/libertypol/ - Libertarian General

Let's recall Aldous Huxley's dystopia Brave New World. Many people think of it as the "soft 1984"; replacing Orwell's rule by violence and control over the truth with Huxley's rule by pleasure and apathy towards the truth.

What often gets forgotten, though, is how dissidents are treated in this book. Rather than being tortured and reeducated, they are deported to an island of their choice where they can live with other freethinkers and live independently. However, there is no possibility for these "sovereign penal colonies" to ever threaten the system due to how remote they are and how (presumably) little infrastructure they have. It is a terrible win-win: the dissidents get their freedom and the system gets a way to rid its opponents in a way that they'll never resist against. The system doesn't destroy its opposition so much as make it irrelevant.

I believe that in this regard, contemporary society has gone totalitarian in a way far beyond what Huxley could have predicted when thinking of his islands. Though governments and businesses are planning and to some degree have engaged in censorship and surveillance online, a free Internet manages to make their opponents irrelevant anyway. Think of sites like Reddit, or 4chan, or even this site and the endless forums out there, not to mention the ability to create your own website or freely hosted blog. A dizzying myriad of radical positions exist out there, some even talking over and over again about how disruptive and even violent action needs to be taken against the system.

However, like the dissidents in Brave New World, this ability to express yourself among like-minded others hardly ever translates into a sustained threat against the system. People rehash the same truths and principles repeatedly in a ceaseless series of threads or blog posts, develop a subculture (memes and /meta/ discussions) that satisfies their need for "being involved", and even break into perpetual infighting over finer points of their ideologies and tactics. This works out to the system's benefit even better than Huxley's islands, as dissidents continue to serve the system as dutiful laborers and consumers who exhaust their rebelliousness by devoting precious leisure time to said online communities.

You may protest with the examples of the Arab Spring or the shenanigans of hacktivists. Surely these are examples of the Internet allowing radicals to organize and wage real life campaigns. But in the case of the former, can we really compare the rebellion of a materially undermuh privileged populace living under a corrupt tinpot autocracy with the sophisticated liberal democracies we live under? That system clearly comes nowhere close to ours in achieving Huxley's "totalitarianism by pleasure and apathy". In the case of the latter, how often does hacktivism or IRL activities organized online translate into sustained campaigns that make reliable tactical gains, and can strategically exploit victories for further success? Typically, they just manifest as hit and runs which the system effortlessly and instantaneously cleans up after to restore normal daily life.