
Amusing ourselves to death - akbarnama
http://onthepathofknowledge.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/amusing-ourselves-to-death/
======
macrael
What made Brave New World far more interesting to me than 1984 is that the bad
guys in 1984 are really clearly bad guys who hide behind an impossibly thin
veneer of public mindedness in order to live exactly as grandly as they want
whereas in Brave New World the man at the top truly believes that he is a
force for good in the world. His life is not a selfish one, not in the same
way, he just believes that most people are happier living in his pleasure
dome. He doesn't hate or fear the protagonist but instead he wants to help him
by spiriting him away from the happy drugged masses to let him live out his
life with the other people who don't want to live that way. It's an entirely
different kind of conflict and much much more compelling.

~~~
timje1
I agree, 1984 always seemed a bit 'Lord of the Rings' to me, with the dark
lords scheming in their towers.

Huxley presented a future in which the ruling class knows what the lower
classes need to be happy, and set that up nicely. Everyone wins!

~~~
teekert
Actually they create a lower class by adding alcohol into their incubation
chambers. The rich/smart make them stupid. They make them cheap laborers like
a dictator keeping the value of a currency low with respect to other
countries.

~~~
eru
That always bugged me about the novel.

On the one hand, they say that they can't have automation: they tried, and the
lower castes got too bored. On the other hand, they need the lower castes as
menial labours.

Do away with the alcohol, and add robots, and you'll have a much nicer
society.

~~~
macrael
Yeah, I felt like you could consider the novel without the class system and it
would be more interesting.

------
mercer
So here's a question that has been on my mind for a while. I regularly read
articles on some aspect of our society that is distressing. Articles such as
this one, as well as articles on 'consuming devices killing creativity',
'bite-sized articles keeping us from reading bigger material like books', 'our
school system turning us into automatons', and so on.

While I find myself agreeing with some of these articles based on my
observation of myself and others, I can't help but wonder to what degree they
actually apply to 'the larger population'.

All these people mindlessly consuming memes on their devices could be creating
something new instead. That's wasted potential. But would they in any other
time period, faced with the societal dangers of those times, be any more
creative?

All these people reading bite-sized articles could be reading meatier material
instead. Again, wasted potential. But there was a time were much of these
people couldn't even read, or didn't have access to much information, so any
reading and awareness of the world at large by chunks of the population is a
win anyways.

And before we had schools, didn't most people follow some other kind of pre-
determined path that shaped them to function appropriately in their respective
societies, losing potential in the process?

Basically, when discussing these supposed problems, are they really problems,
or do these things just fall short of what we can imagine, some potential that
we project on the entire population (which is not a bad reason for discussing
them, of course)? Isn't it the case that in any time period there are only
smaller subsections of people who create, research, and/or people who are
autodidacts that eschew a traditional education for something different?

Would those of us who are amusing ourselves to death not simply do something
else 'mindless' in previous generations?

~~~
gtirloni
If you think only about creating content, I think you have a very good
argument. Historically, not everybody was fit/interested in creating.

However, the underlying theme in these books seems to be one of freedom and
our destiny. I don't think they focus much on creation but more on assessing
reality and being able to change it.

In the past, at least in my 3rd world country, people were much more
interesting in politics, health, education, etc. Nowadays, most people are
happy to be distracted so I fully agree with the author here. Over and over,
political scandals abound, corruption is everywhere and made plain clear to
anyone who wants to see it.. yet, I don't see anyone complaining as they did
in the past. It seems we've reached a plateau and we're comfortable enough.
Distracted enough perhaps.

Perhaps the potential to create has kept the same, not very high, lots of
wasted potential. But the potential to be angry/worried about things that
matter seems to be going down the toilet lately. Just see how nobody besides
IT people and the media cares about the NSA scandal.

~~~
mercer
> In the past, at least in my 3rd world country, people were much more
> interesting in politics, health, education, etc.

I've been thinking about this too, but I can't help but wonder if the higher
interest in "politics, health, education, etc." wasn't just mindless
distraction in disguise. I grew up in a developing nation where it appeared
that people were more engaged with these sorts of things, but it every
discussion could be appended with '...but hey, that's the way it is'.

There are periods in time where a society is more engaged as a whole, and
there are subsections of society that are, among other things politically
engaged. Of course. But I truly wonder how different all that 'reading the
papers and discussing politics' actually is from 'looking at funny political
memes and reading short blog entries on what's wrong with the world'.

