This portrait was painted in oil on Arches paper. Aldous Huxley lived from 1894-1963. He wrote nearly fifty books, including the classic Brave New World.
Growing up in a small town had its upside. Access to nature grounded my personality in ecology. I'll be forever grateful for this. But the social reality of that small town was hellish. During my middle and high school years, I was harassed, bullied, beaten up, and generally treated shabbily by the people around me. And everybody seemed to be okay with that.
I fled that small town seeking freedom. Social freedom. Intellectual freedom. Artistic freedom. Did I find a society encouraging the exercise of these freedoms? I did not. Instead, I found a wasteland.
The corporate world was dehumanizing. Consumer culture was worse. The counterculture had been in shambles since the '70s. And there was nothing else.
I spent my twenties disillusioned, dealing with chronic illness and failing at nearly everything I attempted. The society in which I found myself wasn't free. It was a cage formed by a nonsensical status quo. And it just kept getting more screwed up. Throughout my thirties, this screwed up society became significantly worse. It happened slowly at first. Working in media, I watched the news begin to change in 2016. Increasingly partisan media narratives translated directly into an increasingly divided populace. Then the pandemic started and people completely took leave of their senses.
Now I'm forty and I live in a dystopia. Crime is rampant. The cost of everything is rising sharply. Search results are manipulated by special purpose corporations and corporate algorithms police ideas on social media. Social freedom has been consumed by conformity to partisan stereotypes. Intellectual freedom has become vanishingly rare. And everyone seems to be playing along.
Fortunately, none of this seems to be curtailing artistic freedom. Television and movies may be telling lame stories and prioritizing the mediocre over the meaningful, but that's nothing new. What is new is the technology distributing art and even making new forms of art possible. Streaming music and print-on-demand books. NFTs. Stuff like that.
Our dystopia is messier than Brave New World. It's stupider and more sterile. In many ways, due to its economics, it is arguably less free. But creatively, our dystopia may end up proving more rich. To a greater extent than ideology, technology is moving us in that direction.
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