The other day I came across a bookmark I had made of a November 16 article about a 3D-printed meat mimic steak. From there, my mind wandered on to Woody Allen’s 1973 science fiction film, Sleeper, parodying a dystopic future in the year 2173.
“Wait a minute, how did you go from 3D-steak to a dystopian science fiction from the 70s”, you ask? Well, through mind-trip and idea association. You see, in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, there is a scene where he wanders out in the “farmland” and stumbles upon technology supported mega fruit farming such as gigantic bananas, tomatoes and apples. Or there is another one where he is fighting a mega instant pudding. This post, however, is not about 3D steaks, nor about Sleeper, although the movie is worth watching. It is about how some of our social science-fiction novels from the first half of the 20th century have come frighteningly close to realization in our lives today.
George Orwell’s 1984 (written in 1949) is generally on top of the list, and not far behind is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). The latter book has always been my slightly preferred of the two, for I felt it represented better the risk of the dystopian societies in the West. For one thing, it keeps people happy through Soma (a legal drug with psychotropic effects) and discharges them of societal and personal challenges, including bearing children and raising them. As Wikipedia describes it, “Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society …”
Is this not what our society has almost become? Soma being all the Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok posts and reality shows on TV, and the intelligence-based has become more of an inheritance-based (which has always existed, but now it has been further reinforced), and psychological manipulation and classical conditioning.
The movie Sleeper depicts a society in 2173 with the joint effects of Brave New World and 1984: on one hand it has the frivolous life where the state and technology take care of everything (even love making is taken care of by a machine, and Diane Keaton who plays the lead female has a degree in physical love making because people have forgotten how to do it on their own). On the other hand, the society has the Big Brother and his cronies watching the citizens everywhere. Are we going there today faster than Woody Allen’s 2173? It is amazing how these writers’ imaginations have been realized faster than even the fiction had projected.
There is a principle labeled “Amara/Gate’s law” that roughly says, “we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” But my fear is that one of Isaac Asimov’s statements (another great social science fiction writer) from the 1950s is still valid, and even stronger: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
Paris, December 7, 2021,
Zeejay