> Just see how nobody besides IT people and the media cares about the NSA
> scandal.

That is a good point. But have we historically really done much better in this
regard (other than some 'flare-ups' like the sixties)?

~~~
marcosdumay
It's my opinion (not completely fundamented) that people engage more on
aspects that they can change in some way. If they have no hope of changing
anything in politics, for example, it feels no better than watching sports, so
people flock to the later.

There were quite a lot of examples (all over the world) lately of people
protesting about politics that couldn't even decide what they wanted.

------
ChristianMarks
Now we have indications of the worst of both the Huxleyan and Orwellian
dystopias: an Internet designed to exacerbate the proclivity toward hyperbolic
discounting of the future, and runaway surveillance on a planetary scale.

~~~
sebastianconcpt
yeah, I agree that we have signals of both. It's like the two guard rails of
our runaway towards World State

------
llamataboot
If you are interested in a rather in-depth examination of this line of
thinking, I highly recommend Adam Curtis's 2002 documentary "The Century of
the Self"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self)

~~~
digitalengineer
Here is the entire series on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD989035A4E8883D](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAD989035A4E8883D)

Edit: It's there alright, but it's blocked by the BBC. Sorry guys. It's on the
interwebs but you'll have to do a quick look. I highly recommend it.

~~~
andyjohnson0
Full copies of all four episodes are downloadable from archive.org at
[https://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-
TheCenturyOfTheSelf](https://archive.org/details/AdamCurtis-
TheCenturyOfTheSelf)

------
detcader
I never finished 1984 but both seem to ignore the ultimate driving force
behind both authoritarianism _and_ consumerism that continues to rule the
world, money and capitalism. In 1984, or at least this comic, power and
violence seems to happen for their own sake, "power corrupting power", and
similarly for Huxley's hedonism. The comic claims "Huxley feared those who
would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity..." uh no, no one
just gives us TV and distractions, they _sell it to us._

Maybe that's a shallow analysis, and if so, tell me: where is the aspect of
capital in either work?

~~~
dalek_cannes
> ultimate driving force behind both authoritarianism and consumerism that
> continues to rule the world, money and capitalism

I would say the problem is any social structure that allows money to buy
power, i.e. that allows the translation of economic power into political power
(and vice versa). Either we should prevent that, or consider placing a cap on
maximum per-capita economic power (preferably as a factor of the average, not
unlike the Swiss proposal for CEO salaries).

A person should be able to buy as many yachts, castles or private jets as he
wants, but using his money to lobby, campaign or otherwise influence political
process -- perhaps that should be severely limited?

Civilization and technology today allows individual human beings to wield far
higher concentrations of power than our psychology evolved to deal with. A
good social system should cap it below the threshold where people go crazy
(i.e. where our brains malfunction).

~~~
m_mueller
As a Swiss and living within the Swiss political system I firmly believe that
laws alone can never be enough to keep people from getting too much power.
Instead, implementing and defending a democracy that actually deserves its
name, as in a system where the majority of people keep the last say in the law
making process, instead of just letting them delegate that right every few
year, is what keeps the system stable and everyone in check. Besides the
direct effect on the law, this has two positive effects that most people don't
quite seem to grasp when arguing about direct vs. indirect democracy:

\- People tend to be more content with the laws they need to follow. Even if
they lost on a vote its easier to accept in a system where its an actual
majority behind it instead of just some removed cabal that you can only elect
based on some pamphlet information every few years.

\- Politicians in such a system tend to think ahead in terms of what can and
cannot be popular with the people. They do so not only for the election years
(which don't have that great of an importance here, not only because of direct
democracy but also because of the way our federal government is formed by all
major parties) but whenever delicate issues are coming up. One example I'd
attribute to this effect is our liberal online piracy laws and our seemingly
better protected privacy. When we had our own small scale Snowden affair in
the 80ies it blew up into a huge scandal leading to the resignation of a
federal council member ('Fichenaffäre',
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal)).

------
cooop
Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1931. Is anyone aware of the technologies or
behaviours at the time that inspired the novel?

