• sab@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

    Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

    It’s been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn’t stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

    Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That’s why it’s useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

      You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.

      24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over “Confederate US AU” script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of “Nazi US AU”.

      Heck, you don’t even need fiction. Chile’s cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.

      • sab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you’re right, it’s probably been written many times - I’m not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there’s a lot of brilliant work out there. :)

    • If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

      You don’t need a sci-fi novel for that. History books are enough.

      • sab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)