Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Velocifize This.

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So whenever you hear people talking about dystopian futures or digital panopticons,

one of the ones that's always going to get brought up is George Orwell's 1984.

It's a classic. It's like the Casa Blanca of dystopian futures. I mean,

I'd like to die in it, if I could. It talks about a surveillance state that's all

encompassing, not unlike the one we just referenced on the Freedom versus Security episode we did.

But to the philosopher we're talking about today, Biong Chulhan, 1984, for a lot of people out there

that are talking about this stuff, may actually end up being a bit of a red herring.

See to him, there's a lot of different types of dystopian futures that can happen out there,

and if you're only looking for one of them, you may end up missing the one you're actually living in.

To Han, the far more accurate literary example of a dystopian future that resembles the world we're

in is not Orwell's 1984, but Aldous Huxley's 1932 book called Brave New World.

See, in Brave New World, totally different vibe than 1984. First of all, all the people in the

book live under a single unified global world state. Everybody is one in the book.

And when someone dies, there aren't people having babies to be able to replace them.

The government replaces them by growing a new human inside of a hatchery, far less messy.

Then this new person from birth is psychologically conditioned and engineered by the government

for a particular role in the society depending on what's needed. After a certain point,

once people come of age in the book, the government gives everybody a hallucinogenic drug called

Soma that they take every day. Now, it's not mandatory to take Soma in the book,

...