I think the current reality is more of a mix between "A Brave New World" and "Farenheit 451". Bradbury deserves a mention there.
Funny you would say that... I agree, although I wasn't thinking about Fahrenheit 451 when I mentioned another "mix" scenario in another thread[1] that touched on Nineteen Eighty-Four.
My thought then was:
Interestingly, I think reality is converging towards something like a hybrid of the two worlds described by Orwell and Huxley. Well, in the case of Huxley not so much the literal use of hypnosis and psycho-analysis, but if you treat that stuff as a metaphor, then you can see the connection.
TV, pop music, Fox News, and so much other low-value content has become the "sedative for the masses" at the same time that the government assumes more and more power and control...
"Of course," you might say, "we're nowhere close to Orwell's world with his Minitru, etc ." But if you substitute "We are at war with the USSR and the Taliban are our allies and have always been our allies" and "We are at war with the Taliban and the Russians are our allies and have always been our allies" for certain bits of Orwell's work, you might notice some eerie parallels and scary possibilities.
Aside from the fact that that comic misrepresents the argument behind 1984, they're not really at odds with one another the way the comic makes it seem.
Orwell was writing within the context of his time - the late 1940s. So if he were writing today, it's not too hard to imagine him writing about banning websites (ie, SOPA), or the similar actions that are going on today.
If Orwell were writing today, I imagine 1984 might look more like Cory Doctrow's 'Scroogled'
(The one main difference between the two that Orwell may have gotten 'wrong' is that it is the corporations, not the strictly the government, that serve as Big Brother in Doctrow's case - or rather, a coalition of corporations and the government. Then again, in Neal Stephenson, the corporations eventually become the government, so that's not as significant a difference as it really might seem.)
I think it depends on the culture, and geopolitical region.
Huxley might have been more right for many places (certainly seems so for 'the west'), but Orwell seems to have been pretty dead on about some of the more oppressive regimes of the world - North Korea for instance?