I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that culture was very different then and
have been always been curious as to how he came to his prediction.

~~~
greenyoda
The selective breeding of humans as "alphas", "betas", etc. may have been
inspired by the eugenics movement[1], which had prominent supporters in the
U.K. at the time (e.g., Winston Churchill).[2] Except that in the novel,
instead of just getting rid of "inferior" people, they actively bred them into
a servant caste. (After Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, it became much less
respectable.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#Supporters_and_critics)

------
clienthunter
I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state
of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it
has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of
hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing.

I have problems with this.

In order to decide that something is bad, we need to have an idea of what is
good. Where does that come from here? The past? Your imagination? Do you
'miss' the olden days of constant strife, peril, religion that moulded those
who survived into wise old men and women, their minds enriched by the fullness
of life, but their bodies cold, wet, and illness-ridden from the lack of
modern technology? Perhaps you miss the 'community' vibe of the 1950's. Or
your own childhood. Or perhaps you dream of your own utopia. Am I close?

I hope the point made in the above paragraph is self evident, but in case it's
not, ask yourself how many of your alternative realities you've actually
experienced, and how many are just ideas you've accrued with the blanks
liberally filled in by educated guesses and imaginations. Try and find one
that isn't. Got one? Good.

Now let's plan. How would you - or anyone - transform the whole of society
from what we have today to your new utopia? Plan it out. Perhaps government
has to do something. Perhaps government has to go. You're almost certainly
going to face dissent - perhaps some people need to face some hard realities
for a short time, you know, in the transition period. Think like this for a
while. I don't think it will be long before 1984 starts to take shape.

Let's categorise society. Let's construct a hypothetical index in our minds
that tracks intelligence/education/income in a single number (the actual
equation isn't relevant). Assume it's normally distributed[0]. Let's also
assume that the kind of person who sympathises with the article in this link
is in the top 25% (far right quarter), so put yourself up there. Let's
consider the bottom 55% - the kind of people whose chief pleasures in our
Brave New World may be TV, alcohol, taking selfies, incorrect spelling in text
messages, Facebook, Instagram, Candy Crush, etc. - they're not massively
intellectual.

Where exactly do these people (who I posit construct the majority of our
_actual_ society) fit in to your new utopia, assuming you managed the
transition without creating 1984? Are they suddenly reading books, in a
newfound passion for learning? Maybe they accept their place in their world,
respectfully keeping quiet in reverence to their overlords, the intelligensia.
Can you fit them in anywhere whilst maintaining the utopia?

This thought experiment should be difficult by this point. I say it's
impossible.

If you are not in the bottom 55% of our hypothetical index, there is a great
wealth of things out there to please you. Almost all activities are in reach
of the average person now. You have books, the ability to travel, the
internet, base jumping, mountaineering, arctic exploration, even space travel
is expected to be affordable within most of our lifespans. You probably know
this already, I guess you're probably happy enough with your own life and
world. The discomfort you feel is with the rest of us 'out there', right?

Society is reflective of its components. People will seek to maximise
happiness and pleasure under given constraints. This has always been and will
always be so. It is the essence of humanity. The simple truth is that the
industrial and technical revolutions of late have loosened those constraints
by many orders of magnitude, and now instead of dog-fighting, back-room card
games, duels, 24-hour boozing, or whatever it was the bottom 55% used to do
'back in the day', they have other things. Like you, they are who they are: a
conflagration of nature/nurture forces that amount to a personality.

The difference is that instead of making use of all things available in the
world to please you, you've chosen to spend your time sat on your high horse
looking down on them, wishing they were different, so that the view from up
there was a little nicer.

    
    
      [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution

~~~
lmm
How's this?

There's a difference between what we want and what we enjoy. You see this most
clearly in drug addicts - no, in compulsive gamblers: they desperately want
their fix, but aren't any happier when they're doing it. But the same effect
is in play for all of us, in more subtle form. You can find it in people who
are trying to write: they enjoy writing, but they don't want to do it, have to
force themselves to start.

There's a pattern in this. People enjoy improving themselves, enjoy learning
even - but most people don't want it. Strikingly, if you have people make the
choice for their future selves, they prefer the self-improvement option; if
you offer someone a choice between, say, a ticket to a museum exhibition, or a
couple of free drinks (at equal price), in three months' time, most will
choose the exhibition. But if you give them the choice for tonight, they'll
take the drinks - and when choosing in their own lives, that's what they tend
to prefer. Even if they're going to enjoy them less.

