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Brett McCracken: I think even the title alone, amusing ourselves to death, feels like a book that could have been written in 2024 right? Like this is the world that we live in, we recognize that people everywhere we look, whether we’re at a coffee shop or waiting a waiting room, at a doctor’s office or just walking down the street in a city, we look around and everyone is just glued to their device. They’re doing something on their device. They’re hooked onto this kind of IV drip of consumer content. You look around, you see this is our world. We are amusing ourselves constantly. And one of the things that postman talked about in that book amusing ourselves to death, he made this comparison between two visions of dystopia. There was George Orwell’s version of dystopia in 1984 and there was Aldous Huxley’s vision of dystopia in Brave New World. Orwell’s vision of in 1984 was more of a top down approach. So he would he was arguing that, like our oppression, our power will be taken from us by the powers that be on high, who will impose kind of restrictions and surveillance and all these things. Aldous Huxley and brave new world argued that our oppression will come from within ourselves, because we will willingly, kind of opt into this all, all encompassing amusement world, where we’re just kind of hooked, in an addictive way to amusement, and that is where we will be vulnerable, right? That’s where we will lose our agency, is through this kind of opting into entertainment approach and postman in his book amusing ourselves to death, he said it’s Huxley’s vision of dystopia that is more accurate to describing what is, what is coming to be. And he was writing that in 1985 looking mostly at television, how we had all been kind of hooked on TV. So how much more true is that in 2025 right? And 40 years later, when we are all just kind of hooked to these devices, it’s not just television for a few hours at night that we’re hooked to. It’s things on our phone all day, every day, from start to finish, that we are hooked to. And so I think that that book amusing ourselves to death, it applies so much to our current situation, and almost in more literal ways, the to death part, I think postman was using that more metaphorically, but we are literally scrolling ourselves to death. Like all of all the studies that are showing that mental health is declining and depression and suicide, and like loneliness epidemics, all of these things are very much connected to the technologies of, kind of being hooked onto smartphones and technology. And then there’s things like, you know, distracted driving, where you literally are scrolling yourselves to death, because for two seconds you’re scrolling, and then, you know, you swerve. And so that’s a violent image, but it shows that these technologies have real life consequences, and it is leading to spiritual and mental sickness, and it’s sometimes physical death do.
