The term “agents of control” likely evokes the great dystopian image of Big Brother, the classic literary symbol of totalitarianism, historically realized to a significant degree in the Soviet Union. The regime exercised a monopoly of power from its command economy to its state-run education and media to its vast propaganda machine—all of which aimed to control the horizon of meaning.
However gripping it might have been, this is not the specter that haunts us now. We won the Cold War, after all. The Iron Curtain fell, the Berlin Wall crumbled.
And yet, there is a widespread sense of insecurity about our freedom, about the omnipresence of things that control us, not from a single center but from multiple loci. These are what we might call “meta-agents of control,” and their ambition is every bit as vast as a totalitarian regime. They seek a monopoly over our attention, a colonization of our consciousness. Enter the metaverse where real things are steadily replaced by simulacra and identities by avatars. As Mark Zuckerberg enthused when announcing this next frontier in virtual technology: “Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future.” For this new generation of agents of control—whether it be the purveyors of AI, chatbots, or VR headsets—the key is to render us dependent upon digital technology, which entails at root an overturning of a traditional understanding of the world as good and of reality as compelling. In the bracing words of software engineer Marc Andreessen, for most of humanity “their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.”
Though media critic and educator Neil Postman died before the advent of these technologies, he could have predicted their invention because they spring from the logic and dynamism of modern technology, which appeals to the basic human drive to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. If unchecked and undisciplined by higher principles, this drive can lull us into a state of arrested emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. Postman witnessed this already fifty years ago when the only digital technology on offer for most people was the television. Its effects were doleful but limited by the size and mass of the machine. Now, the ever-thinner, ever-lighter screen is everywhere, invading all spaces without discrimination, private, public, sacred, profane. Our devices—the medium of the “meta-agents of control”—are undermining our capacity for sustained attention, awareness of our surroundings, and our taste for real human presence. To invoke Wordsworth’s poignant phrasing, “For this, for everything, we are out of tune / It moves us not.”
As Neil Postman astutely observes in the following selection, the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking/Penguin Random House, 2006; first ed. 1985), we’re in a dystopia, different from Orwell’s to be sure, but no less threatening, and the new Big Brother fits comfortably in our pockets.
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.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
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, 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, 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.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.
Neil Postman was an American scholar and prolific author whose work focused on culture, communication and the critique of mass media. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, one of his most notable and prophetic books, was translated into sixteen languages.
Dr. Jeanne Schindler is a Fellow of the John Paul II Institute. Until 2013 she was an associate professor at Villanova University. Dr. Schindler’s intellectual interests are interdisciplinary, integrating philosophy, theology, and political science. She has lectured and published in a variety of areas, including Catholic social thought and democratic theory. She edited Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives (2008) and co-edited with her husband, D.C. Schindler, A Robert Spaemann Reader (Oxford University Press, 2015). Dr. Schindler is a homeschooling mother of three children.