So the best way to make people happy isn't just to give them what they ask
for. A paternalistic intervention where you, say, banned certain kinds of
entertainment, and funded others, might well result in people living lives
they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves.

~~~
elohesra
> A paternalistic intervention [...] might well result in people living lives
> they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that the pater making the
decisions is wiser and more able to make correct decisions for others than
others themselves. In a utopia, the decision maker might be the smartest,
wisest person alive, with a nigh god-like ability to discern what's best for
everyone. In reality, the decision maker is just a regular Joe. Worse, in
democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to primarily be
chosen solely on the basis of social class (when did you last see a genuinely
lower class politico?) -- there is absolutely no reason to believe that the
leader has cognitive abilities that are above those of the population.

In a utopia, a paternalist system would work because the decisions made by the
pater would be better than those made by the populace. In reality, it results
in USSR supermarkets stuffed with canned tomatoes because the ever-wise pater
wasn't even able to predict people's most basic wants.

~~~
bananacurve
>in democracies like the US and UK -- where potential leaders seem to
primarily be chosen solely on the basis of social class

Maybe that is true in the UK, but that is clearly not the case in the US,
unless you are going to try to argue that Obama is a WASP.

~~~
lmm
"WASP" is not a social class. Obama is a Harvard-educated lawyer.

~~~
bananacurve
Obama's father went to Harvard but his grandfather was a cook. Hardly a
pedigree.

~~~
pyre
Obama is president, not his father. He grew up as a lawyer's son, not in a
working-class household.

------
mietek
Better quality direct from the comic author:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110411085435/http://www.recombi...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110411085435/http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-
Ourselves-to-Death.html)

Removed from his website on request of Neil Postman estate:

[http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-
ours...](http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/cartoon-blog/amusing-ourselves-to-
death/)

~~~
mxfh
as with any original content that is older than the average HN user memory
threshold, which somewhere between 9 months and 3 years, there is also an old
thread for it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=627476)
1687 days ago | 17 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1554733)
1259 days ago | 81 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4607098)
461 days ago | 79 comments

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5433283)
289 days ago | 17 comments

[EDIT] well, there at least 5 now, including this one.

------
lotsofcows
Why is that whenever I read something like, "Most of us will read this and
continue living our life exactly the same way as before …wake up", my
immediate response is, "Fuck off, you patronising wanker"?

I think it's probably the author's assumption that they're on to something new
- a thought that doesn't recur over and over again:

[http://www.tor.com/images/stories/blogs/13_10/BadForYou-
tech...](http://www.tor.com/images/stories/blogs/13_10/BadForYou-techno-panic-
timeline.jpg)

~~~
bigdubs
James May, of all people, has repeatedly held the position that things are
getting better and not worse.

I generally agree with this. It's important to be vigilant but a little
optimism goes a long way as well.

------
rikkus
If you like your depressing stories in musical form, try listening to 'Amused
to Death' by Roger Waters, inspired by the book. Great album.

If you want to amuse yourself while listening, make sure you have your
speakers set up so the stereo effect on the barking dog at the start sounds
like it's coming from outside. Also make sure your system can cope with the
sound of the bomb dropping.

~~~
hexasquid
Apparently titled as a reference to the book.

------
RankingMember
In that it relates to information glut causing lost focus/awareness, this
reminds me of the curse of the hyperlink in Wikipedia. I can start off reading
about the early history of the Chevy 350 and end up reading about the Heaven's
Gate cult an hour and a half later, wondering what the hell I sat down to do
in the first place.

I've come to learn that recording goals/making lists is key to being
productive when there's so much other stuff vying for my attention and trying
to throw me off course. I used to think I could just keep everything in my
head, but that's just not worked.

------
jbb555
We seem to have got both

~~~
nekopa
I would take it a step further and say we have Orwell because we've fallen
into Huxley.

------
bigs204
What's sad is that the original author of the comic was forced to take it down
due to request from Estate of Neil Postman's. You'd think their estate would
want his ideas spread.

------
ianbicking
Seeing this Brave New World thing pop up again. OMG sheeple wake up! People
have become passive, drowned in irrelevance!

I find this line of discourse dehumanizing. "People" apparently includes
everyone but the reader. Some would claim this is the conceit of such
critique, a claim that only the reader sees the world for what it really is,
the reader (and writer) are better than everyone else. But this kind of
critique has gone on too long for me to feel this way – instead I think these
critiques erase the reader, erase the idea of constructive engagement, they
don't say "you, reader, are the smart one!" instead they say "you are stupid
and purposeless, not even worthy of critique, instead I shall turn my eye to
only the unnamed masses!"

People need to stop talking about "people". Neil Postman should stop talking
about "people". Have the guts to say who you are talking about. Or if more
likely you are only talking about archetypes, step up and acknowledge the
universal inapplicability of archetypes to real people, each of whom is better
than your out-of-focus description. When you multiple out individuals into a
group you don't get a teaming mass – maybe YOU can only appreciate those
individuals as a teaming mass, but don't project the limits of your perception
onto those individuals. Life is bigger than any one goddamned sci-fi story.

------
FollowSteph3
I find that every generation thinks this of the next. For example here's what
the early 1800's thought of students using paper:
[http://i.imgur.com/Od2BB51.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Od2BB51.jpg) These kinds
of declaration have been going on for centuries. There will always be some
people who waste their time and others that produce. You can't produce, even
low brow media, without some active members of the population who have to
first create it ;)

