to make the country more docile, it's just so they can make mega profits.

So I think that's where Orwell missed it - he envisions the worst possible government, one that does evil and is aware of it. But in the real world, nobody thinks like that. Well certainly there are some awful people in power who see the underclasses as a resource to be capitalized on, but it's hard for me to think of Bush or Obama in those terms.

[Triple Zero]

I just wanna say I am enjoying the hell out of the back and forth between Trip and Cain here.  Threads like this are one of the biggest reasons why I love PD.

Thanks. I didn't really come to the conclusion as I did until I started writing that reply. The conclusion, just to sum it up again cause I don't want this thread to become about my projections on AI-wanking:

- the 1984-scenario requires a certain level of technology to work, not just for the surveillance itself but also automation, to deal with the inevitable information overload (that Orwell did not envision, did he?)

- the BNW-scenario takes place in a future world (2540 AD) with all sorts of examples of future technology (baby factories, "feelies", soma, and all sorts of little details), but in order to create The World State it doesn't really need all of this future technology. all it needs to come to existence is the weaknesses of humanity itself, and once it's locked in place like that, people will perpetuate it because of human nature, technology or not. Okay maybe you need Soma, but that's hardly technology, Hassan-i Sabbah did similar

I never saw BB's surveillance apparatus as being something that detected dissidents. Even in my early teens, when I first read the book, the whole notion struck me as impractical and unrealistic in an otherwise realistic context. To me the main purpose of surveillance was as a deterrent. If you know you can be watched at any time then, as illustrated in Winston's story, you'll have to go out of your way to do anything ____-crimey. The primary purpose of such a mechanism would be to breed paranoia, to back it up with the risk of being caught. When the exercise chick pulls Winston up during the morning workout, I figured that was more likely to be someone just channel hopping, looking for anything out of place and then jumping down their throats. Driving the point home, rather than trying to detect any deviation.

Once you have a suitably paranoid populace, who are equally concerned about being found complicit in a crime, you have a nation of grasses, ready to shop anyone over the slightest little - out of the ordinary - behaviour. The surveillance would therefore react to reports by the citizenry, rather than instigate proceedings of it's own accord. Kinda like how it works now, with the detectives mainly investigating reported crimes, just a fucking sight more effectively since no warrant or legwork is required and the suspect given no warning they are under suspicion and, therefore, no opportunity to cover their tracks.

That's an interesting point. One example of such paranoia in myself is that I have been a littlebit hesitant to actually download and torrent any of the more sensitive releases by LulzSec and Anonymous. I dunno, I don't want my IP address in that torrent-swarm, and I rather wait until another website writes about what's in it. So they do control me, in that manner. (of course I could go through all sorts of trouble to get that torrent in a more anonymous fashion, but I don't really need or want that data that badly)



And maybe Cain (or someone) has an idea how less-than-perfect surveillance can still be used to build a surveillance state of complete control.

After all, censoring dictatorships such as China and North Korea are doing it. But again, they're not really doing it through technology (well, there's China's Great Firewall, of course), but rather through culture and "programming" the human population in some way or another, with propaganda and fear.



Cram's also got a good point. IRL, evil never really does evil for the sake of being evil. That's only in stories. Evil happens either because people have the best intentions, or because they ruthlessly want to make money or gain power. I never really realized the 1984 villains were in it simply to crush freedom, and how illogical that actually is, I guess I must have been a littlebit too young when I read it to notice that part.

[Lord Cataplanga]

One thiing that I didn't like about 1984 ----

the villains were villains - when it came time to show their hand, they explained to Winston that they really were in it for control, crushing freedom, doing evil .. it was a self aware power trip.

And in my mind, the people who are currently pushing us into a dark and claustrophobic future  - in the real world - are doing it with the best possible intentions. The guys performing these sketchy black site interrogations, the people tapping our phone lines, really believe they are protecting us.

And if they're not in it for altruism, they're in it for self interest. Pharmaceutical companies aren't intentionally trying to make a zombie state, they're just trying to make a buck. If they want everybody hooked on drugs, it's not to make the country more docile, it's just so they can make mega profits.

So I think that's where Orwell missed it - he envisions the worst possible government, one that does evil and is aware of it. But in the real world, nobody thinks like that. Well certainly there are some awful people in power who see the underclasses as a resource to be capitalized on, but it's hard for me to think of Bush or Obama in those terms.

Maybe it's hard for you to think of Bush and Obama that way, but my parents definitely think of Alfredo Stroessner that way. Sure, he said he was forced to declare a state of siege in the entire country for the sake of peace and progress or some other bullshit, but in the end, his collaborators just wanted to be in the winner's side.

But then again, maybe my parents are just biased.