Brave New World, not 1984: distraction as the modern form of control

The Short Version

Three very different conversations arrive at the same unsettling idea: the pressure that shapes modern minds mostly doesn't arrive as force. It arrives as persuasion, convenience, entertainment and a steady feed of stimulus. Michael Malice, an anarchist writer who thinks about power, says "the world is a lot closer to brave new world than it is to 1984," because influence is "so much cheaper" than threats [3]. On Huberman Lab, Andrew Huberman compares social media to a Las Vegas casino with no clocks, built around random rewards, and futurist Ari Wallach explains how phones have shrunk our sense of time into a hall of mirrors with no past and no future [2]. Rob Bell calls modern technology a fire that keeps us warm and can burn the forest down, "a much more complicated insidious fire because it doesn't even announce a self as fire" [1]. Put together, they suggest that the biggest threat to a free mind today may be the pleasant, invisible pull of comfort and distraction, not a boot on the neck. All three also offer ways to resist it.

Table of contents

What They Said

Michael Malice: soft power beats hard power, and it's cheaper

The clearest statement of the Brave New World, not 1984 idea comes from Michael Malice, who calls himself "an anarchist without adjectives" and wrote The White Pill, The Anarchist Handbook and Dear Reader [3]. It comes up during a Thanksgiving conversation with Lex Fridman, when Fridman describes John Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism. As Fridman puts it, the theory holds that "states, nations want to survive, and they try to do so by maximizing power, military power," and that states live in anarchy toward each other and under constant uncertainty [3]. Malice accepts the premise, "Yes, that's true," that states are in anarchy toward one another, but rejects the conclusion that military power is what really counts [3].

His answer, pointing at Fridman's bookshelf: "I think the world is a lot closer to brave new world than it is to 1984" [3]. He takes China's influence on America as his test case: "The influence is far more through soft power than military power. China doesn't threaten America through, you know, we're going to kill you. It's more like their infiltration of universities, TikTok, things of that nature" [3]. Note what he lists: universities and a short-video entertainment app. Neither is a weapon. Both shape what people pay attention to and what they come to believe.

He applies the same lens to America. Its hegemony, he argues, "isn't just a function of American military. I think it's much more a function of American popular culture" [3]. His reasoning is psychological, not military: "When you're exporting ideas and culture, it makes other people in other countries feel closer to you," which leads them to see you as a friend and "adopt your value" [3]. He adds bluntly: "It's a great way to spread propaganda" [3]. His example is Europe, where American culture is very popular. He doesn't think that is "a function of American bases there. I think it's a function of we're exporting our music or TV shows in our movies" [3].

When Fridman asks whether the battleground will be a battle of ideas, Malice doesn't hedge: "I think it's clearly brave new world. It's so much cheaper. And again, this is one of the dark side of social media to use influence than it is to use threats" [3]. The key word is cost. Threats have to be enforced. Influence spreads by itself once people like what they're consuming.

His most pointed example is COVID. "Yes, there was authoritarianism," he grants, "but it was the fact that everyone bought into it, rightly wrongly, but the vast majority of the population was behind all of these things" [3]. The summary puts his point this way: most of the population went along through persuasion [3]. Malice is careful not to say whether those measures were right ("rightly wrongly"). His claim is about how compliance happened: mostly through consent that had been cultivated, with coercion only a small part.

Malice's comments elsewhere in the episode add to this picture. He says he's thankful for social media as part of what ended his loneliness and built his career [3], so he's no simple technophobe. But he's strict about his own attention online: "That's one of the things I block out people on social media instantly. You're not going to sneer at me in my space. You could steer me all you want in your space, but I'm not putting up with your crap" [3]. He also criticizes the games people play online to feel superior: "If you've proven that someone else is stupid, that doesn't mean you're smart" [3]. And his view of human nature is bleak. Asked whether people are good or evil, he says "I always say they're basically animals," and that most are "almost fundamentally deranged" under a veneer of civilization [3]. That view helps explain why he expects persuasion to work so well. People who run on appetite and impulse are easier to steer with pleasure than with argument.

Huberman and Ari Wallach: the casino and the collapse of time

Here the details need care. The insight's framing gives the casino comparison to Ari Wallach, but in the episode it is Andrew Huberman who makes it [2]. According to the summary, Huberman lays out a theory: game shows were basically commercials, reality TV came next, and social media is now a reality show we all cast ourselves in, one that rewards hyperbole and high-friction behavior over plain kindness [2]. He likens it to a Las Vegas casino with no clocks or natural light, designed around random intermittent rewards, and passes on an addiction counselor's view that gambling is the worst addiction because the next time really could change everything [2]. He also wonders whether any form of social media could work as a real time capsule, since even viral posts seem to fade within months [2].

