Instead of Winston Smith, we have billions of social media users. Instead of the Ministry of Truth, we have fake news. Instead of a camera in every dingy post-war London apartment, we have smartphones in all of our pockets. Instead of Big Brother, Shoshana Zuboff gives us Big Tech. Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism, now the gold standard of digital dystopianism, is a clever remix of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Most of the contemporary critics (including myself) of the digital revolution have gone the Orwellian route. In the mid 1980s, when everyone was glued to their television screens, the New York University media scholar believed, we lived in an Age of Show Business rather than of Big Brother. Huxley was right and Orwell wrong, Postman believed. He argued that we expected to be living in Nineteen Eighty-Four but actually found ourselves in Brave New World. Neil Postman told us that we had it wrong. There are those twin pillars of 20th-century dystopianism, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.Īnd then there’s Neil Postman’s 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, which warns that we can’t have both our Huxley and our Orwell and requires us to choose between them.

During the COVID pandemic, for example, Albert Camus’s La Peste became so memetic that I had to ban my Keen On guests from talking about it in the recommended books feature at the end of the show. Some books, with their seemingly timeless messages and warnings, never go out of fashion.

Huxley and orwell