July 15th, 2018
Videos in contrast
While NYC has overnight train delays and problems and such... so walking is better than taking a bus... that may or may not actually come on time or actually be running in the middle of the night. This video was originally livestreamed on Facebook, so I am chatting in real time with the people that are watching this video. So names and possibly other personal details may be discussed. No, I do not know why there is CGI confetti and snow in the video... I prolly accidently clicked something when I started recording...
My dystopia is better than yours
On October 21, 1949, a few months after the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell received a letter from Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World had been published 17 years earlier. Huxley concludes:
Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency. Meanwhile, of course, there may be a large-scale biological and atomic war—in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.
— Adapted from Letters of Note, Volume 2