Is the Dystopian Internet Closer to Brave New World or to Nineteen Eighty-Four?

We may not notice it, but the internet we use every day is a metaphor for dystopia. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four, it records what we do and say; like Brave New World, it lets us stop thinking and be happy without knowing why.

Turn on the computer. Go online. Stare at the screen for half an hour. Check your phone. Forget what you were doing. Decide to read a little; read one page and feel tired. Resolve to get some work done. Get interrupted by WeChat. Forget again what you were doing. Work for ten minutes and decide it's time to buy something on Taobao. Feel productive, and want to read again. Halfway through, go to Amazon and buy ten books. Along the way, delete 58 spam emails. Forget once more what you were doing. Time for bed. A full, happy day.

We have almost forgotten that this is how we live, even though, many years ago, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World both described, more or less, the world of today.

Of the famous alarmist prophecies, the one these two books most readily call to mind is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, a former New York University professor. Postman wrote about television: how it turns everything into entertainment, makes people stop thinking and grow dull, and draws them further and further from anything truly serious. He feared that people would willingly become appendages of entertainment, just as in Brave New World, where people live in a world arranged for them, full of sensory stimulation and desire, happy without knowing why.

He was right to worry. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four stands for a society that controls thought and spies on private life, where "Big Brother" watches everything. Huxley's Brave New World stands for happiness imposed from above, a world in which vulgar culture makes people ignorant. The fears of both writers are now slowly coming true in the world we live in.

The internet is a product of dystopia. If utopia is humanity's vision of an orderly, uniform "ideal society," the internet reads like a satire of that vision: it records every act and every piece of information, and mocks every thinking brain. When people put their hobbies, their sexual orientation and gender, or their private diaries online, the internet plays the part of the telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four, with someone watching behind it. And when you find that thinking about anything tires you, or that every attempt to focus is broken by phone notifications, you may be reminded of the hallucinogen in Brave New World that can be swallowed at any moment: soma...

Still, we carry on as if nothing were wrong.

1. The internet is like the telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four

The internet's privacy risks are not as frightening as the popular story that it is stealing our information. Nor is the cookie that does the recording actually violating your privacy. The internet resembles Nineteen Eighty-Four in a different way: after three hours in front of a computer, you may have forgotten that it is recording everything you look at.

Recall Nineteen Eighty-Four. You walk into a room, and an oblong metal plate set into the wall broadcasts news around the clock. This is the world of the book's protagonist, Winston Smith, and the device is much like a wall-mounted LCD television. In the book it is called the telescreen. Orwell describes it this way: "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 plate 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."

Yes, it looks like a television. But a television only sends information out. Only in the internet era have people found the closer likeness to Orwell's telescreen. The telescreen could watch remotely and put your every move on record. Online, the cookie does this job for us. You can carry out a series of steps on the web, such as buying a pair of jeans, because a cookie records the purchase details and keeps your conversation with the server going; without it, the server would forget the jeans as soon as you picked them. The cookie works as a messenger. You hand it what you type online, including your username, password, purchase details and IP address, and it tells the server what you should do next. Something that records everything we do has entered our lives, just like that telescreen.

Orwell's description is somewhat like the "panopticon" that Michel Foucault discusses in Discipline and Punish, a concept many people use as a metaphor for the internet age. In this prison, the guards sit in a central watchtower and can see every movement, while the prisoners cannot see them and can only assume they are there, just as people cannot know what is happening to their privacy online.

On an insecure network, private information can leak. A simple example is a password stolen in an internet cafe; you have heard such stories. In practice, though, what cookies record is less dangerous than people fear, and ordinary websites protect and encrypt this kind of data. Even so, the internet has always been a tool for recording information. "If you have your phone, it knows you're there," said Google co-founder Larry Page. Google Chrome introduced an incognito mode, in which browsing and search history are not shown again and cookies leave no trace once the window is closed.

Yet the internet gets us to share information willingly, and by the Web 2.0 era its role as a recording device had become even plainer. All your information and behavior are online. On social networks you give your real name, your hobbies, your relationship status, your daily mood; you post selfies, list the books you've read, keep liking the same people, share which restaurant you ate at, show your running route... Without noticing, you have put everything here. As the book says, "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment." But we have all grown used to it. We accept being watched, and we are glad to.

2. The internet is also a brave new world that won't let you concentrate

The internet has cost some people the ability to take things seriously, and taught them that serious thought is ridiculous. It seems to be handing people a method by which, knowing nothing, they can still say something cutting or poetic about anything, to show that a quick glance is all they need to understand it. Before people can think, it destroys their attention.

You have probably been here. You plan to spend five hours of the afternoon working hard. Just as you start, a phone notification catches your eye; you tap it and start reading an article. Halfway through, an email arrives and you want to reply. Halfway through replying you want to look something up, and while searching you spot news of a concert and go to book tickets. Halfway through booking you notice your balance is low, stop to sigh over life and regret not having worked harder, and so you plan to spend four and a half hours working hard. Just as you are about to start, a phone notification catches your eye...