Wallach's contribution is the deeper diagnosis of what this does to the mind, and it runs through the whole episode. His framework, Longpath, starts from Martin Seligman's idea (from the book Homo Prospectus) that what sets humans apart is our ability to mentally travel in time toward possible futures and then work together to bring about the ones we want [2]. Wallach locates much of this in the hippocampus, which he describes as oddly lacking a timestamp: it takes snapshots of past episodes and reassembles them into possible future scenarios [2]. He paints a picture of "Ari and Andy" on the savanna 150,000 years ago, planning hunts for large game to feed an energy-hungry brain [2].

That ancient planning ability, he argues, now runs on old hardware while a cultural layer has hacked into it [2]. A ding on the phone pulls attention instantly. The result isn't Buddhist presence but what he calls presentism, a hall of mirrors with no past and no future [2]. The distinction matters. The contemplative traditions Bell speaks for also prize the present moment. Wallach's point is that the phone's present is different: it's a reflex that keeps you from thinking ahead at all.

When Huberman brings up casinos, Wallach recasts the question as one about storytelling [2]. He describes caves in the south of Spain where Neanderthal and Homo sapiens paintings sit side by side, recording which animals came by and when. That was knowledge meant to help the group thrive [2]. Our feeds, he says, seen as an anthropologist from Mars would see them, are a hall of mirrors, and he wonders what people 200 years from now will conclude when they see the metrics we use to judge ourselves [2]. Cave paintings carried useful knowledge down the generations. Likes and view counts record only how we compared ourselves with each other.

Wallach also explains why a steady diet of alarming content feels so natural. Our negativity bias made us focus on the burning tree rather than the beautiful one, and media companies know negative stories get more hits [2]. Unlike the others, though, he is a big-picture optimist. In aggregate, he says, "there's no better time to be alive as a homo sapient on planet earth than right now," pointing to health, infant mortality, education and calories [2]. The problem is that we're at an inflection point. What we do about climate change, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology could shape the coming decades or centuries, and a mind stuck in the present is badly placed to decide [2]. His summary line on AI and synthetic biology: "we don't need more smartness, we need more wisdom" [2].

Huberman carries the casino idea further in a darker direction. He says he believes every addiction is rooted in a fear of death and an attempt to shorten the time scale of rewards, and notes that Western societies push aging and dying out of sight [2]. Wallach, drawing on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, adds that thinking into the far future requires imagining a world where you no longer exist, which is exactly why we avoid it [2]. The distraction machine, in other words, offers a way out of the discomfort that long-term thinking brings.

Wallach also explains why so many people now feel the future happens to them. The minute hand has existed on clocks for only about 200 years, he notes, and for most of history people lived much as their parents had, so the idea of the future as something that rolls over us is new [2]. Nearly every future his 15-year-old twin daughters read about is dystopian, and he calls for stories set in protopia, Kevin Kelly's term for a better though imperfect tomorrow [2]. He also connects short-term behavior to institutions: eroding trust in institutions fuels short-term thinking, and academia got good at saying what doesn't work but bad at describing what we want [2].

Rob Bell: a fire that doesn't announce itself

Rob Bell, a former pastor and author of Everything Is Spiritual, reaches the same place by a spiritual path [1]. His conversation with Lewis Howes was recorded in 2020, amid the pandemic, wildfires, unrest and polarization, and Howes frames the moment as one "of information, overload, when we don't even know where tomorrow will bring us" [1].

Bell's starting point is advertising, not politics. Asked what people who lack joy are missing, he says he would look them in the eyes and tell them you are enough. You are enough exactly as you are [1]. Why is that so hard to believe? Because, in his words, "several billion dollars were spent today to, at a deep, subtle level, reaffirmed, for you, that you're here, and there's a better you here" [1]. The message works on the psyche and the heart: "If you just... Had this, not this, bought this" [1]. Against this he sets the whole history of wisdom: "And every ancient tradition that actually helped people was, here, now you're loved, you're okay" [1].

That's the pleasure side of control, in Bell's terms. Nobody forces you to buy anything. You're gently and endlessly persuaded that you're incomplete. In the conversation the point is made in so many words: the system "tells us everything that we are not. We are not enough," and "it advertises to us of why we're not enough over and over again" [1].

The talk then moves to the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and Jaron Lanier's book on deleting social media accounts [1]. Howes describes former product developers at the big social media companies saying, "I wish I could go back and not do what we did" [1]. He also relays the documentary's claim that suicide rates among millennials, steady for decades, spiked around the time social media spread [1]. This is Howes passing on a film's statistic, not something either man studied, so treat it as a reported claim. Howes grants that these tools "benefit us in a lot of ways," especially convenience: "Okay, I can push a button in 30 seconds, my food shows up, or a car picks me up and takes me somewhere" [1]. That is the comfort side of the bargain in one sentence.

