Brave New World Pros And Cons

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Elijah Loyko

Period 1

March 24th, 2023

Since the introduction of the IPhone in 2007, technology has become more than commonplace, it’s become an obligation. Accessibility has been the name of the game, with hundreds of different ways to make entertainment easier to get. In recent years, with the explosion in popularity of Tik Tok, entertainment has been synthesized. Short-form videos of a seemingly infinite number, all made to catch your eye. It can become addicting. In a world where entertainment from our technology is all anyone wants, it's easy to see similarities to author

Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World ''. Huxley’s novel depicts a dystopian world united and controlled not by force, but by pleasure. A world where culture

The foremost reason contemporary society grows closer to a form of control like Huxley imagined is the easy availability of entertainment. According to the US Census Bureau, in the

United States, 84% of households had smartphones present. With access to the entire internet, and apps like Youtube and Tik Tok, shorthand entertainment such as short videos or clips becomes commonplace. Entire generations have been dubbed “Ipad kids”. When the easiest way to keep a child quiet is to hand them a device with unfettered access to this easy entertainment, we as a culture have created a generation who not only knows no other way than this ease of access, but that has been in part raised by technology. Trivial entertainment is very quickly becoming a main facet of our contemporary culture. Click-bait has become part of who we are.

When compared to the entertainment in Brave New World, The parallels between our contemporary society and Huxley’s become frighteningly clear. From pages 167-169 of Brave

New World, Huxley describes the often aforementioned “feelies” in the story. The Feelie was not unlike a movie theater, however it induced all the senses. Huxley describes the

The system creates a positive feedback loop in the brain, meaning the more meaningless entertainment content you watch, the more you will be provided. In a culture where people have been conditioned to need trivial video content to be happy, triviality becomes the culture, not unlike in Brave New World.

The usage of social media like Tik Tok is not unlike the usage of the fictional Soma, the drug of choice in Huxley’s Brave New World. Soma is a narcotic that induces extreme feelings of happiness, or at higher doses, mentally removes you from the world around you, as if

“ignorance is bliss” could be in drug form. As described by Flynn, Tik Tok creates a positive feedback loop, which can do somewhat the same thing. Apps like Tik Tok can function as a psychological break from the world around you, because it pulls nearly 100% of the user’s attention. This makes the app like an escape from the difficulty of reality, or a “holiday”