Brave New World and what it teaches us about the future
The resurgence of fake news is making us disinterested in real stories. Soon we’ll be so full of ourselves that we won’t care about the real issues that surround us

Sometimes I wonder if we are living in the future that Aldous Huxley predicted in his novel Brave New World (published in 1932). With an immense amount of 24-hour news channels and with countless sources of news to choose from, but with very little global interest of real stories, it appears that what the British author anticipated isn’t so far from reality: a world that is so into themselves that they, more often than none, forget the real world around them and the real issues that surround them.
For those who haven’t read it — I highly recommend it — Brave New World is a dystopian novel set in a futuristic Britain where children are selected from birth to follow an specific purpose: those in the higher steps of the social ladder are chosen to become scientists and to pursue high paying jobs, while those less privileged are forced to do the jobs that no one wants.
The first few chapters of this book are actually some of the best introduction chapters you’ll find in any work of fiction: they explain how children are forced to care less about books by giving them electrical shocks, over and over, until they get sick and uninterested. And while the ending of the novel is actually not at all a happy one, it makes the reader wonder if this story could be, in a near future, a real one.
None of the characters — except for one — actually have dreams of pursuing careers or having families. In fact, most just go through life having meaningless sex, consuming drugs and chasing endless and worthless emotions but not really engaging with one another.
No real meaning
In the last few years, with the resurgence of fake news all over the world, people have become — and are becoming — disinterested in real news. When not knowing whether what you’re watching or reading is real and when faced with the decision to spend time consuming news that might actually not be trustworthy, the consumers are left with very little options but to shift their attention to other forms of information: hence the resurgence of Netflix and other forms of entertainment.

This global phenomenon doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon: we’ve seen how vital fake news has been to Putin’s stability as president of Russia and we’ve witnessed how important fake news was to electing presidents such as Donald Trump in the USA and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico.
While fake news is being used for entertaining purposes — over six million Mexicans believe Paul Walker is alive and living in Mexico due to a fake internet story — fake news is also being used for political and economic purposes: it is used against immigrants, not only in the US-Mexico border but also in Europe and South America and it is being used against developing countries in Asia and Africa.
Independent fake news sites make millions of dollars every year with no purpose other than to buy expensive cars and to live lives of luxury. However, countries are increasingly using fake news to control their people — it appears that lying to them make politicians hold on to power as long as they can.
I always believed that the future would be more like George Orwell’s depiction in his novel 1984 (published in 1949) where authoritarian governments prevent their people from being informed by handling all news sources. However, now I think that the future will be more like the one depicted in Brave New World: a future where people are so full of themselves that governments don’t bother blocking news sources. And we have fake news to thank for that.