Then comes Bell's central image. Technology is "like the invention of fire, and it can keep you warm and cook your food, and it can kill you. Burn the whole forest down" [1]. "We invented these things that have a tremendous upside and an underbelly," he says, and although things are far more sophisticated now, "the same ancient question is do we have the wisdom and maturity to handle our fire is still the question that has always been the question" [1]. He rejects the idea that we've outgrown it: "So the idea that we graduated beyond that question, we're right back to can we handle the fire?" [1]. What's new is that the danger is hidden: "It's a much more complicated insidious fire because it doesn't even announce a self as fire" [1].

A fire that doesn't announce itself is very close to Malice's soft power and to Wallach's hacked hippocampus. In all three, the danger comes from not recognizing what's happening to you. You notice force. You don't notice a pleasant feed.

Bell also explains what happens to people's energy online. He describes what he calls the undernet, the underbelly of the internet, which he says is collapsing in on itself through a misunderstanding of how to steward our energies [1]. Everyone has sacred energies, as organizers, healers, scientists or public servants, and if you don't use them to build something, they get bottled up and come out as fantasy: spouting off with your thumbs while believing you've done something [1]. That's a fine description of distraction passing for action. Outrage feels like participation while the real work goes undone. Bell admits he's not immune: "I'll be home, looking at comments" [1].

His counter is what he calls a converter. When anger arises, "somewhere in there, you realize that's going to consume me and not take me anywhere interesting. But if I build, I picture it like a converter, I just decided to build a converter somewhere in here," and all that "anger, frustration, rage about how the world should be better and it's not, I'm going to convert into energy to actually do my part" [1]. For combative relatives or online figures, he asks one question: "How does filling your head with that help you do what you're here to do?" [1].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

Where they agree

Influence works quietly. Malice's soft power, Bell's fire that "doesn't even announce a self as fire" and Wallach's hacked hippocampus all describe a pressure that works because nobody experiences it as pressure [1][2][3]. Malice's COVID example says compliance came mostly from people who "bought into it" [3]. Bell's advertising example says the message of inadequacy works "at a deep, subtle level" [1]. Huberman's casino is designed so that you lose track of time [2].

The mechanism is appetite, not argument. None of them describes people being persuaded by strong reasoning. Malice describes culture making people "feel closer" to the exporter until they "adopt your value" [3]. Bell describes billions spent making you feel that a better you lies one purchase away [1]. Huberman describes random intermittent rewards, and Wallach describes a ding that captures attention instantly [2]. In every case the lever is desire, belonging or reward.

The tools aren't simply evil. Bell insists technology has "a tremendous upside" [1]. Howes likes having food show up in 30 seconds [1]. Malice is thankful for social media [3]. Wallach thinks there's never been a better time to be alive [2]. None of them calls for giving up technology. The shared question is Bell's: "do we have the wisdom and maturity to handle our fire" [1]. Wallach puts it almost the same way: "we don't need more smartness, we need more wisdom" [2].

The fix is inside the individual. Bell's converter and his "you are enough," Wallach's longer time horizon and Malice's habit of instantly blocking sneerers are all personal habits of attention, not policy proposals [1][2][3].

Where they don't

Different problems. Malice is talking about power: how states and cultures win influence over one another [3]. Wallach is talking about time: how a shrunken horizon leaves us unable to plan for the future [2]. Bell is talking about the soul: how constant messages of lack keep people from joy and presence [1]. They describe the same phenomenon, but what worries each of them differs. For Malice the danger is manipulation. For Wallach it's short-term thinking at a moment when the stakes are high. For Bell it's losing touch with the heart.

The casino line is Huberman's, not Wallach's. It's worth stating plainly. The casino comparison belongs to Huberman [2]. Wallach answers by moving the discussion toward storytelling and time capsules [2]. They agree in spirit, but Wallach's own diagnosis is presentism, not gambling.

Fridman's pushback. Malice's claim didn't go unchallenged. Fridman calls it "an interesting idea" and poses the real question, "What has more power? The viral spread of ideas or the power of the military?", then points out that "the United States is at the top of the world on both" [3]. Malice concedes: "That's true. And so it's hard to disentangle the two" [3]. So the strongest version of the thesis stays unproven. America has both cultural reach and military bases, and nobody in the conversation can cleanly separate their effects. Malice relies on the European case, where he doesn't think American cultural popularity comes from American bases [3], but that's his judgment, not a measurement.

