/lit/ - Literature

>>21911978

At last

Try this short story out, Vonnegut’s Harrison bergeron is probably what you want https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

>>21911978
Obvious answer and not a book, but Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is pretty spot on.

Why is there no book on stupidity as a divine universal core concept of the universe? I can't understand that there's still no mythology that turns the very essence of stupidity into a holy god, that truly everyone on earth worships

People always complain about how much modernity sucks and how we live in le cyberpunk capitalist dystopia or whatever and I'm just sitting here in my comfy air conditioned home office getting paid $25 an hour to literally shitpost, smoke weed, and jerk off while writing an occasional email

>>21912178
good for you, keep sucking your boss's dick

Not a work of fiction, but it's completely bizarre to me how this was written before even ten years ago

>>21911995
What about Sneed?

>>21912157
The Sirens of Titan has something similar, but more like banality than stupidity
also The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I'd be surprised if Terry Pratchett hasn't written anything like that

>>21912178
>I'm just sitting here in my comfy air conditioned home office getting paid $25 an hour to literally shitpost, smoke weed, and jerk off while writing an occasional email
It's dystopian because you think this is a good thing, a happy dumb life. No different if you were plugged into the matrix. You are not fulfilled, you have no purpose. You are a sloth in human form. The collapse is coming.

>>21912143
>Obvious answer and not a book, but Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is pretty spot on.

came here to post this

>>21912143
>>21913496
Why does everyone say this film is so great and salient when it's almost just as lowbrow as the society it's trying to satirize? It's paper-thin, intellectually.

>>21913521
Why, because it doesn't spell its message out in words on the screen? Maybe you're paper-thin yourself.

>>21913521
Midwits love Idiocracy because they like to envision themselves as the last enlightened person in their community/social circle/whatever. There's a reason it used to be like every other Redditor's favorite movie.

>>21911978
I can't recall the nane, but there was this YA dystopia book where everything is a corporate hellhole and everyone has brain chips that feed them advertisments all day to get them to be better consumers for whatever corporations want. The MC meets a girl with some kind of genetic defect that keeps her from getting implanted properly abs he forms his first real human connection with her, but when she basically gets cancer the social credit medical system won't give her treatment because it calculates that she's a bad investment. Ultimately the boy crumbles to social pressure and programming and ghosts her and she dies, and he has a full on psychotic breakdown in guilt.

At the end once he's been heavily medicated all his "friends" are talking about the cool new tumors they're growing from the hyper-polluted environment, and how it's all the rage online.

Can't remember the name.

>>21913562
It is genuinely insightful at times. "Particular individual" is exactly how everybody talks now, since everyone's a 95IQ retard with a college degree somehow. And the "but Brawndo's got what plants crave" rivals "it goes up to 11" for describing how 98% of normie retards think and act.

>>21911978
Were the ___ to win this war, the world would return to a dull and primitive state.
-some guy idk

>>21912143
i couldn't make it 10 minutes into the horribly written movie

the forever war predicted people would be encouraged to DUDE WEED out, would be moved into urban centers and rural property would be tightly controlled, and everyone would be engineered towards homosexuality the point where heterosexuality s "weird and taboo", and the family would be eliminated, and reproduction and child rearing would be taken over by the state instead of men and women coming together and having kids

>>21911978
i hate my life so fucking much that its a joke i cant off myself
fuck

>>21915235
Yeah

>>21913968
L’académie

>>21913486
If OP is looking for something along these lines, try "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster.
Written 100 years ago, it predicted Internet-based shut-in culture surprisingly well, and how no one know how to fix anything anymore.

>>21911978
I mean Brave New World is exactly that. All people care about is doing drugs, fucking and being entertained by the screens.

>>21916042
This. BNW is superior to 1984 in every aspect, and is by and large more relevant to our contemporary predicament

>>21916042
>>21916066
midwits

>>21911978
So you want books about the human condition?

>>21912665
Pynchon's better

>>21912178
Noone goes into the office anymore so I like to go there when wfh gets too boring

>>21911995
I liked the sequel, "Seed", a lot more.

>>21916075
no u

>>21911978
1984 didn't "predict" doublethink, newspeak or thoughtcrime, these things were already prevalent in culture and in history, Orwell verbalized them in order to point out the damage these unspoken concepts have on society. The prediction of state controlled media broadcasted to your home was relatively new but the television was invented in 1913 and "1984" came out in 1949. Every government will do anything in their power to control the wealth and will always try to stupify the masses to get away with it.