~~~
trendoid
Its not just about creating, its also what these people are creating and whats
the incentive to create? Do these creators ever think about the repercussions
of their creations on the society? If your creation is not motivating people
to create themselves or even making them learn something interesting, I am not
sure if its the ideal creation.

~~~
FollowSteph3
It's a catch-22. You can't have content without creators, and if the content
gets so bad that no one creates anymore, then you have no new content, which
means you get more creators. It's an oscillation.

~~~
trendoid
I was actually addressing this line of yours :

>There will always be some people who waste their time and others that
produce.

The people who are producing are creating content which encourages people to
waste time. Producers will say 'we are just making what people want' but the
problem is that most people don't know what they want. Its not like they watch
5-6 hours of TV and go to sleep feeling good about themselves. Producers will
keep creating that since it equals shit loads of money but concomitantly it
also ends up making majority of population less creative, less informed and
more distracted.

------
frou_dh
Something I found surprisingly infuriating lately is that on the YouTube app
for iOS, you can be watching a video full-screen and, _before the video is
even finished_ , a thing slides up from the bottom about what it wants you to
watch next. Fuck off! I'm still trying to watch the one video I elected to see
and it's already trying to herd me down the attention deficit rathole.

~~~
triangleman
YouTube app... for iOS... there's your problem right there.

~~~
frou_dh
I have no idea what you're talking about. My specific complaint aside, the
dedicated app is far more responsive and reliable to use than the mobile site,
as is often the case when there's a choice.

------
teekert
Lately I have kept repeating to myself: You can either spend your time
consuming or you can spend your time creating.

I have always felt guilty deep inside when watching something and not learning
anything from it, I try to find that one thing, that small part of philosophy
in a television series and use it as a motivation to watch (like the line: "We
are the universe trying to figure itself out" and the stuff about humanity
growing up in Babylon 5). But the feeling of uselessness kept creeping up.

Recently I have just told myself flat out: Just make something, I felt
increasingly restless while watching TV. And it feels good, I make lego
contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my RPi(s). It feels
good. I don't know why but ever since I was I kid I have felt this, very
deeply and only in the last year have I actually expressed it in words.

I have read 1984 and Brave new world in the last 3 years and they hit some
sensitive spots for, must reads if you ask me.

~~~
CmonDev
"I make lego contraptions with my son, I make leds blink with Python on my
RPi(s)." \- just a different type of consumption. Unless you are building
something conceptually new.

~~~
teekert
But it still qualifies as learning something new. Over time I'm building the
basis for building something conceptually new.

Perhaps this feeling is difficult to put in words, it feels very significant
to me.

------
angersock
Waaaay back in highschool I read both 1984 and Brave New World (same weekend,
even...come Monday I was extremely depressed), and came to a similar
conclusion--because really, who wants to fight love?

Given the modern drive for micro-optimizing every bit of one's life (looking
at you, /4 Hour.*/) there is a much better dystopic story out there by Harlan
Ellison:

[http://compositionawebb.pbworks.com/f/%5C%27Repent,+Harlequi...](http://compositionawebb.pbworks.com/f/%5C%27Repent,+Harlequin!%5C%27+Said+the+Ticktockman+by+Harlan+Ellison.pdf)

And perhaps even more appropriately, given the themes of impersonally evil
bureaucracy and supposed terrorism, the movie Brazil:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_%281985_film%29)

------
crazygringo
Doesn't practically every high schooler (in the U.S. at least) read both
books, be assigned an essay to ask which one has happened, and then come to
the conclusion that we're far more like Brave New World? As a foreword to a
book, this isn't exactly original stuff.

