The End of I

By Shasta McLaughlin

“...chains are but an ill wearing, how much care soever hath been taken to file and polish them.” John Locke, First Treatise on Government

Entering a dystopian world once required reading a sci-fi novel or watching a sci-fi film. In the Spring of 2020, futuristic fiction became fact. Global panic; lethal germs released from secret labs; shadowy, unaccountable bureaucracies; open societies turning totalitarian overnight; devious scientists and power-mad billionaires; power-mad scientists and maniacal billionaires; and untested medical “cures” foisted onto an unsuspecting public—nearly all of the elements for a good sci-fi plot made an appearance except for aliens and intergalactic travel. Did earthly, objective reality finally catch up to what writers and filmmakers had already imagined, or did the American public’s molded minds bring dystopia to life?

Although dystopian literature, especially for young adults, has been trendy this century, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 established the gold standard for imagining unpleasant futures. Published, respectively, in 1932 and 1949, Brave New World and 1984 predicted the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions’ ill consequences should human societies make wrong choices or fail to curb science and technology’s worst tendencies. Huxley and Orwell observed working masses, buffeted by vast forces seemingly beyond human agency, leading desperate lives. The mechanized factory assembly lines and the mechanized slaughter of World War I likely reinforced a view of a world spinning, like the gears in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times, quickly out of control.  

Huxley and Orwell assumed that governments harnessing science and technology to control human beings would be the future’s central concern. Brave New World anticipates genetic manipulation, psychological conditioning, and “Soma,” a required, daily tranquilizing drug, as the means to keeping citizens servile and content. Orwell, writing seventeen years later, had further witnessed Nazi Germany when he predicted ubiquitous surveillance and relentless propaganda, or “Big Brother,” as the methods of control. What both “Soma” and “Big Brother” have in common is that they are both external forces imposed on citizens by omnipotent states. In the first half of the 20th Century, Huxley and Orwell still valued individual, human autonomy, and external control imposed by omnipotent states was its principal threat.

Perhaps neither author envisioned that the public, the masses, would willingly enslave themselves. Yes, a slew of early-mid 1970s films—The Omega Man, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, Rollerball—all suggested that humans would eventually be their own undoing. Any nuclear war flick implies the same. However, the 21st Century version of human bondage features no germs, no cannibalism, no resurgent simians, triumphant corporations, or nuclear apocalypse.

Imagine instead the common sight of an individual walking along a sidewalk with their smartphone in hand, eyes to screen, and ears jammed with earbuds. Having likely plugged yourself into your own smartphone at some point, you see that individual as having chosen to take a walk and check their email, listen to music, watch a video, and/or surf the web at the same time. Occasionally, they even talk out loud, seemingly to themselves, but perhaps to someone on the other end of a phone or video call. 

Now, set aside that image for a moment and picture an early remote control toy. The operator used the controller, perhaps by punching buttons or twisting a miniature steering wheel, to maneuver a car or robot along the ground via an electric cable connecting the two. To play with such a toy for the first time, or any remote controlled device, is to experience a frisson of power. How cool to manipulate one object by operating a complete separate one! 

Combine the two scenarios—the person walking with the smartphone, and the person steering a remote control toy—and what is the result? The smartphone is the control module, and the earbuds connect it to the person’s brain. Facebook, Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, or any other such Internet-based, software/entertainment company operate the control module. To state this situation as clearly as possible, the software/entertainment company operates the human being via the smartphone. Once you grasp this new way of seeing the relationship—Internet-based company steering the human robot via the smartphone control module—it cannot be undone. Observe the same individual walking down the sidewalk again, and you cannot help but wonder, “which company is operating the remote control?”

What Huxley and Orwell would have found incomprehensible is that the individual holding the smartphone has freely allowed him or herself to be controlled. No omnipotent state compelled free human beings to carry a smartphone with them at all times. As of the Spring of 2020, 81% of Americans had not only willingly agreed to this arrangement during waking and even sleeping hours, but they were even paying for the privilege to do so.

Thus, the 21st Century smartphone, marketed to Americans as a “hip” symbol of personal identity and technological marvel, is actually the perfect combination of Huxley and Orwell’s methods for social control, Soma and Big Brother. The smartphone is Soma in that it mesmerizes and sedates. Its user, slack-jawed, passive, and disconnected (the irony of being “connected”) from the tangible world around them, enjoys a pleasant squirt of dopamine with each incoming text, amusing video, or swipe to the next screen. How often have you had to dodge a teen, a twenty-, or a thirty-something on the sidewalk, humans with little or no experience of a non-Internet world, so completely engrossed in their device that they are largely oblivious to their physical surroundings? Of course, their elders are hardly any better. The smartphone is also Big Brother, not so much in that it is a means of surveillance (although it is one, as Edward Snowden revealed in 2013), but in that a screen delivers the drug. 

The iPhone debuted in 2007. Like iPod, iMac, iTunes, did you notice the symbolism in Apple’s choice of spelling? Lower case “i,” upper case device or service. In the West, the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment marked a renewed emphasis on man as the measure of all things. “Cogito ergo sum,” René Descartes famously stated. “I think, therefore, I am.” Thanks to Apple’s clever transformation, the subject is now the object, subordinate to Apple, and no longer thinking either.

Ignorance is the means of social control in the third most influential 20th Century dystopian novel, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. For Bradbury, burning books represented the end of human liberty and an open society. Knowledge and the capacity to use it are the evils to be stamped out by the state. Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, describes how constant Internet viewing had already begun to lead to a decline in human cognitive ability even then. Thirteen years later (2023), The Shallows is likely outdated. Ignorance, passivity, and a constant drugged state are what Apple, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc… want for the American public though it is not what they advertise. More likely than not, this very essay has exceeded most smartphone-addicted Americans’ attention span and capacity for reasoned thought.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of our visit to Dystopia starting in the Spring of 2020 was how quickly and readily the American public gave up 245 years of liberty for servitude. Most science fiction novels and films are set in a distant future, or at least predict a decades long decline (except in the case of nuclear war), before the advent of humanity’s slavery. From being the brave “I” who would meet the British redcoats at dawn on Lexington Green; who would pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to sign the Declaration of Independence a year later; who would leave or flee oppressive homelands with little or no resources to start a new life in the land of opportunity; who would face down totalitarian states in Europe, Americans have regressed to a people who not only willingly accepted the shackles of the state governors who issued “emergency orders” in the Spring of 2020 and beyond, but who asked for the chains to be tightened. Is there any wonder how governors could so easily implement autocratic control, faster and with less effort than any newly-minted despot who has just come to power in a coup? No need for Soma, Big Brother, or burning books. Try to get someone to give up their smartphone.