>>21915800
excellent recommendation
>Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine. The sigh at the crises of the Brisbane symphony no longer irritated Vashti; she accepted it as part of the melody. The jarring noise, whether in the head or in the wall, was no longer resented by her friend. And so with the mouldy artificial fruit, so with the bath water that began to stink, so with the defective rhymes that the poetry machine had taken to emit. all were bitterly complained of at first, and then acquiesced in and forgotten. Things went from bad to worse unchallenged.

>>21916066
They’re both true simultaneously. Along with Fahrenheit 451. I feel like a pleb saying this because they’re such “normie” basic highschool midbrow tier books according to the consensus of the handsome geniuses (chads) on /lit/, but it has to be said.

BNW is for if you’re one of the masses who stays in line, in one of the countries with a higher standard of living. 1984-style responses are for Chinese citizens, the prisoners of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, or if you were someone who happened to be there on January 6th, now increasingly if you’re posting hate speech and/or anything that could be construed as threats of violence online (like the U.K. hate speech laws … cops will come to your house over social media posts…), or if you were someone trying to organize an anti-lockdown protest in Australia or New Zealand during the pandemic (yes, cops came to their houses, too), and the like, basically just being politically incorrect in general now (although to a lesser degree, still, than other victims of totalitarianism noted here like Chinese citizens or assorted Arabs in Guantanamo Bay/Abu Ghraib). And especially if you’re Julian Assange — that’s the 1984 treatment you’re getting.

Memoryholing. Doublethink. Newspeak. Thoughtcrime. The government watching us through telescreens. Still strikingly prescient or applicable, with maybe some modifications (gadgets like Amazon’s Echo, smartphones, and devices through which you browse the Internet now being more applicable than a telescreen).

However, BNW got some of the other stuff right or somewhat so — super-sexed-up society instead of an anti-sex one like in 1984 (although with the paradoxical effect of leading to the rise of sexlessness in young males — like with pornography addiction, Japanese hikkikomoris, warped gender imbalances now displayed most strikingly in studies of online dating (women seeing only a top 10% of men as truly attractive, men more easily attracted to anything with a warm wet hole between its legs that’s still alive or something like that?), and the rise of mental health disorders and social anxiety through being raised by the Internet and social media), down to an agenda of kids being taught about sex as early as possible, drugs (both recreational and pharmaceutical) and electronic entertainment to pacify the masses.

Also throw in “The Camp of the Saints” at this point (not a chud pls don’t ban me Jannies).

>>21916075
Dimwit

>>21912143
>>21913496
Idiocracy is far too optimistic. The IQ decline will be a lot faster and the outcome will be a lot worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYWIyga245g

>>21916666
Yep...it happened to every other advanced civilization, too.
Most recently, the Byzantine Empire, and before that, the Roman Empire.
Humanity is practically a cursed race.

>>21916666
I can't take Dutton seriously. Is the book good? Does he have a specific prediction on the number? We're entering an age of designer genetics in a few decades. Even with dysgenics as a factor net intelligence has the potential to raise dramatically. Besides of which most races segregate and hispanics aren't as comparably dumb as blacks. straightforward dysgenics isn't going to lower IQ more than a few points per decade and we obviously have assortative mating going on

>>21917124
>an age of designer genetics
And you think that the ones who fund these experiments (i.e. Big Business and Big Government) are going to select for intelligence?
Of course not...intelligence is a threat to them.
There's a reason candidates for law enforcement are disqualified for scoring too highly on IQ tests.
Also...what's to say that an "improvement" in the immune system won't lead to antibodies that attack mundane people like a pandemic virus?
You really haven't thought through this, have you.

>>21913486
>being comfortable and doing things you enjoy is le bad because...it just is okay!!!
I mean you're free to move to some African shithole and toil in the coal mines for 12 hours a day if you think that'll make you feel """fulfilled"""
As for me, I'll enjoy my comfy bedroom where I can play vidya and read genre fiction.

>>21916208
Nothing beats the prequel by Chuck though

>>21917775
God, how I hate faggots.

>>21911978
The Forever War
The Culture Series

>>21916666
Dutton a cute

>>21916666
Checked. I read 1984 when I was 12 and saw so many parallels to real life. It's scary to think how much closer we are to that world 20 years later.

>>21917775
What a sad pathetic loser you are

>>21912178
Brave New World