Did Orwell Predict the War on Copyrights and the **AA?

[crobusa]

I?ve seem various threads on the internet debating whether the assault on the First Amendment was a symptom of Orwell?s 1984 or Huxley?s Brave New World. 1984?s imagery was of a depressing Big Brother forever crushing humanity under the excuse of war. BNW suggested that people willingly sacrificed their freedom to be constantly entertained.

I was recently going through the archives of old works and found "The Prevention of Literature", a essay he wrote 4 years before his death. Many of the passages summarized the premise for 1984, and hinted his reasoning for naming suspected communists to a government blacklist. (Article on that here Page may be NSFW)
Some interesting quotes:

?A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands.?
?Of course, print will continue to be used, and it is interesting to speculate what kinds of reading matter would survive in a rigidly totalitarian society. Newspapers will presumably continue until television technique reaches a higher level, but apart from newspapers it is doubtful even now whether the great mass of people in the industrialized countries feel the need for any kind of literature. They are unwilling, at any rate, to spend anywhere near as much on reading matter as they spend on several other recreations. Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.
It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery. But a sort of mechanizing process can already be seen at work in the film and radio, in publicity and propaganda, and in the lower reaches of journalism. The Disney films, for instance, are produced by what is essentially a factory process, the work being done partly mechanically and partly by teams of artists who have to subordinate their individual style. Radio features are commonly written by tired hacks to whom the subject and the manner of treatment are dictated beforehand: even so, what they write is merely a kind of raw material to be chopped into shape by producers and censors?

I've heard of people reading what they want to see, but this is almost prophetic. He goes on to suggest the reason literature didn't die in totalitarian regimes was because they were inefficient, and their leaders corrupt, apthetic, or liberal. (I would assume apathy of the profitability of a work or a sense of communuity are the two main reasons for works entering the public domain/getting GPL'd.)

 

[pulse8]

Is RIAA a new four-letter, forbidden word or something?

 

[LordMaul]

Originally posted by: pulse8
Is RIAA a new four-letter, forbidden word or something?

No, but it could also mean MPAA.

 

[crobusa]

I meant it could be RIAA or MPAA, both whine the same tune.

 

[pulse8]

Originally posted by: crobusa
I meant it could be RIAA or MPAA, both whine the same tune.

I see.

 

[MadRat]

Very interesting post.