Orwell and Huxley missed the future that Asimov inadvertently got right.

The powerful idea

A few years back a comic by Stuart McMillen (Recombinant Records) was circulating on social media that compared the futures prophesied by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley (this comparison was taken from the foreword to Neil Postman:s "Amusing Ourselves To Death"). Since McMillen has taken down the comic due to wishes of the Postman family i'll do a short summary. Basically while Orwell made grim projections based on his experiences (as a volunteer in the Spanish civil war) with how revolutionary movements used physical thought oppression after gaining power by creating an overtly oppressive state, Huxley had envisioned a world where the power kept masses under control with a more voluntarily based information overload where problems and issues in society were diluted by amusement such as from mass media.

While both approaches can be said to have been applied in the real world for keeping the civil society in a domicile state, In Orwells case in oppressive regimes like East Germany and North Korea whilst Huxleys predictions could have been said to have been partially true for the Western world, i'd argue that the person who got the projections about current society right was Isaac Asimov with his concept of psychohistory.

The original Foundation trilogy whilst mentioning the idea of calculating probabilities of the future that was still mostly a smaller backdrop to the space opera and mental control ideas. However Asimov had also explored the potential of computer AI's doing projections of human actions and also controlling us in his Robot short stories and with the Foundation prequels written in the late 70's and 80's he fully latched onto the ideas of computers being ideal when merging his Robot and Foundation universes.

The Foundation prequels established that there was a need for both a way to (ONE) calculate the probabilities of events happening in a society (not on an individual level) as well as the ability to (TWO) control minds to tip over the scales whenever individual actions could control probabilities of events and follow up events. (The post-trilogy sequels also added that good politicians had a natural intuition about some of the probabilities of events).

SO how does this apply to our time?

ONE : Calculating event probabilities

Pollsters and similar people had gotten fairly good at using polling and data processing to do projections about electoral trends to calculate odds, they are still quite crude tools:

1. Polls needs to be kept short and ask the right questions, if the question is wrong you can mislead yourself.
2. Polls only cover a sample of the population leading to a big variance in the results

However, compare this with social media to see what Cambridge Analytica could do with the data trove they got to analyze (and probably more that i missed)

1. Social media has a huge unfiltered data set of peoples opinions that only 10 years ago would have been prohibitively expensive to process but today massive data power can be bought on demand
2. With unfiltered data you don't need to start by asking questions from people that might not respond correctly due to not having an opinion or being asked the wrong question, you can instead sift through the data to find the answers and post new questions almost for free if the answer is inconclusive.
3. You have a far higher sample of the population but more importantly you have the SAME sample meaning that you can actually follow trends by correlating data with events.

TWO: Controlling people

Isn't mind-control science fiction? In the fantasy/sci-fi way of mentalist people yes. But if we circle back to social media we look at the other part of social media, how do they make money? Advertising of course and the reason Google tried so hard to compete in the social networking space with Facebook was because they very well knew that advertising could become so much better targeted with the data Facebook has at hand, and even with Googles data there are probably plenty of relevant data points to target individuals.

Just to remind ourselves there's been plenty of reports that advertisement targeted for special groups was present during the 2016 US election. Regular advertising always has had to account for backlash and fact checking and has often had a tendency to be pretty bland, contrast this with a highly targeted "dark" AD that not only could swing people directly to the "right side" but also cause secondary effects such as getting voters that were impossible to turn to vote for another candidate such as Jill Stein or not vote at all, both options that would strengthen the position of the side posting the ads.

Are we forever under the boot?

Depends on your outlook, some thinks that our kids growing up will eventually fix the problem but younger generations are probably equally ignorant. Others thinks that we should lock down the internet and may even point out that places like China and Turkey censor the internet and use offensive tools (but wasn't it that kind of governments we wanted to avoid?). Others might suggest quitting social media en masse (no that won't happen).

Despite the mess that the GDPR is causing in the EU right now, legislation in it's ilk might be the only sane choice combined with society making it a collective effort into bringing out people who try to influence covertly. I could stand behind for example advertisers on bigger social media platforms being required to submit identity verification and be clear about the sender of advertisements. Facebook already requires people to use real names and since both FB and Twitter have blue badges to indicate verified persons we might be already be heading in a direction where the air for people who try to keep working crowds anonymously is slowly sucked out.

I do have some respect for peoples wishes to be private but playing fields should always be level so if the social media platform is for real persons then one should keep to those rules there and do private discussions on sites where everyone is anonymous, because one of the huge issues now is that the playing field has been skewed in favor of those working in the dark.