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GeekNights 20110106 - Oldening
Tonight on GeekNights we consider our age and the effects of aging, coming closer and closer as we are to Carousel. We also geekbite the second Locke Lamora book - Red Seas under Red Skies - and consider the correlation between walking speed and longevity.
- Rym's Thing - Eat the Kids First
- Scott's Thing - Feh Yes Vintage Manga
Comments
Beware that such a system may have to take disregard for human life to new and hitherto unknown extremes.
Virginia has like a "million" different license plate styles, which can lead to all kinds of fun. How about a big "V" for the University of Virgina and "AGINA"? My friend had a plate that was LOL WTF but when he got a new car they made him turn in his plates because I guess at that point someone at the DMV learned what WTF meant. Here is a website of cool license plates, which many are from Virginia because it is pretty cheap to get a vanity plate there.
I am of the mind that, when it comes to Posthumanism, Iain M. Banks is right about many things.
Perhaps I do just agree with his predictions more, but that's because they make huge amounts of sense to me. Warren Ellis is good in the same way.
Banks himself says that his Culture is only so popular because it is as near to an appealing utopia anyone has yet written. Personally I can't wait until he writes a book where the whole system collapses. Actually, that might happen in his latest novel, Surface Details, but I've not had a chance to read it as yet.
*Although, to be fair, Huxley did think the world was moving towards what he set out in his book.
See this is easy. Government control of the population through media, framing, language and distorting history exists. Also, popular control of moods through legal drugs and trite entertainment exists.
On the other hand, sentient machine intelligence, post-scarcity societies, nanotechnology (as commonly portrayed in science fiction), and post-human beings don't yet exist. Maybe they will, or maybe they won't, and current thinkers and authors may be proved "right" or "wrong" about those things. But not yet!
Yes, I know it's also a book. It's a book about culture published in 1985. That interests me too, since I thought that, in your opinion, anything more than two years old is worthless because it's obsolete and irrelevant and should be disdained by all the young, smart people. Surely a book about culture published in 1985 would be obsolete and irrelevant as well, no?
"Summing up" with an infographic is cool, but you know what is better? Reading the source material and finding your own meaning. Personally 1984 is one of my all time favourite novels, and I've read it many times. I've read Brave New World way, way less, not because I think it is less applicable to the current world, but because I don't enjoy it much as a piece of literature or story telling. Orwell was, technically, a way better writer than Huxley.
But both books were written for their time, and that they both have meaning today, when so much other literature falls be the wayside, is a testament to their worth. It isn't a competition, nor is the question of "right or wrong" a meaningful one.
Except, of course, if you are so clueless that a single infographic can sway your opinion on books you don't care enough to read before forming your own opinions (not a dig at anyone on this forum, but I've talked with that kind of person).
Look at the world around you. There are many Orwellian things, yes. There is the kind of blatant things you saw in the USSR and continue to see in many countries around the world. There is censorship, there is propaganda, there is the use of fear, and the use of force. With the recent proposals for national Internet IDs, there is no shortage of the Orwellian.
However, all of those things are transparent. There are many people in North Korea who know better. They're all watching South Korean sitcoms that have been smuggled into the country. People in China know better. That's why they're winning Nobel prizes while in jail. I really believe that 1984 just can't happen. In the book most people totally fall in line. In reality, ruling with fear and huge blatant lies is too obvious. Too many people can see through it, and now they are mad.
Yet, look at our world today for the Huxleyan, and you will see it even more frequently. A politician doesn't have to scare you into voting for them. They just get you playing Farmville all day long, and you won't do a thing about their heinous corruption. Talk about your bread and circuses, we have infinite circuses. People's minds are so occupied with trivialities that there is no room for anything else. Between Internet and television, the society is effectively "gentled" (see the Lies of Locke Lamora). We are not a dog that has been whipped and trained to obey orders. We're a cat buried in so much catnip, we're just going to sit still until we die.
It doesn't matter in a 1984 world if you know the whole thing's a sham. You still can't take action unless a majority around you take action simultaneously. Any individual actor is quashed.
Meanwhile, the US has already got 200+ years, and Rome has the most. Both of these excelled at bread and circuses, not so much at mind control.
Get your Matroshka dolls kids. I heard you like Orwells so I put an Orwell in your Huxley so you got doublespeak in your feelies.
The point is that your understanding and thought processes about science fiction are very, very basic, and very simplistic, almost to the point of obvious uselessness. And even then you are being too shallow.
Brave New World doesn't just show people taking drugs and engaging in mindless entertainment. It also talks about raising kids from controlled test tube baby type labs, selecting and sorting them at birth into which class or caste they will be in for the rest of their lives, then indoctrinating them in those way throughout life. Only once they go through all that do the drugs and mindless entertainment come into play.
In the real world, we are far from this happening. Just as far from this happening as the events and politics that we read in 1984. But, and let me explain with simple words here, because you obviously aren't getting it: this doesn't matter. Neither book is a prediction. Neither book is right. Neither book is wrong. However, both books remain relevant, as their themes and ideas are still applicable in today's modern world.