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What year is it again? Because people keep telling me we’re in 1984—or at least George Orwell’s vision of it. Doublespeak rules the business and political realms, objective truth has been shattered by a barrage of deepfakes and machine hallucinations, and we’re approaching the final frontier of labor extraction as AI mines our humanity for mimicry and (as we’re so often told) replacement.
The conditions Orwell warned of can’t arrive overnight; rather, a populace must be lulled into allowing it to happen. Not that we don’t seem pretty lull-able these days. When we sense constant threat—of war, of global food insecurity, of a mass surveillance state coming our way—can we be blamed for wanting to chill out? To scroll to something happier, maybe with a dog in it? To consume our way to happy oblivion, to ignore the fact that we essentially live in a caste system striated by economic class and labor potential that we’re increasingly unable to escape?
Which is to say: We’re not in 1984 at all. We’re in a Brave New World.
In 1984, totalitarianism came actively. Big Brother was a strongman, literally in your face at the start of each day. The populace was an unruly animal to be caged, prodded, trained, terrorized into compliance. But in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the change comes slowly, through inaction, as the masses happily shackle themselves in distraction. No one comes to enslave them; they enslave themselves.
In the foreword of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.” The world Orwell created in 1984 is based on our history of the totalitarian impulse for conquest, domination, and control. Brave New World instead looks eerily forward, envisioning a technocratic world forever attempting to find utopia, never being present but always looking elsewhere for the next best thing. Huxley challenges us to push back on our American assumption that the arc of history bends toward justice, that the good guys will always win, that progress is a forever forward journey. Justice, goodness, and progress are not accidents of assumption; they are outcomes for which we must actively strive, one focused foot in front of the other.
But we would do well to shake ourselves out of our dopamine-induced lethargy to study Brave New World in earnest. Do yourself a favor and pair it with Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book written during the advent of television, updated during the rise of the internet, and still holding true in today’s rollercoaster ride of social media. But first, start with these essays, which chronicle the slow burn of mindless tech, empty venture capitalism, and lazy grift leading the charge between our old world and the next.
Leave your humanity at the door; it’s time to enter our brave new world.
The Rot Economy (Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At, February 2023)
To understand our brave new world, we must understand our brave new rot economy. We love to rot. We rot in bed scrolling through videos gamed to hold our eyeballs for just a millisecond longer than the last video. We rot our brains asking questions of AI that we would do better to ask each other. And, according to tech critic Ed Zitron (who is also a tech publicist, what a world!), we rot our economy by investing in “number-go-up” tech schemes designed to return shareholder profit at all costs—even if the ultimate cost is our humanity.
In this essay written in early 2023, just after ChatGPT came online, Zitron makes the case that our current late-stage, tech-centric capitalism has created an economy based on a bubble of rot. Historically unprofitable companies get valued at billions of dollars based on empty hopes and dreams. Previously successful companies pursue shareholder returns at the expense of the products that delivered success in the first place. Uncritical techno-optimism has so gobbled up Wall Street trading that it’s hard to see where value ends and rot begins.
[G]rowth is a fire. If you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food, and sustain life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left, but if you desperately desire that fire, you will constantly have to find new things to burn at any cost.
And we, societally, have turned our markets and businesses—private and public—over to arsonists. We have created conditions where we celebrate people for making “big” companies but not “good” companies.
The Century of the Maxxer (Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge, February 2026)
First, a stupid story. Every time my siblings-in-law visit, our time together inevitably revolves around a new vocal stim that the youngest brother (a doofus) can’t stop repeating. This time it was maxxing and mogging. “Damn Pat, you’re grillmaxxing,” as my husband turned over the burgers. Ted dancemaxxed at the honky tonk. Caitlin, a professional baker, cakemogged us. We’re all around 40, why do you ask?
After the visit, as I explained the difference between maxxing and mogging to my mother, I felt a deep resentment welling up from my core. I resented that I now knew about a kid who goes by Clavicular and who takes hammers to his face and hormones to his testicles in the name of “looksmaxxing.” That there’s someone out there called The Crooked Man, who only works out one of his two trapezius muscles for some kind of internet reason that I’ll never understand. That all these looks-obsessed Zoomers and Alphas are also misognymaxxing, idolizing internet goons like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes, and my god, the way things are going, they’ll probably be in the State Department if they aren’t already. And who can blame them? They’re raised on the internet, where the most, the extreme, the max always rises to the top.
What I love about this piece is its ability to both capture the vibe of maxxing while explaining maxxing to an audience who objectively does not maxx. Basically, my brain leaked out of my ears as I read this and I loved every minute of it. (Wait, no; my ears were leakmaxxing.) Let me hand it over to Kriss so you can get to readmaxxing.
The twenty-first century is going to be a century of the maxxer. It won’t take many maxxers to make a century; when you drag yourself to the absolute furthest point in a distribution tail you leave a lot of turbulence in your wake. The twentieth century was a century of the masses, class and ethnic conflicts, nationalism and the great contests of history. The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense. All of us will be held hostage to the obsessions of a small group of mentally deranged and self-destructive freaks. Someone will emerge out of nowhere and start tonguemaxxing, and suddenly entire political orders will rise and fall on the density of the President’s circumvallate papillae. The kind of Marxist-historicist critique I’ve half-mockingly resurrected here is already becoming impossible. Already it’s crowded out by screeching eroticised resentment. Brief storms of interpretative fury. The future will not understand itself. There’s only one way to escape the magnetic chaos that’s coming, and live in a world that still holds together. You need to start maxxing yourself. You need to find a principle, any principle, and destroy yourself for it. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?
Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? (Francisco Pacifico, The Dial, December 2025)
If you are a man, you apparently spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. (The gladiators! The aqueducts! The battle planning!) I am not a man, but if I am going to be thinking about the Roman Empire (and even though I am not a man, I do think about it often enough to qualify me as honorary), I tend to focus on the aftermath of the empire’s fall.
For no reason at all, I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what it was like to live through the fall of a great civilization. A collapse doesn’t usually end with imminent obliteration; it’s a slow decay. The good times roll on, harder times roll in, and you, poor human, just have to roll with it—all the while maintaining the daily grind, the cleaning and cooking and making money to afford your ability to clean and cook. Somewhere else, another great society is being born, children of a later era coming to gawk at the museum of your past and ask: What was it like back then? More importantly, what is it like now?
That’s the crux of this fantastic essay by Francisco Pacifico. Couched in the experience of a regular guy trying to exist in a tourist town, the reader will find our past, present, and American future laid bare before us. The empire has risen, the empire is falling, and centuries from now, there will still be some poor schmuck trying to enjoy a moment of rest while the children of the new golden era take up space.
Put another way, they’re playing a videogame called knowledge, and we’re its nonplayer characters. Reality starts glowing as soon as they learn a new thing. Before the learning, it is dark; we don’t exist. That’s the main aspect of an empire surveying the land. . . .
Americans think they are alone in pushing the wheel of history and progress forward. It’s frustrating for Italians. Because we know that, at least twice in history we thought of ourselves as people who can do so, who can peek into the future. (We had our own empire, the Renaissance.)
So when the American family slows down time to reflect on gianduia, or pistacchio, or arachidi salate, it feels as though they are not reflecting on flavors with us, they are talking to us as if we were curiosities of history, oddities, eccentricities, exotic pralines with the gift of speech. They love to hear us talk, explain our gelato flavors. We are the funny-talking people who explain flavors. They are the protagonists of history; we are not. They are slow because they are the main characters; they own their time. They own time.
The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It? (Emi Nietfeld, Wired, September 2025)
In our brave new world, everything is for sale—including our wombs. And where there’s a sale, there must be customer service when things go wrong, right? That’s the scenario Nietfeld explores in this twisty feature about a dispute between a venture capitalist and her birthing surrogate.
But the question goes far past one of customer service to examine the limits of entitlement after purchase. When one provides a bodily function as a service, such as a live womb for someone else’s genetic material, where does the product end and the person begin? Who is entitled to compensation when a body fails? Who is entitled to direct what is done with the body carrying the expensive product—the payer or the producer?
[I]ntended parents and gestational carriers—IPs and GCs, as they’re somewhat dehumanizingly known—are often uninformed about the dearth of regulation and completely unprepared for what can go wrong. Only one state, New York, requires agencies to be licensed. Although America is the world leader in surrogacy, it’s also the developed nation with the highest maternal mortality rate and one of the highest stillbirth rates, a situation described by many as “a public health crisis.” Compared to natural conception, carrying a genetically unrelated fetus more than triples the risk of severe, potentially deadly conditions, a statistic surrogates are rarely given. IPs do not always have to disclose complete medical information, including histories of certain conditions that may harm their GCs. They don’t have to be honest about how many kids they have, why they are hiring a surrogate, or how many other surrogates they have simultaneously pregnant. Do you really know who is carrying your child—or whose child you are carrying?
Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era (Nicholas Hune-Brown, The Local, November 2025)
There must always be more in our brave new world—more products, more money, more bylines and wait a second, did I just use an em-dash back there? I promise this isn’t AI-generated.
If you read enough AI writing (just go spend some time on LinkedIn), you’ll start to notice the rhythm to the pattern: the vagaries in the details, the “not this, but that” impression of a human in Freshman Comp 101 stretching for a voice. But what about when all the writing you see mimics this pattern? Or maybe some of it always has because you’re an editor accepting freelance pitches and there are so many baby freelancers out there hungry for their first byline?
Out of all the articles in this depressing lineup (sorry), this one gets me the most. A young writer builds a portfolio of clips by tricking editors into accepting AI-generated pitches for AI-generated stories, which include AI-generated quotes attributed to (and here’s the twist) real sources—sources who, when asked later, say that they’ve never heard of this person. The grift works again and again until one editor gets a hunch that this portfolio and this writer are not all that they seem.
When I think about this piece, which is often, I always wonder about the endgame. What was Victoria Goldiee’s goal? I hesitate to call her a scammer, because that moniker implies that this grift is about money, and there is very little money in writing. There is, though, the satisfaction of seeing your words in print, which is a kind of satisfaction that is hard to describe. What young writer isn’t hungry to get their first few bylines so that the next ones come more easily? It’s easy to envision the lengths someone would go to to break through, especially given the overstuffed state of most editors’ inboxes. Promising young writers already face an uphill battle in pursuit of a byline; in our brave new world, the incline is even steeper.
After weeks of trudging through Goldiee’s online mess, I went back to my inbox to deal with the rest of the pitches that were still sitting there waiting for me. I was a freelance writer for most of my career, so as an editor, I’ve always done my best to respond to every thoughtful pitch I get. Looking at them now, though, all I could see was the synthetic sheen of artificial intelligence. There were probably some promising young writers buried in there somewhere. But I couldn’t bear to dig through the bullshit to try to find them.
I idly googled the authors of a few of the pitches that looked most blatantly written by AI. I saw their bylines across the internet—a web of lies and uncanny half-truths entrenched so deeply in the information ecosystem that no one could possibly have the energy to dislodge them—and I was struck by a brief but genuine moment of bone-deep despair. Then I closed my laptop.
Lisa Bubert writes from Nashville, TN. Her fiction, essays, and journalism have been published in numerous publications, including Texas Highways, Noema, Northwest Review, Texas Monthly, and many others. Her work has been recognized by the Best of American Essays, and nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
