For example, Orwell (in 1984) focused on the filtering, manipulation, constriction and reconstruction of information in order to continuouly redraw the history / truth. But today the truth is something that's often just as fuzzy because we're overwhelmed with too much information and too many distractions. Different means, same ends (read: confused and manipulated proles).
But it's the ends that matter. Both Huxley and Orwell have warned us. The irony is, at this point, too few are paying attention.
And IMO that realization is a sort of "coming of age" that isn't in any way unique to modern generations.
When you become an adult and realize that the people running the show are just humans like you...
And that anyone selling you a simple "one right perspective" is only selling you part of the truth.
These days media organisations cause outrage for the sole purpose of getting you mad, only to read the article and realise the title is nonsense and you've just given them ad money.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."
I stand with Nir (and Huxley). These technologies are powerful, but that doesn't make them evil. They can be used for good.
I would not describe it like this. Proponents of technology but critics of the rationality it has created exist, most notably Marcuse. He criticises the development both in the capitaliat countries abd the USSR from a Marxist perspective in One-Dimensional Man, a widely acclaimed analysis of the rationality of creating false needs. Please read it, you may like it given your viewpoint. He very well integrates the last paragraph of your comment. Man is one-dimensional due to the rise of technological rationality in all expression, sexual, artistic and leisure. Nothing remains undominated, not even the great unknowns of nature and the human mind. Everything is integrated and rational through paradoxical irrationality of overproduction and false manufactured needs through advertisement.
This is true locally, but globally and taken to the extreme it's a nightmare. People don't know what they want, and if you were to give them everything they wanted, you would destroy them. Take a look at anybody who's suddenly come into a lot of fame and fortune. The results are usually appalling.
We're all children and eschew what is good for us, just as adults we're cognisant of that failing.
Companies use our gluttony and greed to develop a desire in us, then fulfill that desire. The most financially profitable companies don't just give us what we want, they tell us first what we want, then sell it us.
Viz: You want to be lusted after by women, seen as powerful, make men jealous; our watch will do that for you; buying our watch will give you all you want.
Yes, agreed, globally is pathological, but it achieves the ends of Capitalism, making the rich richer off the backs of the poor man's labour.
We developed our own environment into a state in which we are not optimally adapted to it anymore.
>Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.
-The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)
Sounds like the current media panic about terrorism, etc.
> [...] technology will entertain us to stupidity, apathy and alienation [...]
Perhaps a combination of both. The whole concept is as old as the Roman empire, [1].
http://www.anorak.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/huxley-or...
I find your comment rather ignorant. It's entirely possible that the scenarios can in some way coexist. I'd also argue that for 2001 and The Matrix, technological danger is not the main subject.
The traditional Hollywood criticism on technology goes along the lines of Frankenstein, Metropolis, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Terminator and Matrix: technology will control us. I find it dumb, frankly.
Then there is the political criticism along the lines of George Orwell and some Luddites: technology is a tool for control and domination either by governments or evil capitalists. It is not totally wrong (e.g.: China, Turkey) but not the exact true sometimes.
But the Huxley criticism is, for me, the most interesting: technology will entertain us to stupidity, apathy and alienation. This seems to be very much the case in here.