The internet controls your behavior. First, you must keep tending and updating your information and activity online. Second, push notifications make you unwilling, at any moment, to miss anything they show you, which means you will rarely manage something like "five hours absorbed in work." The state of "flow" described by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the feeling of pouring all your mental energy into one activity, has become an endangered species in an age when anything can grab your attention at any moment. What internet companies do, in effect, is grab as much of your attention as they can. Content companies and social networks are rivals, competing for attention.

For the individual, this closely resembles the state Huxley describes in Brave New World. In that world, set in AD 2532, every person is designed from birth to death by a monopoly genetics company. People feel happy because "sleep-teaching" corrects their thinking and soma, a mind-numbing drug, can be taken at any time. Their happiness is in fact happiness imposed on them. In the internet era, our thoughts are shaped by the information online. Most of the time, the internet guides each step by which we decide what to look at. Focusing on a problem grows harder, yet you believe you are thinking for yourself.

3. Lists are to the internet roughly what entertainment is to television

Both dissolve seriousness, even as they make dull material livelier and more fun. But just as Neil Postman argued that television was turning culture into a burlesque, the rise of the "list" makes the world simpler and clearer while letting the human habit of "collecting" take hold here quickly.

Think of visiting a museum. The way to give yourself the comfortable feeling that "I've been here, and I'll remember everything" is to bring a camera and photograph everything you see. This skips the work of remembering and thinking, and the camera in your hand and the folder on your computer create the illusion that you can learn everything without using your brain.

New features on the internet decide what you do, and even change how you express things, and these features happen to fit the museum habit just described.

Take bookmarking. When you click "save" or "mark," the thought process goes roughly like this: read it, great, too lazy to think more, save. Read it, didn't get it, too lazy to think more, save. Read it, great, thought about it a little, too lazy to think further, save. Didn't finish, might be great, read later, save. In 2012, "read later" tools took off. Pocket, Instapaper and Readability all work well, but go and check: of everything you meant to read later in 2012, how much have you actually read?

Take liking. A like can stand in for nearly every urge to communicate and every thought you have: nice selfie but nothing to say, like. That sounds about right, like. I think I've seen this article before, like. We get along well, like. She hasn't spoken to me in ages and I want to break the ice, like. In short, a like takes the least thought and is very convenient. It is like swallowing a tablet of soma in Brave New World.

The internet can offer deep and rich information, but more popular than the endless stream of detailed content are the lists that introduce it, or the feeling of scrolling through those lists. The articles shared in a single WeChat Moments feed could keep you studying for a whole day, yet people would rather scroll through Moments, comment "so pretty," and feel they have caught up on the day's news.

4. It makes brainwashing easy, and breeds what Le Bon called "the crowd"

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." These are the three slogans on the Ministry of Truth building in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the guiding ideology of Winston Smith's world. Phrases that are deeply ingrained, or that spread as fast as a virus, seem able to do the same job: certain internet buzzwords, for instance.

A peculiar kind of reasoning is especially common in middle-school essays: to prove a point, you need only produce an "as the ancients said." Maxims and idioms long served as most people's evidence when thinking about a problem. In recent years, anything one dislikes prompts "how can one bear it"; anywhere one likes is "high-end, classy and impressive"; any piece of prose is "chicken soup"; and anyone at all calls himself a "loser"...

Put it this way: if a word is known to everyone in a group, then when people consider something that would normally take a fairly long process of thought, and they can't be bothered to analyze it, the familiar word pops into their heads and is immediately taken as a ready-made answer. The thinking is cut short.

Buzzwords work much like this kind of "guiding ideology," or a tyranny that people accept willingly. They thrive in the internet era. As a rule, the more widely these words spread, the vaguer their meaning becomes, and the further their sense is stretched. Take the much-mocked "chicken soup for the soul": it originally meant writing that talks only about outcomes and never about how to solve the problem, but now any slightly polished paragraph gets called chicken soup. "The words that carry the greatest influence in language are often precisely the least definite ones," Gustave Le Bon wrote in The Crowd. Such words make it easy for people to jump to conclusions.

But a more important idea in Le Bon's The Crowd is the "crowd" itself: people gathered for some purpose, whose thoughts converge, who are easily excited, abandon reasoning and ignore intelligence. In the internet era it is almost impossible to avoid joining such a crowd, because something is always happening and there is always a place to take a stand. When a public event occurs, for instance, such a crowd holds that picking a side matters more than analyzing the problem. The individual mind always loses to collective emotion. If Weibo is full of anger, wailing or tears, you may feel it is your duty to share that emotion too. People become easier to persuade, and mass brainwashing becomes far easier.

