The equation: 40 ounces of oats = 2 cartons of oat milk presupposes after all that both commodities cost equally much labour.
It's not oppressive in the same sense as typical violence, and certainly not as uncomfortable, but :graeber: did document what knowing deep down that what you do is lecherous and useless does to your psyche. Prognosis not good.
The coward who made this has included just one of the authors' first names purely to avoid using the word "Dickian".
attempting to compare reality to fictional dystopia always falls short, even when you shore it up with three other fictional dystopias
the truth is stranger than fiction
Yeah absolutely. Those stories are literally reflections of the time & place they were created, so by comparing the present day to them you're starting this weird postmodern logic-loop that can't offer any solutions or alternatives
Out of all of them Brave New World really nails it, the only one of the four that feels like a proper commentary on the way I live in the here and now.
Kafka comes in at second, if only because it is cathartic to read his stuff
Kafka gets really chilling when you realize all that bureaucratic oppression was done with nothing but a paper and pencil
No phones
No computers
No databases
No internet
No neural networks
No AI
Now they have all those things.
But, can desk jockeys and bureaucrats stop me from talking loudly about crazy niche porn genres I have found, while waiting in the queue? NOPE
kafka's bureacracy was never malicious it's an indifferent thing that chews up lives because it's easier to do what the paperwork says to than correct it even when that's wrong
I used to pirate a lot, maybe I just did it when it was easier to get away with it
For me it's Fahrenheit 451 that's closest to the mark.
For the last decade I've felt like the odd one out for having lots of books, but not having a car or a TV
I don't think a totalitarian regime can perpetuate itself unless it has access to all four domains: the police state sometimes throws bureaucracy at you, the bureaucracy sometimes throws hyperreality at you, the hyperreality sometimes tries to sell you stuff, and the shopping mall has loss prevention officers with a license to kill.
So, IMO the repeated use of the word 'rule' is a bit misleading because it's really just a single power structure. Solid meme otherwise.
Also the role of organized religion in all this has been neglected, so maybe we should add a fifth one and call it "Atwoodian".
Look, just eat your tin of fish and keep lathing a world where our children don't have to eat tins of corpse-starch and our grandchildren get to exist at all.
