Pornocalypse Now

[Blue_Tires]

A little wordy and pretentious, but he does bring up some excellent issues...


Pornocalypse Now

It’s in a fog of fake fucking that man is sleepwalking toward an abyss.


Now that Gitmo is basically kaput and Bush’s war on the future has been replaced with Obama’s strategy for the present, is Orwell’s forewarning still relevant? Or has the real-world manifestation of the Orwellian already reached its peak and entered into decline?

Let me entertain you with a fantastic scenario – If Orwell had been born in 1984 rather than 1903, he would be a member of a subset of young men whose lives have been framed by two critical shifts in the mental landscape: the collapse of the global superpowers (USSR/US) and the rise of the pornography industry. Obviously there are countless events that have shaped the world in the past quarter century, but in terms of timing and impact, none have had such a profound effect on the average G8 20-something as the reshaping of conflict and sexual narratives. Just as the war on terror mainstreamed the notion of war without actual war, the pornography industry has successfully popularized sex without sex. So what would this bizarro Orwell be getting up to while the world totters on the brink of depression? Plumbing the depths of the English language or playing Call of Duty in his underwear? As newspapers are dying off quicker than Mexican salamanders, our young Orwell would probably not be a down-and-out journalist, but more likely a disengaged copywriter – his dystopian prose taking on an entirely different shape and form:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a woman’s face. Now zoom out, it’s a slutty blonde bitch getting her ass hammered by two monster cocks. Coming soon to DVD, Nazi Sluts 9: Invasion of the Schwarzkommando!”

It’s the early ’90s, sometime during the beginning of the Clinton era, around the time that the Democrats put an end to the Republican war on porn that raged throughout the Reagan/Bush years. The Berlin Wall has crumbled and East Germans are no longer forced to smuggle in their contraband pornos from the liberated West. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms have made it possible for Moscovites to get their hands on Japanese camcorders, the first small steps towards the production of Soviet smut.

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/83/pornocalypse_now.html

[bemildred]

1. Gender politics is another form of divide-and-rule. nt

[Blue_Tires]

2. daytime kick

[KoKo]

3. Comment from person at the website on the article:

18, 2009
12:03 am
Link

”..we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

“This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

- The forward from “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman
— Eric

[Hugin]

4. Hmm, food for thought.

Thanks for pointing that out, KoKo.

[Blue_Tires]

6. excellent point

[Blue_Tires]

5. ttt

[8 track mind]

7. damn.....

And so it began. My virgin eyes were submerged into an ocean of luma-chroma sex acts and the outrageous poetics of consumerist eros: turgid hard-ons mechanically harpooning seeping vaginal canals and gracefully spraying sperm streams atop mountainous titties with their omnipresent nipple peaks.

wow.....leave a little bit to the imagination why don't we......

:sarcasm: