ext_199791 ([identity profile] acroyear70.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] javasaurus 2005-09-21 04:37 pm (UTC)

the majesty of that book

is that it doesn't matter what the political climate of the day is -- you can "see it happening before you".

if you specifically looked at it in the 90s, when we all saw the great media conglomeration and consolidation especially in news and in "Clear Channel"'s takeover of broadcast radio, the pettyness of the clinton-lewinski affair, the passage of the DMCA, the continual extension of copyrights and the abuse of patents, and the growing over-reliance on AP and Reuters over home-grown investigative journalism (supposedly for financial reasons), and you'd see it all in there in some parallel as well...

...and completely overlook the "quasi-religious figurehead" and "get rid of science" portions of that world.

the world in that book is the ultimate in worst-case scenerios. as such, its unlikely to impossible that it all will happen, but at any point in time you can see *some* of it happening in the news of the day.

its impossible to read that book without the bias of current events. those who read it in the 60's missed most of what we've described but instead specifically noticed the examples of forced labor (in their eyes, the Draft), the repression of sex to reproduction only, the abuse of investigative powers over our privacy (remnants of the original McCarthyism) and the concept of a "conspiracy" where the powers in the public eye (Kennedy, Johnson, and congress) aren't the real power in the government.

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