- cross-posted to:
- socialism@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- socialism@lemmy.ml
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https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/huxleya-bravenewworldrevisited/huxleya-bravenewworldrevisited-00-h.html
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Tfw in Brave New World they got unlimited drugs and consequence-free sex while we're stuck with jingoism and Puritanism.
tfw when what people imagined to be a dystopia in 1930s starts to look pretty good compared to what we actually got
This but for all the GenX ennui media from the 90s. The job from office space looks like a goddamn dream these days
Same with stuff like Simpsons, where the idea of a single income family owning a house and having kids is unthinkable today.
It really does throw a monkey wrench in the Grand Narrative of Historical Progress.
nipping off in the time machine to kick a young Edward Bernays into the path of a streetcar
this presumes that living in this system is actually more fun and pleasurable than the alternative, which is blatantly incorrect (all pleasures are being slowly eroded away to increase profits)
It's kind of the same mechanic we see when monopolies form. Initially, companies will often produce a genuinely good product to beat their competition. Then once they get market dominance, the quality of the product starts to decline because it's the only game in town and the customers are already locked in.
society of the spectacle + brave new world = you're living in one yada yada yada
aldous wrote a book titled "The Perennial Philosophy" that I totally recommend just for edification about commonalities about mystic traditions separated by time and space (Huxley was an early acid head lol), but he said this thing in like the 40s about how advertising was the new, all pervading religious cosmology where we were all being instructed every moment in a value system of wasteful degradation of life and mass inhumanity. new is better than used, young is better than old, cleverness is better than wisdom, all is replaceable, nothing need be preserved or even studied.
I read those lines literally 20 years ago and not a season goes by that I don't feel haunted by the power and omnipresence of advertising -- and that some people saw it coming when it was just radio and billboards.
