Fear and Terror

My poll on which work that told us the most about the future will expire in just hours. My candidates were: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell [1948], 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick [1968], Brave New World, Aldous Huxley [1932], Blade Runner, Ridley Scott [1982] and Back to the Future, Steven Spielberg [1985]. At the moment, Back to the Future is in the lead. It has two votes or 40 percent of all the votes. But it ain’t over yet.

Literature has always been my passion. I have not read that many sci-fi novels though. In yesterday’s lecture, Nicklas Bergman briefly talked about Theodore Kaczynski also known as the Unabomber (University- and airline bomber). As you may or may not know, Kaczynski was a madman and also a social critic. He went to Harvard and other universities and was a quite clever mathematician. In his manifesto Industrial Society and its Future he is very concerned that the technology of the future will erode all human freedom.


This got me thinking of the tragic high school massacre in Jokela, Finland less than a year ago. An 18-year old, confused man named Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed 8 people in November 7, 2007. He then also shot himself. The day before the occurrence, he posted a sort of “press kit” on the Internet, including this picture of him, a YouTube-clip and a manifesto on natural selection. Luckily, Sweden has yet been spared from a tragedy of this type. Unfortunately, it think it’s somewhat a question of time, until something similar will happen here. I think it’s sad that the Internet can be used by anyone to presumably get immense attention when executing these extreme terrorist acts. I really don’t want to speculate in it, but I can’t help of thinking if this young man still would shoot these people if he knew he wouldn’t get the attention he had afterwards on the Internet.

Fear of technology and progress is perhaps the most common theme in sci-fi literature and movies. I am glad that people write books and direct films instead of blowing other people in the air, to get their points across. There is something about those books that can fascinate you. Perhaps it satisfies the same psychological need that make people go rent horror movies. Perhaps it is just that simple.

I think it's time to start dreaming about a future brighter than that.



For a couple of years, I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the best books I’ve read. Today, I’d read it more as a depiction of its times and the thoughts and fears in 1948, than a prediction of our future. We always seem to be scared of the technology in the future. I think a very legitimate question is to get back and ask oneself if we can think of technologies in the past that makes us worried, and that we want to have undone. Except for the atom bomb, I can’t think of many, at least not on the whole. Even if the future can’t be predicted from the past, I think this way of thinking indicates that our fears are most often over-exaggerated.

I think that it is inevitable that we will be fully controlled and monitored in the future, resembling what is happening in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But I’m not sure this will be done in a mean spirited way as in the same book. Really. I’m not sure at all it will be something negative. I think it will reduce the incentives to commit crimes and make us all very safe. Perhaps your Big Brother can be your very best friend.