We're living in every dystopian novel that warned us about the future

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And as promised, here is the script from my video:
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Who’s suffering?
My name is Mr. Beat and let me be blunt. (looking over) No, not James Blunt. (You’re beautiful) Oh, thank you.
It’s been really difficult for me to be positive about the future lately. Why? You may ask.
Because it seems we’re living inside every dystopian novel that warned us about the future.

And to be clear, when I say “dystopia,” I mean an imaginary society in which people have lost all their freedoms and lost their humanity and equality.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking…”Oh come on, Beat, it’s not THAT bad.” And I’m not saying we’re in a literal apocalypse. But some of the themes these authors warned us about? They aren’t just “futuristic” anymore. They’re just…the present.

Let’s break it down. Let’s just go through seven of the big ones- the most popular dystopian novels…many of which we were forced to read in school growing up. We’ll go through them one by one. Oh yes. One by one. Starting with…

1984- The Death of Privacy and Truth
Let’s start with the most popular, the one that most of you are probably already aware of because people bring up so much that it's kinda annoying. George Orwell’s 1984.

When Orwell wrote about Big Brother, he imagined a world where the Thought Police watched you through “Telescreens” that could never be turned off. And indeed, people used to be terrified of the government putting cameras in their homes. But here’s the twist: we didn’t need an authoritarian government to force them on us. We BOUGHT them. We often call them “smart.” Smartphones, smart speakers, smart TVs, smart thermostats, smart locks, smart doorbells, smart appliances, smart lights, smart vacuums, smart baby monitors…basically if they have a camera and an internet connection, one could make a compelling argument that they are just like the Telescreens Orwell wrote about in 1984. All of these smart devices are spying on us.^1 Through them giant media companies are gathering a lot of personal information about you…even information as sensitive as your GPS location, your search history, or your heart rate and blood pressure… and then these media companies are turning around and regularly selling that personal information to who the heck knows.

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A pretty dang relevant sponsor this time around. Let’s go back to literally 1984.

But modern Big Brother surveillance isn’t just our smart devices spying on us and stealing our data. In Orwell’s 1984, if you made the wrong face, the authoritarian government of Oceania would arrest you. A Facecrime. Well, today facial recognition software can scan a crowd of thousands and pick out a single protester within seconds. We’ve built a surveillance net so advanced that even Orwell would shake his head.

The authoritarian government of Oceania in the novel also created Newspeak, a highly controlled and oversimplified language to limit a person’s ability to critically think. Today, we see this in “Corporate Speak” that encourages conformity. We don’t “fire people,” we “right-size the talent pool.” We don’t have “civilian casualties,” we have "collateral damage.” When language becomes a tool to hide the truth rather than express it, Big Brother isn’t just watching…he’s talking right through us.

And speaking of the truth…in the novel, the authoritarian government of Oceania’s ultimate goal was to make you believe that 2+2=5. Why? Well, because if they can make you deny the most basic facts of reality, they own you. Fast forward to 2026, and while we don’t have a “Ministry of Truth,” we do have “alternative facts.” We have algorithms that create filter bubbles where you only see news that confirms what you already believe. We’ve reached the point where two neighbors can live on the same street but inhabit two entirely different realities. Worst of all, we apparently have a government telling us we can’t believe what we see or hear, seemingly telling us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

Animal Farm- The Corruption of Power
Heck, you could even throw in George Orwell’s earlier masterpiece, Animal Farm.

In the book, animals overthrow their human oppressors for equality. They establish laws to promote equality known as the Seven Commandments, with the final one being “All animals are equal.” But the pigs slowly corrupt the revolution and soon it becomes “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” One of the pigs, Squealer, spreads a bunch of propaganda to fool the other animals into NOT SEEING that the revolution has been corrupted. Basically, Animal Farm is a brutal allegory for how revolutions often get hijacked by power-hungry leaders and how propaganda twists the truth.

And today? Well really throughout history but also today? We see people in power not held accountable for breaking the law. We see leaders who promise reforms but end up seeming to forget those reforms once they’re in power…instead just consolidating their power. This echoes the pigs’ betrayal. The modern “Squealers” are hack pundits and spin doctors who spend 14 hours a day convincing us that down is up and illegal, supposedly temporary measures passed 25 years ago are now permanent necessities. It’s the Seven Commandments approach to law…the rules haven’t changed, you’re just misremembering them dude.  

Brave New World- The Golden Cage
Probably the most disturbingly accurate dystopian novel I’ve ever read is Aldous (al duhs) Huxley’s Brave New World.

1 minute mark https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWPrOvzzqZk&t 
Indeed, while Orwell feared we’d be controlled by pain, Aldous Huxley feared we’d be controlled more by PLEASURE. In Brave New World, an authoritarian government keeps its citizens in a state of shallow, mindless bliss through a drug called Soma (that doesn’t cause a hangover) and endless, extremely engaging…yet trivial… entertainment. 

Well well, doesn’t THAT sound familiar. We are currently the most medicated and overstimulated humans in history. Sure, never before has it been easier to get access to drugs to make the pain go away, but we also have an infinite “Soma” drip right in our pockets. In fact, I might be interrupting your “Soma” drip right now. In our attention economy, everyday we are constantly bombarded with endless entertainment and distractions on our phones, from outrage cycles on social media to gamified shopping on Temu to scrolling millions of videos on TikTok to 24/7 Twitch streamers, constantly giving us dopamine hits before we can even process what we’re looking at. Not that much different than how the babies in Huxley’s Brave New World are conditioned in the Hatcheries, this endless entertainment and convenience conditions us to value comfort over everything else.

There’s also a strict social hierarchy in Brave New World, a caste system basically based on genetics. Each caste is indoctrinated to prefer members of their own caste and wear uniforms with different colors identifying their caste. In our world, innovations in genetics like CRISPR raise designer-baby questions, and social hierarchies, mostly based on wealth, are only getting worse, it seems, as social mobility declines.

Huxley’s warning was that we would come to LOVE our oppression. We’d trade our political agency and privacy for convenience and personalized recommendations. We wouldn’t be forced into a cage. We’d willingly just….walk right into that freaking cage. Indeed, it seems that many of us aren’t being forced to obey, we’re being entertained into indifference.

Fahrenheit 451- The End of the Deep Dive
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 45, another one that hopefully you were forced to read in school, explores similar themes to Brave New World.

In the Fahrenheit 451, “firemen” burn books because books are made up of conflicting ideas, and conflicting ideas make people sad. 

Today? Well, censorship HAS increased, even in places known for free speech like the United States. And sure, literal book bans have also been on the rise, often targeting stories about marginalized groups.

But Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is about much more than censorship. Bradbury himself told interviewers the book was about OUR OWN media consuming habits more than anything else. You see, DUE to the book burnings and censorship seen in Fahrenheit 451, society drowns in shallow entertainment and anti-intellectualism and chooses conformity over the truth. Bradbury saw a future in which people were so obsessed with the people on their wall-sized black mirrors that they lost the ability to have a conversation with their actual neighbors. People became more lonely. 

And today? Doom scrolling and viral videos prioritize quick hits over deep thought. Nuance is lost. If I can’t explain a complex geopolitical conflict in a short “explainer” video, people lose interest. We are self-censoring these days, man…so much that we often refuse to engage with anything that challenges our echo chambers. We easily fall for fake news. We seem to be losing our ability to just…sit…with a difficult idea. We’re metaphorically burning our own books by refusing to read anything longer than a caption. Why read a whole book when you can just watch the TikTok summary? In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury feared we’d lose our minds to the “Seashell” earbuds. (taking out earbuds) Oh. Good thing this video is not sponsored by Raycon…or Blinkist. And finally, yep…loneliness seems to be worse than ever right now.

The Handmaid’s Tale- Rights Are Made Up
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which recently was adapted into a pretty successful TV series, hits pretty close to home for a lot of people right now.

Atwood has repeatedly said she mostly just put stuff in the book that is based on events that have already really happened throughout history. In the story, a patriarchal, authoritarian country known as the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, terrorizes women and treats them as second-class citizens, and justifies it using the Old Testament of the Bible. The theocratic regime of Gilead completely controls women’s bodies amid environmental collapse and infertility. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBgdaZ0Xxr4 
Today, a return to abortion restrictions in the United States, a backlash against birth control, the renewed push for “traditional” family structures…and the associated tradwives trend….and the rise of Christian nationalism, are causing protestors to literally dress up as handmaids from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. After all, the slow, incremental chipping away at rights, often justified by “tradition” or “family values” is exactly how Atwood’s dystopia began. The Handmaid’s Tale reminds us that progress isn’t a one-way street. Rights, once gained, are never truly secure and can be lost through apathy or reactionary legislation. Sure, the handmaid’s uniform might not be real, but the battles over who controls women’s bodies? Oh they be very real.

Parable of the Sower- Greed Above All Else
Here’s a lesser known, but still a classic. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. 

