Aldous Huxley Explains How Guy Become “the Sufferer of His Personal Generation” (1961)

Only a cou­ple of days in the past, Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner tweet­ed out a video professional­mot­ing, “the brand new iPad Professional: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The reaction has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for plenty of view­ers, the advert’s imagery of a hydraulic press overwhelm­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, artwork sup­plies, and vin­tage input­tain­ment right into a sin­gle pill inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fortress they’ve lengthy felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion prior to now cou­ple of a long time. Because the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Weigh down­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to professional­duce a homog­e­nized emblem­ed slab is pret­ty a lot the place the tech indus­check out is at in 2024.”

One gained­ders whether or not this is able to have sur­prised Aldous Hux­ley. He beneath­stood, as he explains in the 1961 BBC inter­view above, that “when you plant the seed of implemented sci­ence or tech­nol­o­gy, it professional­ceeds to develop, and it grows accord­ing to the regulations of its personal being. And the regulations of its being aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the similar because the regulations of our being.”

Even six a long time in the past, he and cer­tain oth­ers had the sense, which has since develop into truthful­ly com­mon, that “guy is being sub­ject­ed to his personal inven­tions, that he’s now the vic­tim of his personal tech­nol­o­gy”; that “the devel­op­ment of new social and sci­en­tif­ic his­to­ry has cre­at­ed an international by which guy appears to be made for tech­nol­o­gy moderately than the oth­er manner round.”

Hav­ing writ­ten his acclaimed dystopi­an nov­el Courageous New International thir­ty years ear­li­er, Hux­ley was once estab­lished as a seer of pos­si­ble tech­nol­o­gy-dri­ven overall­i­tar­i­an futures. He beneath­stood that “we’re a lit­tle reluc­tant to embark upon tech­nol­o­gy, to permit tech­nol­o­gy to take over,” however that, “in the end, we gen­er­al­ly suc­cumb,” permit­ing our­selves to be mas­tered through our personal cre­ations. On this, he resem­bles the Julia of Byron’s Don Juan, who, “whis­in line with­ing ‘I can ne’er con­despatched’ – con­despatched­ed.” Hux­ley additionally knew that “it’s pos­si­ble to make peo­ple con­tent with their servi­tude,” much more effec­tive­ly in moder­ni­ty than antiq­ui­ty: “you’ll professional­vide them with bread and cir­cus­es, and you’ll professional­vide them with finish­much less quantities of dis­trac­tion and professional­pa­gan­da” — deliv­ered, right here within the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry, immediately to the instrument in our hand.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Aldous Hux­ley Pre­dicts in 1950 What the International Will Glance Like within the Yr 2000

An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Loose­dom (1958)

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Spoil Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­los angeles­tion, Medicine & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

Aldous Hux­ley to George Orwell: My Hell­ish Imaginative and prescient of the Long run is Wager­ter Than Yours (1949)

Listen Aldous Hux­ley Nar­price His Dystopi­an Mas­ter­piece Courageous New International

Aldous Hux­ley, Death of Can­cer, Left This International Go back and forth­ping on LSD (1963)

Based totally in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and huge­casts on towns, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks come with the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Towns, the guide The State­much less Town: a Stroll thru Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video collection The Town in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­guide.