#neil postman

[amandapostman]

My great uncle is Neil Postman, who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book that critiqued the prevalence of television as a means for conveying information versus providing entertainment, and now I really want to resurrect him and get his opinion on Tenna.

Me: So there’s a character who’s the personification of a television, right? And his raison d’etre is to entertain the main characters of the video game— that’s kind of like an interactive television show— so much so that they stay with him in his world and away from their real-life problems, like how you described television as a version of “soma” from Huxley’s Brave New World. But he himself is just as affected by those real-life problems as the protagonist, and his flashy, attention-grabbing persona is really just a bid to be loved as he slowly becomes outdated, paralleling the main character’s isolation in the aftermath of their parents’ divorce. How does that affect your view that television is a means to advertise lifestyles rather than convey information?

Neil: Donald Trump is president?

Me: Oh, and he’s implied to have previously been in a romantic relationship with the personification of a spam email— gay marriage is legal now, by the way— which, while a newer technology than television, is also becoming obsolete, and is also centered around being attention grabbing and spreading misinformation. Does the inclusion of this relationship imply that genuine connection can be found through the spectacle of these media forms, or does the relationship’s failure condemn both television and internet as vapid reflections of true connection?

Neil: The media gave Donald Trump enough free publicity that he became president?

[kafkasapartment]

"But in Huxley's (Brave New World) vision, no Big Brother (Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Textbooks are concerned with presenting the facts of the case (whatever the case may be) as if there can be no disputing them, as if they are fixed and immutable. And still worse, there is usually no clue given as to who claimed these are the facts of the case, or how "it" discovered these facts (there being no he or she, or I or we). There is no sense of the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error. Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth.

Neil Postman, The End of Education, p. 116

[unsolicited-opinions]

Why they hate Huxley

A few recent comments and reblogs have taken issue with the idea that the works of Aldous Huxley are an important defense against the propaganda challenges of our time.

But Postman was right:

"Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us" is terrifyingly relevant to the mid 2020s.

We're not living in Orwell's nightmare of enforced ignorance and pain, we're living in Huxley's nightmare of voluntary distraction and pleasure.

We're drowning in:

Infinite scroll and algorithmically optimized engagement which has made propaganda more effective and widespread than ever before

Outrage as entertainment

Complex policy reduced to memes and hot takes

Complex peoples reduced to black-and-white moral caricatures

The transformation of citizenship into spectatorship and team sports

"Discourse" that's really just performance

What makes this particularly insidious and aligned with Huxley's warning is that nobody is forcing us to watch TikTok for hours, let it reprogram our brains, or reduce politics to team sports. We're doing it willingly because it feels good, because it's easier than sustained attention, because trivial culture is more fun than serious engagement.

That's how we know we're living in Huxley's Brave New World.

The Huxley-deriding replies and reblogs fixate on his coming from an elite, well-off, British, intellectual family, but those who dismiss him as an elite snob are doing exactly what he warned about, using a simple, emotionally satisfying dismissal (eg. priviledged white guy = bad/wrong) to avoid grappling with uncomfortable truths about how we've all become complicit in our own intellectual infantilization.

Why do people reach for this particular class-based line of attack when I make an argument about Huxley's prescience regarding media and propaganda?

Ad hominem deflection: It's easier to dismiss ideas by attacking the messenger than to engage with whether Huxley was actually right about soma-like escapism, entertainment as distraction, or technological control. If they can make Huxley seem unsympathetic or out-of-touch, they don't have to grapple with how his warnings apply to our current media landscape. Thinking too hard is scary.

Academic Class Bias: Many online fat-left critics see Huxley as a stand-in for a kind of British paternalism or condescension. They aren't necessarily responding to what he wrote, but to the archetype they've constructed. A soft-spoken Oxbridge intellectual wringing his hands about pleasure while ignoring material injustice.

Discomfort with cultural self-critique: Huxley's critique lands hardest on us. Our appetite for distraction, our complicity in choosing comfort over thought, our thirst for spectacle. That makes some readers bristle. Dismissing Huxley lets them redirect attention away from their own eager participation in the system which is actively manipulating them.

It's easier to dismiss Huxley as a privileged pessimist than to ask what he actually saw coming and examine how close we are to living in it.

It's more comfortable and satisfying to mock the man warning us that this comfort will be our undoing. It's unsettling to realize the undoing is already underway.

If Huxley was right, they have to face that we didn't lose our freedom, we traded it willingly for dopamine, for distraction and for emotional resonance.

That's hard to protest and feel righteous about because there's no villain to topple...just thousands of tiny daily choices we're already making...and making poorly.

For some, taking that much responsibility for themselves is both too frightening and too much work.

[tuttle-did-it]

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

[ofruinsandmyth]

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984 (the book), Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure." In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

— Neil Postman

[dabiconcordia]

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares." ― Neil Postman

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Poetic Outlaws :: @OutlawsPoetic

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”

― Neil Postman