Re:Mother
by mortenjorck on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:21PM
(#7060798)
Even allowing for a language barrier, this has to be the most overtly Huxleyan branding I've seen on a consumer product. It's unnerving.
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Hm, my candidate:
A couple standing in front of an ATM, she ovviously pregnant, on the screen there is an image of a house, speech bubble "Oh! How does it know we were thinking of moving to a bigger home?"
Saw this on a wall in the conference room of an ATM maker, about 10 years ago...
considering Futurama's "Mom" character, it's even more uncanny.
Re:Mother
by allochthon on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @11:03PM
(#7061601)
this has to be the most overtly Huxleyan branding I've seen on a consumer product
Which isn't necessarily a bad thing for the product they're selling, which is both cool and odd in a 1984 kind of way.
1984 was Orwell. Huxley was Brave New World.
Also, it seemed to me that the dichotomy set up in BNW is that "natural is good and right, artificial or new is bad" - one that has soured me on Huxley basically since when I first read it.
The author commented on that in his foreword of later editions of the book. He said something along the lines that if he was writing the novel later in his life, the dichotomy wouldn't be as pointed.
I think "mother knows best" would have been much less creepy.