I am writing this while the US government boasts about a planned livestream of an execution. A firing squad, a December date, a 1 pm start, and the Defence Secretary, the global defender of human rights, promising that ‘people will be able to watch it’.
The world has come to this: Simple binaries of more stupid and less stupid. Being rational or having common sense is left with an ‘at your own risk’ tag.
George Orwell would know the scene. Early in his book 1984, Winston Smith describes a night at the cinema. A war film, a boat full of refugees bombed at sea, and an audience shouting along with laughter. The bomb is ordinary. What frightens is the cackling.
It is hard to say which hits the mind harder: puberty or 40 (I came up with this while doomscrolling at 2 am). At 20, Orwell explains everything. His world has villains, and youthful energy needs them. Around 40, with a chin and a half and a belly you hold in for photographs, his French teacher at Eton starts to make more sense. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932. In 1949, he sent his old pupil a letter praising 1984 and then, politely, marking it wrong. He said rulers would learn that people who love their servitude are cheaper to manage than those who need prisons.
Migration researchers categorise every departure as push or pull. Information works the same way. Orwell’s world is push: The state shoves its version at you and burns the rest. Huxley’s is pull. Nobody hides anything. You reach for the pill yourself and ask for a refill. People want more.
Nepal has tested both. In September 2025, the government tried the Orwell method, shutting down 26 social media platforms. The ban lasted less than a week, cost 77 lives, and led to the fall of one government. The country then chose its interim prime minister through a poll on Discord, an app generally built for gamers.
What comes next is pure Huxley. Nobody censors anything now; ministers threaten assaults on live public broadcasts. The slogans arrive as reels, as hypnopaedia did in Huxley’s dormitories, and are painted on the backs of trucks for those who miss them. A prime minister with 182 of 275 seats can walk out of Parliament mid-address and lose nothing, because the House was never his real audience. The feed is. Call it algorithmocracy, like ‘Fordism’ of Huxley. It needs no Ministry of Truth, only good wifi and a population too entertained to ask the second question.
The average user spends two hours and 39 minutes a day on social media. That is 40 full days a year, longer than any holiday any employer in Kathmandu will give you. No ministry ordered it. Orwell’s citizens had to be herded into their Two Minutes Hate. We call it hatewatching, and we do it for free, with zeal.
Bad press has also died. Orwell’s regime feared a bad headline so much that it paid Winston to rewrite old newspapers. Nobody bothers any more. A scandal is a product launch, and the anger over a livestreamed execution is the advertising for the livestream. In 1995, Carl Sagan complained that the media had begun to glorify stupidity, assuring people that knowing nothing was cool. He thought it was a trend. It turned out to be a business model, with the Kardashians as its royal family: a global industry built on being watched. They understood, before the rest of us, that attention is the product and talent is optional.
Many people are like the Mona Lisa now, famous simply for being famous.
Then there is the sameness. Huxley imagined factories that hatch up to 96 identical twins from a single egg. We skipped the people and applied the method to everything else. The streaming menu offers thousands of essentially identical titles. Electric cars look like the same bar of soap in different sizes. The music service Deezer reported that more than half the new songs uploaded to it were made entirely by AI. The algorithm noticed what we liked once and has served it back ever since.
Try riding a public bus, and you will get hyperthermia from loud, non-stop AI-generated-sounding slop yelling in the name of music.
Even love got the treatment. In Brave New World, everyone belongs to everyone else. Falling for one person is bad manners, and a College of Emotional Engineering writes the feelings the state wants people to feel. Huxley needed a government for that. We have Tinder and Bumble. Right swipe for yes, left swipe for no. A human being is judged in under a second, and behind the screen an algorithm decides whose face you will see at all. Heartbreak used to take months. Now it takes a thumb (blocked). And for those tired of people altogether, an AI companion never argues, never ages, and never asks where this is going.
Orwell did get language right. He feared a vocabulary so flat that some thoughts could no longer be expressed. He assumed a ministry would do the flattening. We managed it ourselves, with icons, with books so dead to feeling. With films that only BT Kanchha would approve of, whole socio-political positions now fit inside ‘slay’ and ‘cringe’.
Baby-talking influencers should come with a statutory warning, don’t you think?
Ernest Hemingway recounts a lunch in Paris where F. Scott Fitzgerald confessed that his wife had told him he was too small to please any woman. Hemingway took him to the men’s room, looked, declared him normal, and sent him to the Louvre to compare himself with the statues. Only Hemingway’s version survives, and he never undersold his own kindness. Still, the man who wrote The Great Gatsby needed another man to tell him he measured up just fine.
The men’s room is a feed, and the feed never says you are fine, because a reassured customer logs off. Everyone does this 40 times a day now. We watch our own Instagram stories to check how we look. The MRR-type groups help us confirm our biases and abuse those who think differently. The fear of being found out pays for it all. Orwell’s state broke people until they conformed. Ours only needs to show us someone prettier or someone who can oversimplify.
Fairness demands the other side. Nobody in Huxley’s world goes hungry. The feed that numbs a city also gives Nepali teenagers a voice louder than the elected kleptocrats. It lets a mother in Achham see her son’s face in Doha every evening. Help and harm in equal measure. That is exactly why it wins. A boot can be resisted. It is far harder to resist something that remembers your birthday, agrees with you, and makes you feel relevant with 100s of filters.
And now a third book is catching up. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s scientist builds a creature, takes one look, and runs. The creature raises itself by watching a family through a gap in a wall. AI was built the same way. Its makers fed it everything humans ever wrote, from poetry to comment sections, and now warn us about it between funding rounds. Orwell’s villain watches you. Huxley’s entertains you. Shelley’s maker walks away.
Consider what the creature is watching now. Gen Z was born into the feed and has learned to use it as a strategy, from Dhaka to Kathmandu. Millennials remember the world before it and still cannot put their phones down. We know what was lost and are too tired to fetch it back.
So I will cross my fingers and try to keep up as the classic book characters keep returning to reality. When I do look up from the screen, mostly while the phone is charging, I finally understand why our parents called us brats.
Meanwhile, enjoy the livestream.