First of all, though Parable of the Sower came out in 1993, it’s freaking set in the 2020s. The story follows an extremely empathetic young woman who becomes displaced from her relatively safe, gated community but then ends up starting basically a religion. In Butler’s dystopia, corporate greed has led to the total collapse of the middle class and…you guessed it… environmental catastrophe. Gated communities like the one the main character lives in have become armed fortresses, and people outside of the gated communities are in dire poverty and barely surviving. But heck, even in some of the gated communities water is scarce. 

Now, the real 2020s are nearly as bad as the 2020s in the Parable of the Sower, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t trending in the wrong direction. Each year, environmental catastrophes, skyrocketing inequality, and the mass migration of refugees from disaster zones seemingly gets worse. Gated communities are even on the rise.^2 More and more public spaces are becoming privatized.^3
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Butler’s Parable of the Sower shows a world that is increasingly more desperate, and, due to that, more cruel. Yeah, this one hits a little too close to home.

The Hunger Games- A Cruel Game that the Privileged Don’t Have to Play
You might think this one’s a wild pick, but I picked this one because it’s more metaphorical, ok?

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which is technically a trilogy and has prequels and later became a wildly popular movie series and basically a franchise at this point, is way more than just about kids fighting. It’s about the myth of social mobility. In the fictional country of Panem (pan uhm), a very wealthy and powerful group of people in the Capitol completely exploit the rest of the country through authoritarian control, ridiculous inequality, and…yes…spectacle violence. The rich watch the poor suffer for entertainment while maintaining power through fear and division. The book title is the name of such…violent spectacle. Every year in the Hunger Games, two children…one boy and one girl…from each poor district are randomly selected and then forced to play in what’s essentially a battle royale death match.

Ok, so you might be wondering, what the heck does the Hunger Games have to do with today? Yeah. That’s a good question.

While we don’t have kids fighting in arenas to the death, (well we kind of do) we do live in a world where major urban wealth centers thrive (kind of like the Capitol) and rural areas or certain parts of the world struggle with poverty (kind of like the Districts). The Capitol extracts everything from the Districts while giving nothing back, which is kind of a metaphor for how global capitalism and neo-imperialism exploit labor and resources from poorer parts of the world to fuel First World luxury. We watch reality TV that exploits and profits from people suffering. 

More than anything, though, we see in the book series that the Capitol spreads the myth that the system is fair. This parallels the myth of upward social mobility for anyone. Ya know, what we call here in the United States (sing) The American Dream. That anyone can be successful through hard work and determination. Occasionally, someone poor DOES make it to the top, just like how occasionally someone poor wins the Hunger Games, eh? Ya gotta give them SOME hope.

Writing a Better Ending
Ok, sure…I must admit that, most of us are pretty far from dystopia. While there are dystopian aspects of modern society here in the 2020s, that doesn’t mean we don’t have any freedoms. In fact, odds are, if you’re watching this video right now, you still have a LOT of freedom to do what you want whenever you want. 

My point of making this video is to never take these freedoms for granted. They can be taken away in an instant. More importantly, just because YOU still have freedoms, that doesn’t mean EVERYONE around currently has the same freedoms as you.

Dystopian novels aren’t meant to be instruction manuals, man. They’re supposed to be cautionary tales. They are meant to wake us up. 

In each and every one of these books, an individual who refuses to forget the truth rises up to resist the authoritarians in power. Sometimes it starts with a diary, a single, small act of rebellion, or even a single act of empathy. 

And because we still have lots of freedoms, we still have the power to change the ending of this hypothetical mashup of dystopian novels. We can still turn off the Big Brother devices, put down the Soma, and start treating each other like neighbors instead of “data points.”

As the great philosopher Natasha Bedingfield once sang, “Today is where your book begins. The rest is still unwritten.” You still have the power to determine what the next chapter will look like. Please send this video to every billionaire you know.



But hey, what the heck do I know? What book do YOU think best describes the current era we are living in? Let me know by yelling at me in public. Oh, and just a reminder that we must call out traitors to the human race. Also, just another reminder that you are obligated to become smart at something. Ok. Thank you for staying curious.

​Disclaimer: Mr. Beat offers opinions in this video
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^1.  https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/advice-smart-devices-data-tracking/
^2. https://luskin.ucla.edu/prof-minjee-kim-weighs-in-on-the-rise-of-gated-communities-in-the-u-s
^3.  https://www.politico.eu/newsletter/global-policy-lab/living-cities-privatizing-public-spaces/