But there's also a counterpoint, which is that all the distraction, or the
pleasure, or gossip, or whatever it is -- that's the stuff that it means to be
human. We don't just mindlessly watch TV -- we talk about it with friends,
joke about it, have fun with it. When a man comes home after a hard day of
work, and wants to unwind by watching Celebrity Apprentice with his wife, I
think sometimes people are a little to quick to judge. Everybody needs their
'guilty pleasures'. That doesn't mean that's all we are.

~~~
cincinnatus
I'm afraid most are only exposed to 1984 and then reassure themselves we
dodged that bullet.

------
merloen
Another take on Huxley's dystopia (if you can call it that) is this:
[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-
optimal](http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal)

Much deeper and scarier than you'd expect given the setting.

------
arca_vorago
I've seen this cartoon before, and honestly I think people are trying to pick
either or (1984 or Brave New World), and are missing the more nuanced side of
it.

My simplified summary though, is this: Brave New World for the masses, and
1984 for anyone who wakes up and tries to change it.

Also, that people talk about both authors works but neglect to discuss their
British secret and not-so-secret society connections seems to create a sort of
superficial aura of debate around the two. Frankly, the books only scratch the
surface, but TPTB have done an excellent job at making any even potential
association with the title "conspiracy theorist" a thing to be feared. (and
plenty of the theorists themselves have helped in that cause)

------
swombat
Anyone actually read that book? Would you recommend it?

~~~
da02
Alan Kay recommended it. He kept bringing it up. I finally read it last week.
It's awesome. I think you can apply what people did with the TV to how people
use social media: a series of interruptions.

Someone posted the pdf of the 20th anniv. edition. Google: Amusing Ourselves
to Death pdf

~~~
dingfeng_quek
It could be depressing as well, since the described effects correspond to the
erosion of many important public institutions (like democratic governance).

Seems like this decade is a good time for an update on this issue, now that
entertainment technologies are ubiquitous and totally attention grabbing, and
cognitive psychology gives it good scientific grounding.

------
ableal
An even older (1960s, I think) clip featuring Marshall McLuhan, still rather
relevant on the topic

[http://www.openculture.com/2010/04/marshall_mcluhan_the_worl...](http://www.openculture.com/2010/04/marshall_mcluhan_the_world_is_a_global_village_.html)

The keywords here were "Individual man is out, tribal man is in".

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guloizo
Please respect the comic author and text author and stop reposting this. See:
[http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-
Ourse...](http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-
Death.html)

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Vektorweg
Orwell is right. Humans can learn to "survive" in a free information age, but
can't live freely in a observed environment.

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StavrosK
I never understood why Brave New World is a dystopia. To me, it always seemed
to be saying "yes, everyone's happy all the time, but our current values are
marginalized!", which is just the appeal to tradition fallacy.

Can someone please explain to me what's bad about everyone being happy all the
time? "They aren't happy in ways that currently make _us_ happy!" isn't a
strong argument...

~~~
onion2k
The people in BNW aren't happy per se. Anyone with a desire to do anything
outside of the accepted norm is outcast. They have no freedom. They only
really have the illusion of happiness. Whether that's enough is the
fundamental question the book asks.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, it's been a while and I don't remember that. Who was cast out?

~~~
marcosdumay
The protagonist.

------
pmorici
Two different means to the same end. Whats the old saying about Rome, "bread
and circuses"?

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onedev
Man I couldn't even make it past all the comics without getting depressed and
frustrated.

------
return0
First world problems.

~~~
angersock
Gilded cages are still cages.

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sidcool
What is the solution of this quandary?

~~~
kristofferR
And what's the problem with it?

I surely think a lot of popular culture is stupid/a waste of time, but as long
as I (and others) have the freedom to freely chose more "fruitful" things to
do with our time - then what's the big deal?

~~~
normloman
You have less freedom than you think. Timesinks are addictive. We've all
clicked on a link-bait headline, even though we knew it would waste our time,
because the text was so enticing. And most can remember playing a boring video
game longer than they wanted because they were distracted by some manipulative
aspect of the game (need another level / badge / chicken on my farm). It's
gotten so bad, people regularly refer to MMORPGS as "skinner-boxes."

With effort, and focus, we all can give up today's addictive timesinks. But
when we're assaulted by the timesinks on an hourly basis, it's not as easy as
you think.

~~~
kristofferR
Sure, but what's the alternative?

Should the government ban stupid stuff in order to force people into "more
satisfying pleasures" though a "moral ecology" that discourages
addictive/pointless things?

~~~
normloman
No.

~~~
kristofferR
Exactly.

