twentytwentyfive (12. 169)

Better Living through Beowulf brings us a thoughtful reflection on George Orwell’s prescient 1946 essay called “The Prevention of Literature” that forecasts how authoritarian regimes will turn to AI (not exactly couched in modern parlance but rather as formulaic, mass-produced writing that could outpace any author or newsroom, though his dystopian novel does feature prole porn—we might even be denied that—and other entertainments produced by machine), which envisions journalism being first censored out of existence to be churned out with minimal human input or intervention with prose and poetry to follow—though book bans in the United States (including 1984) seem to rather subvert that sequence, notwithstanding the attacks against what’s labelled as the “legacy media” continuing—already witnessing the change in his own time with modular stories and plots, easily adapted and repackaged for an eager audience and easily made to conform with the worldview that the state seeks to project. Introducing his work with a recollection of attending a meeting of the PEN Club in London that coincided with the three-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Milton’s Areopagitica—in defence of press freedoms—two years prior, Orwell blames the loss of intellectual liberty on the undermining of the increasingly concentrated ownership of the press and monopolies on broadcast media by corporations that refused to support their authors and internecine squabbling amongst academics. Such an atmosphere and compromised readership enables conditions for a totalitarian takeover. Contemporary critics generally agreed with Orwell’s premise, though some though his arguments amounted to “intellectual swashbuckling” and concluded his prophecies doubtful.