Over the course of the twentieth century, as the final manifestation of the system began to take shape, some thinkers began to speculate on what the result would be, of what kind of world was coming into being. Of these nightmarish visions of our present four stand as prototypes, and as models for fundamental aspects of the system. These are the dystopias imagined by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick1:

Orwellian Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed through violent control of sexual impulse. Constant surveillance and constant censorship. Control of bodies by enclosure, fear, explicit violence, repression of dissent and forced obedience to ‘the party line’ (orwellian fanaticism: All must submit). Control of minds by explicitly policing, punishing and suppressing subversive language (orwellian newspeak: state-controlled reduction of vocabulary to limit range of thought). Truth cannot be known (a.k.a. hyper-relativism or postmodernism); and therefore we need an external authority to decide what the truth is (kings and priests) and to protect society from chaos and madness (the orwellian them: reds, anarchists, extremists, infidels, plebs, freaks, criminals, etc.).

Huxleyan Rule by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, technocratic systems. Super-excess of choice. Limitation of access to speech platforms. Assimilation of minorities (via tokenism), foundational belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and ‘flexibility’. Control by desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent2 (system selects for system-friendly voices and unconscious self-censorship). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality, promiscuity and dissolution. Control of bodies through pleasure and addiction to pleasure. Control of minds by proliferating information and enclosing language within professional boundaries (illichian newspeak, or uniquack). Truth can be intellectually known (the religion of scientism) and is obvious when understood (huxleyan fanaticism: only the wicked can refuse it) and learnt in the process of setting up an internal authority (a.k.a. morality or conscience) called ‘education’.

Kafkaesque3 Rule by bureaucracy. Control of world through putting it in writing; fixing names, surveying land, standardising measures, tracking movement, quantifying, measuring and recording everything that happens everywhere, thereby abstracting it and making it manageable, which, in itself, induces tractable stress and the schizoid, self-regulating self-consciousness (anxiety about low marks, unlikes, official judgements and the like) of the bureaucratically surveilled. In addition, bureaucratic functions and practices in an expanding abstract system are increasingly designed to manage their own abstract output. Having less and less to do with the actual lives of those who engage with paperwork, bureaucratic tasks necessarily become frustrating, interminable, dehumanising and pointless; a state of affairs which is permitted, and even encouraged, as it automatically grinds down that which threatens management; the informal, the illiterate, the spontaneous, the weird, the local, the private, the embodied and all those who seek to have a direct relationship with their fellows; all of which is intolerable to Kafkaesque systems, which promote into power hyper-normal functionaries who seek an indirect relationship with their fellows and who, through fear of life, seek to control it through the flow of paperwork.

Phildickian Rule by replacing reality with an abstract, ersatz virtual image of it (a.k.a. the spectacle). This technique of social control began with literacy—and the creation of written symbols, which devalued soft conscious sensuous inspiration, fostered a private (reader-text) interaction with society, created the illusion that language is a thing, that meaning can be stored, owned and perfectly duplicated, that elite language is standard and so on4—and ended with virtuality—the conversion of classrooms, offices, prisons, shops and similar social spaces into ‘immersive’ on-line holodecks which control and reward participants through permanent, perfect surveillance, the stimulation of positive and negative emotion, offers of godlike powers, and threats to nonconformists of either narco-withdrawal or banishment to an off-line reality now so degraded by the demands of manufacturing an entire artificial universe, that only hellish production facilities, shoddy living-units and omni-prisons can materially function there.

These four visions of hell are all founded upon the civilised system. This foundation, or background, serves as the origin and meeting point of Orwellian, Huxleyan, Kafkaesque and Phildickian worlds, which necessarily overlap and interact at key points; namely the fundamental alienation and misery of civilisation, the commodification and rationalisation of capitalism and the hyper-specialised, hyper-technical approach to life of late-capitalism. From this common root grew those branches of modernity and postmodernity which Orwell, Huxley, Kafka and Dick explored and described, and which it is helpful to bear in mind as we investigate our world further.

All modern societies, for example, are both Kafkaesque and Phildickian (indeed virtual Phildickia can be seen as a modern refinement of the hyper-literate Kafkastan) with either a Huxleyan or Orwellian overarching framework; modern, Western, ‘capitalist’ societies have tended to be basically Huxleyan (HKP) and, on the other side of the slit-thin officially acceptable ‘political spectrum’ (a.k.a. the ‘Overton Window’), pre-modern, Eastern, ‘communist’ countries have tended to Orwellianism (OKP),5 although within these disparities much diversity prevails. We are, while at work for example, largely in an Orwellian mode, where freedom to choose how and when we work is strictly limited (either explicitly or, for modern professionals and precarious freelancers, implicitly), where spontaneity and sexuality are severely punished and where, essentially, we are treated like chattel. When we leave work, however, we enter a Huxleyan world of transcendent freedom, infinite choice, democracy and pleasure; we can comment, vote, consume to satiety, a panoply of sexual and creative opportunity opens out and everyone everywhere treats us (or is at least supposed to treat us) like the capitalist gods we really are (official term; customer); at least those of us who can pay are. The dirt poor remain in Airstrip 1.

