Jaideep Sobti

“Oh, they like to get you in a compromising position,
They like to get you there and smile in your face,
Yeah, they think they're so cute when they got you in that condition,
But I think it's a total disgrace.

- Authority Song, Uh-Huh”
― John Mellencamp

“I started tracking billionaire wealth in my home country, India. Back in 2010 anger against the new wealth elite was growing, and my first parsing of the Forbes lists helped explain why. Although India is relatively poor, billionaire wealth had soared to the equivalent of more than 17 per cent of gross domestic product, one of the highest shares in the world, with most of the gains accruing to a narrow set of families in industries prone to crony capitalism.”
― Ruchir Sharma

“In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures.

One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother, and Thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the Memory Hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.

The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and Softer Form of Totalitarianism - one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and Hypnotic Persuasion rather than through brutality; of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with sexual frustration; of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial class to a subgroup of dimwitted serfs programmed to love their menial work; and of Soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.

Which template would win, we wondered?

Would it be possible for both of these futures - the hard and the soft - to exist a the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?

Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily, after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us.

Those of us still pottering along on the earthly plane - and thus still able to read books - are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?”
― Margaret Atwood

“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn't, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That's the source of the tremendous power of reinforcement - there's no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave - the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.”
― B.F. Skinner, Walden Two