Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. On net they tend to engender sloppy creation (hence: AI slop), not encouraging puerile tabloid consumption.
Edit: and atlas shrugged, but that doesn’t go over well here.
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1984: control through fear and pain.
Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction.
Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception.
Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation.
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Brave New World is the most prophetic.
Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time. Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. Except instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen that I just spend a hundred pages getting you to sympathize with."
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of trick to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.