Sunday, November 24, 2013

Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and right about now.

An article quite good with coffee in front of the fire on a chilly November Sunday.

Aldous Huxley, CS Lewis and JFK all died on the same day in 1963, and amid the media fixation with the 50th anniversary of the assassination, I found myself thinking about Huxley and Soma. The craft beer movement currently is on a Soma-as-guiding-principle kick, isn't it?

Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopia ... CS Lewis may be getting a plaque. But Huxley, for his foretelling of a society that loves servitude, is the true visionary, by John Naughton (The Guardian)

... For one of the ironies of history is that visions of our networked future can be bracketed by the imaginative nightmares of Huxley and his fellow Etonian George Orwell. Orwell feared that we would be destroyed by the things we fear – the state surveillance apparatus so vividly evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley's nightmare, set out in Brave New World, his great dystopian novel, was that we would be undone by the things that delight us.

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