Bribery will get you everywhere

STATE power can shape private choice so completely that people come to desire what dominates them. Aldous Huxley suspected that power might evolve in this direction. Writing to Orwell after the publication of 1984, he commented that the book’s image of tyranny would likely prove too crude and wasteful to persist. “The lust for power,” he remarked, is more efficiently satisfied by “suggesting people into loving their servitude.”  Pass the Soma.

This is fine

So what if Orwell’s novel has climbed back onto bestseller lists. “People sense that something is wrong in our digital comfort zone,”  it was said. An Insane Clown Posse was loose. “But our society is more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1984, people are controlled by the threat of harm. In Brave New World, they are controlled by administering pleasure.” The result is not simply compliance, but a profound dependence on the architectures that shape our choices. “In the digital panopticon, we feel free,” Elon writes. “But this feeling of freedom, wholly absent from Orwell’s surveillance state, is a problem. Grok is leaking proprietary information .”