Soma or Big Brother? Destruction or distraction? For years “Brave New World” was balanced against “1984″, as though those two works defined the opposite ends of the dystopian spectrum, a spectrum one might presume to be exclusively in shades of grey. And though such an opposition ignores the many other fine works describing the range of hand-baskets in which we may be hell-bound, the pairing offered a useful metaphor. For many, the final word on the debate was Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business” which in 1986 argued brilliantly that it was Huxley, not Orwell, whose map more accurately charted our society’s devolution. If you haven’t read Postman, or have only fuzzy memories of “1984″ or “Brave New World” check out Stuart McMillen’s concise and clear outline of Postman’s contrast between the Orwellian and Huxleyan dystopias. It’s a funny cartoon summary with painfully accurate images of Huxleyan indulgence and Orwellian control. And it’s hard to argue against Huxley in a week when Google (to whom we’ll return later on) tells us that people find the question of whether the world’s leaders in Copenhagen will manage to avert the impending climate catastrophe to be five million hits less interesting than Tiger Woods, whom we are given to understand has been putting his balls into the wrong holes.

Despite that, I think Postman had it wrong. I loved “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, without fully questioning Postman’s conceit of a choice between either Orwell or Huxley. Yet surely if there’s one thing we’re offered in our sybaritic world, it’s everything, all at once. We can have our cake, eat it too, and not gain weight from it. We can have it all. And we have to, because Huxleyan distraction isn’t enough to prevent everyone from paying attention all the time. Consider the obese humans in “Wall-E” who recline in their hovering chairs being fed a constant diet of junk news and junk food: even after years of such indolence the Captain is able to lead a mutiny. Homeland Security was asleep at the switch. Huxley alone is not enough; Big Brother needs lend a hand. In the 20+ years since Postman, two elements have rejuvenated the Orwellians: one is the increasing centralization and availability of information; the other is the successful use of 9/11 and Islamophobia as a reason to allow governments access to that information. The result is an increasing tightening of the Orwellian noose, carried out while the majority of the public remains distracted by the Huxleyan feelies.

Our tour starts in England, the first country to enshrine personal freedom in the Magna Carta, and the first of the Western democracies to flee it. Shortly after 2001, posters began appearing on London buses and in bus shelters showing eyes floating and watching, with the slogan “Secure Beneath the Watching Eyes”. It was an image so macabre that Simon Davis, head of Privacy International said, “I thought it was a powerful piece of political satire from a disruptive citizen’s group, but then it dawned on me that they were real.” And now Toronto is following suit. But recently London’s watching eyes started really focusing: here’s the start to Cory Doctorow’s summary, from boingboing

Britain is full of license-plate cameras, cameras used to send you tickets if you’re caught speeding, or driving in the bus-lane, or entering London’s “congestion-charge zone” without paying the daily fee for driving in central London. … So any police officer can add any license number to the database of “people of interest” and every time that license plate passes a camera, the local police force will receive an urgent alert, and can pull over the car, detain the driver, and search the car and its passengers under the Terrorism Act.
And, of course, police officers are less than discriminating about who they add to this list. For example, “Catt, 50, and her 84-year-old father, John” were added to the list because a police officer noticed their van at three protest demonstrations. And now Catt and John get pulled over by the police and searched as terrorists.

And here, should your memory of 1984 have faded, is the original:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Nor is England the only country in which Orwell’s predictions are manifesting. In Cuba, thoughtcrime is now illegal. As the Guardian reports:

The Cuban president, Raúl Castro … has extended use of an “Orwellian” law that allows the state to punish people before they commit a crime on suspicion they may do so, a tactic designed to cow actual and potential opponents.

Orwell also writes about newspeak, the willful destruction of English. One of Big Brother’s slogans was “War is Peace”, a conceit which received an elegant exegesis in Oslo as Obama gave his speech defending war while pocketing the Peace prize. As The Calgary Herald aptly noted:

The BBC headline captured it perfectly: “Obama defends war as he picks up the Nobel Peace Prize.” That the headline could have just as easily appeared in a satirical publication like the Onion is fitting for the world in 2009, where up is down, where left is right, and where the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful army can order a military escalation in a war that no one understands, and receive the Nobel Peace Prize a week later.
George Orwell once wrote that “political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

And of course, there is nowhere where all information is so collected, collated, composed and compressed as at Google, the company with the “Do No Evil” slogan. Which is why it was scary this week when Google CEO Eric Schmidt said privacy isn’t important, and if you want to keep something private, “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” (in other words, “innocent people have nothing to hide.”) Boingboing pointed out how Google boycotted CNET after CNET published information about Schmidt ” his salary; his neighborhood, some of his hobbies and political donations — all obtained through Google searches….” Cory Doctorow comments, cruelly but fairly, “Hey, Eric: if you don’t want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn’t have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?” Of course, as The Onion points out (in a cleverly Prisoner-influenced video), we do always have the option to opt out of Google.

This being the XX1st century, we don’t just live in an Orwellian state, but in a post-modern Orwellian state, as Kindle owners learned this year when they awoke to discover that the copies of 1984 that they believed they had “purchased” from Amazon and naively thought they “owned” were wiped off their e-readers overnight. Minor copyright issues, coughed Amazon apologetically, and nothing to do with the “memory hole” in 1984.

How can you keep up with it all, from the FUBAR Homeland Security no-fly lists in the US to the censorship of unsmiling olympic rings in Canada? Fortunately SOS, (Students for an Orwellian Society) (slogan: Because 2009 is 25 years too late) has a fine website that tries to keep track of the rising tide of doubleplusungoodness. And maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll have Oprah on closed circuit in Room 101, Orwell’s vision of Guantanamo. We can watch her and see her audience watching us, as we confess to our crimes. It could be our big 15 minutes of fame.