Meanwhile, ready-made answers increasingly replace thinking. In this brave new world, people live inside a sense of achievement and security they believe they have already earned, safe and sound.

5. In the early internet, nobody knew you were a dog. Now they know your breed, your age and how you get along with other dogs

At first people found the internet could host chat rooms, where everyone was anonymous and nobody knew who anyone was. Then they found it could sell advertising, and because it could collect data, it could target ads more precisely than traditional advertising. Later still, they found it could be used to order services to the door and to hail rides, with everything tied together by a single identity system: a phone number, ID card details or a bank card number.

On July 5, 1993, The New Yorker published the famous cartoon by Peter Steiner: a dog sitting on a chair at a computer tells another dog on the floor, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Steiner has earned US$50,000 from reprints of the cartoon.

Now, though, Twitter serves ads based on the interests you select, and Amazon guesses what you like from your purchases and saved items and recommends similar new products. The internet has begun to understand your behavior and has learned to predict what you might want to see.

The era of "nobody knows you're a dog" began to fade the moment you signed up for your first social network and a line of small print beside the box advised you to "use your real name." Today the internet not only knows who you are but may understand you better than your closest friend. Your map app warns you before you leave work that traffic on the way home is heavy. Your music player tells you which songs sound like the one you played last time. If you tell your mother "I slept pretty well last night," your sleep-tracking app will reveal that you got only half an hour of deep sleep. In the era of "I know who you are," nobody knows the real you better than the internet does.

6. Now, how do you prove to the internet that you are human?

"Are you a robot or a human?" Reply to a post several times in a row and the internet begins to doubt that you are human and asks this question. It then makes you prove it by typing in something called a verification code, because only a human can enter the random string. We have to work to prove we are not machines.

Beyond codes like these, we have other such experiences: applying for a WeChat official account means taking a photo holding your ID card; verifying an Alipay Wallet account means uploading both sides of your ID card; or, more simply, unlocking your phone takes a fingerprint. If you want to hail a ride, you must link a credit card, enter your ID number and give your phone number, and only after receiving a verification code can you go on.

Yet you still cannot prove you are a person. Robots keep learning. Late last year, Google rolled out an improved verification system, because it had found that robots could crack those hard-to-read codes (formally known as CAPTCHA) with 99.8% accuracy. Google's new scheme, called noCAPTCHA, contains a "risk analysis engine" that lets a machine decide whether you are human. If you pass, fine. If you don't, you, a human, must take a matching test, such as answering "Which of these pictures looks most like this kitten?"

This looks like a simpler, more human-friendly test, but the technology that makes humans prove they are human is more complex: Google must analyze the user's behavior online before and after to reach a verdict. One obstacle humans meet when inventing new technology to serve themselves turns out to be proving that they are not the machine, which makes the verification code an awkward thing. As people become less and less like people, we again seem to see the shadow of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

7. Finally, a guide to some words people often use that sound rather profound

Utopia and dystopia

Utopia is simply the perfect world humans dream of; the word literally means an "imaginary world." Around 1515, a man named Thomas More wrote a book with a very long title, A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Commonwealth and of the New Island of Utopia, known simply as Utopia, in which he imagined his ideal world. There, property is held in common, people are equal, everyone wears the same work clothes, goods are distributed according to need, everyone does productive labor, and there is no depravity or sin... Dystopia is not the opposite of this perfect world but a doubt about it and a critique of it.

Looking at the same common property, the same equality, the same work clothes, others pointed out that beneath the surface of plenty and beauty lies a starved inner life, in which humans lose their individuality and become less than human. On the surface there is peace, but in fact such a system is riddled with ills and short of resources, and because human desires are suppressed, crime and persecution born of warped human nature are far from rare. Dystopia points out that there is no real freedom here.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Dystopia is in fact a literary genre. The "dystopian trilogy" usually means George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, of which the first two are the best known. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes a totalitarian society. Big Brother sits at the top of the national pyramid; his portrait is everywhere, and he watches the people at every moment. The state has a department that tightly controls thought and makes people believe three principles: "War is peace," "Freedom is slavery," "Ignorance is strength."

Life carried on this way is indeed "wonderful," but human nature is ignored. The book's protagonists are a man and a woman who loathe the system, and they do what this ideal society least wants: they fall in love, and they resist. In the end the system crushes them, a tragedy of human nature.

Brave New World

Compared with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World is less oppressive. There is no Big Brother watching directly and no direct thought control, but the book is really about the same thing: using pleasure and the abandonment of thought to make people numb. People are content with their lot and take a fixed daily dose of the mind-numbing drug soma. They too lose the capacity for desire and thought, and they call this a brave new world. Again the protagonist is a rebel, an untrained "Savage" who arrives and cannot bear the uniform way of life. A man of flesh and blood with something to believe in, he dies in the end in loneliness. The brave new world numbs people with pleasure and stability, and in it you will not find a single form of art that stirs any passion.