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Published · transcript-backedHenry Farrell: evaluation
23 Oct 2019 Conversations with Tyler Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
“What he gets better is the sense of massive complex systems that don’t work particularly well — the kinds of constraints that they impose upon individuals and the kinds of ways that people try to respond to those constraints. And also, of course, the sense of a profound unreality in his novels, which I think is really why Dick, much more than, say, Orwell or Huxley or any of the other people you might think of — Zamyatin — is really the person who captures the kind of dystopian characteristics of the society that we live in at the moment, which isn’t a society where we have a state telling everybody what to think, but it’s a world in which nobody knows quite what to believe is true anymore.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Henry Farrell
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 23 Oct 2019
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Philip K. Dick — in his worldview, why do checks and balances fail in a democracy? How do things go wrong? “Oh, we’re America. We vote for people. They give us things. We live, we die.” What’s the actual problem? I think that Dick’s understanding of politics — at least his intellectual understanding of politics — is not his strength. Clearly, he’s got this very strong paranoid streak. Everything is about Richard Nixon, which I suppose is not unreasonable given the way that the world is. What Dick gets much, much better than his sense of politics and such — or, for that matter, than his sense of character because he is absolutely terrible on character, especially when it comes to women characters. His women characters — they’re all expressions of Dick’s own personal anxieties in one way or another. What he gets better is the sense of massive complex systems that don’t work particularly well — the kinds of constraints that they impose upon individuals and the kinds of ways that people try to respond to those constraints. And also, of course, the sense of a profound unreality in his novels, which I think is really why Dick, much more than, say, Orwell or Huxley or any of the other people you might think of — Zamyatin — is really the person who captures the kind of dystopian characteristics of the society that we live in at the moment, which isn’t a society where we have a state telling everybody what to think, but it’s a world in which nobody knows quite what to believe is true anymore. And you have multiple different versions of the truth. Philip K. Dick would have just reveled in QAnon. He would have had a very, very good sense of how it is that we could end up in a world with people like Donald Trump and QAnon reinforcing each other in a kind of a feedback loop. What’s the best of his creations? And what’s the most important? And are they the same?…
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