We’re Living in the Dystopian Future That Neil Postman Predicted Forty Years Ago

The Posture of Our Age

Heads down. Telephones out. Fingers scrolling. That is the humanoid posture of our age.

We see it in every single place. Sit in a espresso store and go searching you. All eyes on units. Wait in line on the put up workplace or grocery retailer. All eyes on units. Sit at a crimson mild and have a look at the drivers within the automobiles round you. Identical story. Extra disturbing nonetheless, have a look at the drivers on the freeway going full velocity. Even a few of them have their eyes darting between the windshields and their smartphones.

We see it in ourselves too. Sit all the way down to learn a bodily e book along with your cellphone close by. Observe how lengthy you possibly can go with out scrolling, texting, or checking some notification. Once you’re standing in line at a espresso store and have forty-five seconds to spare, discover how exhausting it’s to withstand the urge to drag out your cellphone to do one thing— something—to fill that clean area. Extra disturbing nonetheless, monitor how a lot time elapses between the second you wake within the morning till the second you unlock your cellphone and begin scrolling.

For many people, it’s solely a matter of seconds.

From the rising of the solar to its happening, we scroll our method by the day. We scroll our method by life. And we’re scrolling ourselves to loss of life.

The loss of life march of our scrolling society is not only a metaphor. In some ways, the smartphone is actually killing us (and never simply in distracted-driving car accidents). Researchers have made compelling correlations between smartphone (particularly social media) utilization and rising psychological unhealth (melancholy, nervousness, suicidal ideation, loneliness), particularly amongst teenagers and younger adults.¹ Think about the staggering rise in suicide charges amongst US youth and younger adults because the daybreak of the smartphone age. Between 2001 and 2007, the suicide charge for youths ages ten to twenty-four was pretty steady, however since 2007 (the 12 months the iPhone debuted), it has skyrocketed, rising 62 % between 2007 and 2021.²

Expertise has additionally helped speed up a “loneliness epidemic” with demonstrable, wide-ranging unfavorable results on total well being.³

The ominous time period “deaths of despair” has grow to be a part of modern vernacular. And after steadily climbing for a lot of the final century, common life expectations in america have, since 2021, began to say no.

Actually greater than expertise is at play in these developments. However not much less. Once we think about the variables which have most modified in society within the final twenty years, any reply we give you will focus on digital expertise. We didn’t know what “social media” was twenty-five years in the past. The time period smartphone was first coined in 1997. The World Huge Net is barely three a long time previous. Every of these items has totally reshaped the world within the final quarter century. And issues proceed to maneuver quick—so quick that we not often pause lengthy sufficient to ask questions or ponder unintended uncomfortable side effects. As Antón Barba-Kay put it in A Net of Our Personal Making, digital expertise has so vastly reworked human life over just some a long time that “there may be now arguably a better chasm between somebody age twelve and somebody age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between folks separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in historic Egypt.”⁴

Our essential colleges wrestle to maintain tempo with the scope and velocity of the digital revolution. In consequence, we’re usually blind to the methods we’re being reworked. If we might soar ahead in time a number of a long time, we might see extra clearly. However since we are able to’t do this, our greatest path to knowledge is commonly within the different course: trying again in time, studying from bygone eras and voices. What we are able to’t see now will be illuminated, not less than partly, by the insights of generations previous.

One e book I return to many times is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Dying. The e book was prophetic when it launched in 1985, and it’s much more prophetic now, 4 a long time later.

Which Dystopia?

Simply as as we speak we glance again to Postman’s e book to assist make sense of our cultural second, so too did Postman look to the previous from his vantage level in 1985, on the peak of what he known as the “Age of Present Enterprise.” The previous books Postman seemed to for perception had been a pair of dystopian novels: George Orwell’s 1984 (printed in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Courageous New World (1932). Engaged on his e book in 1984, Postman contemplated: Had Orwell’s imaginative and prescient of that 12 months come to fruition? Or was Huxley’s darkish imaginative and prescient of the long run extra correct?

What we are able to’t see now will be illuminated, not less than partly, by the insights of generations previous.

Postman concluded that Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s, higher predicted the form Western society took within the latter half of the 20 th century. As he defined,

Orwell feared those that would deprive us of data. Huxley feared those that would give us a lot that we might be lowered to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the reality can be hid from us. Huxley feared the reality can be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we might grow to be a captive tradition. Huxley feared we might grow to be a trivial tradition, preoccupied with some equal of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Courageous New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who’re ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “did not keep in mind man’s nearly infinite urge for food for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, persons are managed by inflicting ache. In Courageous New World, they’re managed by inflicting pleasure.⁵

If Postman was astute in 1985 to watch the Huxleyan form of our “trivial tradition”—the place opted-in distractions and diversions stored us numb and dumb—how far more correct does his prophetic imaginative and prescient describe life in 2025?

When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves, he had tv principally in view because the chief purveyor of trivial data that swept us away in a “sea of irrelevance.” Forty years later, we nonetheless have TV—albeit tons of extra channels and a rising variety of streaming TV platforms. However we even have YouTube, Fb, TikTok, and different always-on pipelines of content material, algorithmically designed to seize our consideration and hold us watching and scrolling, eyes glued to screens.

“Amusing ourselves to loss of life” remains to be a extremely correct descriptor of what mass media does to us. However now the dominant type it takes is scrolling. And whereas Postman, who died in 2003, by no means lived to see the best way smartphones, streaming, and social media would rework the world, his knowledge and warnings ring out with potent relevance.

Simply as Huxley helped Postman make sense of his world in 1985, Postman may also help us make sense of ours.

This text is tailored from Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.

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