Monk

Good timing! Just as I am wrapping up “Brave New World”, Andrew Sullivan links to a post by Stuart McMillen from 2009 that plays with the question of who was the better prognosticator: George Orwell with his “1984” or Aldous Huxley with, yes, “Brave New World”? McMillen draws a comic strip based on Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”

Since it is from 2009, you might have seen in before, and it even looks familiar to me, but I cannot remember clearly, and in any case it’s worth a repeat.

In brief, Huxley is felt to have the better of this constructed debate. Orwell perhaps played too hard on the idea of governments relying on pure brute force, whereas Huxley makes the keen point that successful governments would rule over us more subtly than that, by playing on our weaknesses, by infantilizing us, by amusing ourselves with senseless distractions and currying our dependency. A taste of the drawn contrast:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.

I suppose I buy that argument. Though, if I could have only one book, I think I’d stick with “1984.” I am drawn to that darkness, as it tends to match the darkness in my soul. And there is just a sweeter desperation in it.

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Add this to the endangered list: blank spaces.

Advertisers seem determined to fill every last one of them. Supermarket eggs have been stamped with the names of CBS television shows. Subway turnstiles bear messages from Geico auto insurance. Chinese food cartons promote Continental Airways. US Airways is selling ads on motion sickness bags. And the trays used in airport security lines have been hawking Rolodexes.

Marketers used to try their hardest to reach people at home, when they were watching TV or reading newspapers or magazines. But consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn.

“We never know where the consumer is going to be at any point in time, so we have to find a way to be everywhere,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive at the Kaplan Thaler Group, a New York ad agency. “Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.”

-- Louise Story for The New York Times

I cannot tell if this thought is more scary or sad. It's a little like red-on-white porn, I think. No bleak, dystopian future should be without it.

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