Thread: Wikileaks reveals “TrapWire,” a government spy network that uses ordinary surveillance cameras

Originally Posted by Oneironaut Zero

I think it's absolutely the point, that: more people associating "police state" with Orwell makes it so hard for people to understand/fathom that we really are heading toward a [Huxlean?] police state.

There wasn't any police state in Huxley. ._.

Video surveillance = Orwellian.

Yeah, was gonna say the same thing. Huxley never wrote about a police state as far as I know.

Personally, and I think I've said this before, I think we will have a hybrid of the two. Actually, I think we already do have a hybrid of the two. But it will get worse.
Reality TV shows and celebrity gossip are taking care of Huxley's warning, while government spy agencies and some multinational corporations are using 1984 as a guidebook.

Originally Posted by tommo

Yeah, was gonna say the same thing. Huxley never wrote about a police state as far as I know.

Personally, and I think I've said this before, I think we will have a hybrid of the two. Actually, I think we already do have a hybrid of the two. But it will get worse.

Two parts Huxley, one part Orwell imo. We've devolved into a culture of complacency that isn't quite as numb to it all as Huxley's vision, but just enough so that Orwellian tactics can start being applied without a reaction from the masses.

i so scurrd :[

Originally Posted by Xei

There wasn't any police state in Huxley. ._.

Video surveillance = Orwellian.

Excuse me, I should have use quotation marks when I said "police state".

I am speaking about the covert level of control over the population that was displayed in Huxley's book - not the in-your-face, boot-stamping type in 1984. What went on in Brave New World was very much a level of control, brought about by conditioning. It was a system that 'policed itself', through indoctrination. I'm not talking about video surveillance, in this case. I'm talking about the subconscious and manipulative methods of control exerted over a population. Don't forget about what happened in Brave New World, when you 'went off your programming' and started thinking adversely to the system; you were exiled. That is very much a 'police state', and the relation between the two is what Huxley wrote to Orwell about in his letter. They both had visions of the way the government would control and manipulate their people. It is just that they had different visions. What Huxley envisioned was more a 'passively coerced' 'police state' than Orwell's, but they were two sides of the same coin.