Ideological managers (academics, film directors, journalists, etc.) prefer to have two (or more) dystopian systems because it makes us seem like the goodies and them the baddies. Communism is to blame for their food banks and breadlines, but capitalism has nothing to do with ours (or vice versa). Sure, our masses have the same miserable lives as theirs, reel under the same bureaucratic insanity, stumble around the same shoddy unreal worlds, and witness the same catastrophic destruction of nature and beauty as theirs do, but at least we’ve got democracy! / at least our families stick together! / at least the trains run on time! / at least GTA 5,67,8,9 is coming out soon / at least the Olympics will cheer us up (delete, or exterminate, as appropriate).

I call this common justification, biastification: To excuse one excess of one’s self or one’s society by comparing it with its opposame / false antonym. Our basically Huxleyan nightmare is excused by pointing the finger at their basically Orwellian nightmare. The cult of optimism is excused by comparing it with that of pessimism, cold rationality is excused by comparing it with hot emotion, being ‘a responsible adult’ is excused by comparing it to being ‘an irresponsible child’, hedonism is excused by comparing it to boredom, corporatism is excused by comparing it to statism, and the implicit violence of modern uncivilisation is excused by comparing it to the explicit violence of the lawless pre-modern cults which gave rise to and sustain it.

That all these apparent differences are essentially aspects of the same reality or pseudo reality becomes visible during crisis. When the Huxleyan world is attacked (or an attack, by terrorists, communists or flu-like viruses, is simulated) or, at its apogee, begins to break down, it instantly turns into an Orwellian nightmare. When the ‘law and order’ of capitalism disintegrates, those who uphold it are perfectly happy to take their place at the head of feudal gangs and crime syndicates. When the over-excited optimist loses his status he instantly transforms into a suicidal pessimist. When the fun-loving influencer cannot get her fix of excitement she immediately experiences intense, unbearable boredom. When the truth gets close to the rationalist, physicalist, objectivist bone, childish, irrational, solipsistic spleen erupts. When a sophisticated virtual addiction becomes unavailable, the addict switches at once to a cruder antecedent. When a socialist revolution seizes the state, capitalist professionals hardly skip a step in transferring to one-party rhythms. When communism falls, commissars switch to raving capitalists in a trice. At no point is a genuine alternative, much less the source of or solution to what ails us, perceived or acknowledged.

Those who build and maintain the system do not have an organ to sense the source, that which is beyond or prior to the biastified opposames of the emotional-rational world. Uncertainty, mystery, femininity, innocence, nature and the context (a.k.a. non-specialist reality) are all sources of anxiety to systemoids, who respond to their presence with irritation, hostility and an irresistible urge to either brush them from view or to bring them under comprehensible control. The mysterious and the immediate are met with violence and—the modern companion of violence—rationalisation; the further reduction of experience to quantifiable things, objects, ideas, facts, figures, commodities, prices, wages and so on. Then, as reality is annihilated, and a rational, virtual nightmare spreads over the wasteland where the earth once was, the system proceeds to make a series of extraordinary claims to the effect that because our lives have quantitatively improved—because more land or labour has been commodified, because more output has been produced, because the virtual world is faster or more accurately emulates sensory experience, because people are financially richer, or in possession of more amenities, qualifications, knowledge, security or choice—that we are thereby enjoying a superior ‘quality’ of life.

Radical critiques of the system necessarily focus on this so-called ‘quality’, and attempt to show that it is actually just a larger quantity of stimulation, movement, security or power (relative to boredom, insecurity or poverty). We have more jobs, yes, and more money, and more comfort, and more power; more things—but our lives are not improving. We are becoming lonelier, sicker, more insane, more bored, and more alienated from a natural world, which is actually dying. A few technological innovations may genuinely serve us, but the system as a whole enslaves and ruins us. The earth is not becoming a better place to live. In fact, everything on it which we deeply value is being destroyed by amenities, choice, prosperity, jobs and progress.

The response of the system to the threat of such a critique is completely predictable. The system and those who serve it inevitably respond to qualitative degradation with quantitative demands and rebuttals: show me your proof, give me your evidence, explain to me the details, my life isn’t as bad as all that, look at what the papers say, what does all this even mean? Not that there isn’t a place for the facts that professional systemacrats demand—of course there is—but that the problem with and solution to the unhappy supermind are, ultimately, not a matter that can be resolved in this way, technically, rationally, objectively or scientifically. It is to art we must turn to understand our world; which is why those in command of the world spend an enormous amount of energy in debasing art, in stripping it of meaning, or of handing it over exclusively to their quality-immune chums.

Naturally there is no point in arguing with those who cannot understand the truth of quality—you might as well reason with a child shouting ‘no I’m not, you are’ over and over again—but those who own and manage the system are well aware that their violent reactions to this truth are of limited efficacy and, on their own, betray a lack of integrity. Hence, the existence of an ideology industry to produce and disseminate myths by which the system can protect itself against radical attack; by which owners and managers can live without conscience and workers and outcasts can die without complaint; by which a counterfeit unworld can justifiably replace the earth we once lived on; myths of the benevolence of the system, of its eternal inevitability, of its unquestionable truth, of its glory, beauty, utility and equity.

These are…