The distractions in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 book, ‘Brave New World’, seem awfully familiar

Though I rarely make new year resolutions, one of my goals for 2018 is to regulate the time I spend on social media. While I do find Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram important sources of information and connection, I’ve also found it increasingly difficult to disengage from them. Often, entire hours slip by while I’m caught up by one distraction or another when I get onto one of these platforms.

As it happens, I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) over the new year break, and these seemingly trivial distractions are the very things the novel positions as future tools of control.