Coercion hasn't disappeared. Malice himself says "Yes, there was authoritarianism" during COVID [3]. His claim is about proportions, not that force has vanished. Bell also names hard power where he sees it: he argues that American policing needs more community responsibility and less brutality, and that power and money are "probably lurking" behind arrangements that resist change [1]. None of the three claims that force has gone away. They argue that distraction does more of the work.

How dark is the picture? Malice's view of human nature is the bleakest: people are "basically animals," with profound goodness the exception rather than the rule [3]. Fridman disagrees, arguing that the desire for good outweighs tribal hatred [3]. Wallach is the most hopeful, saying humans are only about a third of the way through a typical mammal species' million-year run and calling for protopian stories [2]. Bell sits in between. He sees an undernet collapsing in on itself, but also believes that disruption can "break you open" into something new [1]. These moods lead to different advice. Malice's leads to firm personal boundaries. Wallach's leads to building the future deliberately. Bell's leads to looking inward and to compassion.

Why It Works

The sources give several mechanisms for why comfort and distraction steer people so well.

Old hardware, new inputs. Wallach's account is the most detailed. The hippocampus evolved to assemble past episodes into possible futures so early humans could plan hunts and survive [2]. That same system now gets a steady stream of cues from phones and notifications, and a cultural layer has hacked into it, so attention goes wherever the ding points [2]. The result is presentism, a present with no past or future to steer by [2]. Someone who can't think ahead can't resist anything that pays off right now.

Random rewards. Huberman's casino has no clocks or natural light and is built around random intermittent rewards. The addiction counselor he cites calls gambling the worst addiction because the next time really could change everything [2]. The social feed, in his telling, rewards hyperbole and high-friction behavior over plain kindness [2]. He links this to what he sees as the root of all addiction, a fear of death and an attempt to shorten the time scale of rewards [2].

Negativity bias. Humans evolved to focus on the burning tree rather than the beautiful one, and media companies know negative stories get more hits [2]. Distraction is often the unpleasant kind too. Outrage and alarm hook us as well as pleasure does.

Emotions steer. Wallach, citing Seligman, says "Emotions are there to help us make better decisions for the future" [2]. He describes a study in which people who had recently gone through a breakup felt better after taking acetaminophen, which suggests emotional pain shares circuitry with physical pain and exists to guide future behavior [2]. Through the somatic marker hypothesis, he argues that a vision changes behavior only when it's felt, the way a kedge anchor thrown 30 or 40 meters out pulls a boat toward it [2]. The same machinery works for advertisers: whoever controls what you feel steers where you go. Bell's billions spent persuading you that "there's a better you here" [1] use exactly this lever.

A future self who feels like a stranger. Wallach cites Hal Hershfield's research at UCLA: in brain scans, thinking about yourself ten years from now lit up the same region as thinking about celebrities, meaning people treat their future selves almost as strangers [2]. Seen this way, trading tomorrow for a pleasure today feels like spending a stranger's money. When participants saw an aged version of themselves in a virtual-reality mirror, they later put more money into hypothetical retirement savings [2].

Lifespan bias and a lost purpose. Wallach argues that we all suffer from a lifespan bias, treating birth to death as the only unit of time that matters, and that religion once supplied a telos, an ultimate aim, that science can't replace: science can tell us how we got here but not where we should go [2]. Without a larger aim, whatever is in front of us wins by default. Bell's version: every ancient tradition that helped people told them they were already loved and okay [1], a message the advertising economy keeps drowning out.

Influence costs less than threats. At the level of societies, Malice's mechanism is economic: influence is "so much cheaper" than threats [3]. Exported culture makes foreigners "feel closer to you" until they "adopt your value" [3]. Force needs constant spending. Culture, once people enjoy it, spreads through their own choices.

Bottled energy. Bell's undernet explains what distraction does to our capacity to act: energies not used to build something come out as fantasy, typing with your thumbs while believing you've done something [1]. The feed turns the urge to change things into commentary.

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

Where it applies. The pattern clearly fits social media and phones: all three conversations single them out by name, through TikTok [3], the Social Dilemma discussion [1] and Huberman's casino [2]. It fits advertising and consumer culture, which Bell describes as a daily campaign to convince you that you're not enough [1]. Malice argues it fits geopolitics and culture wars, where universities, entertainment and music do more than bases [3]. And it fits individual decisions about the future, from retirement savings to flossing, where Wallach and Hershfield show how a shrunken time horizon leads to worse choices [2]. It also bears on public crises. Malice's COVID example shows persuasion shaping mass behavior [3], and Bell sees polarization, the fire and the undernet as one problem, since for him the political is just the personal at a larger scale, a posture of the heart that asks "Are you open or are you closed?" [1].

Where it doesn't, or not fully. First, force is still real. Malice acknowledges authoritarianism during COVID [3], and Bell names police brutality [1]. The thesis is about where most of the influence comes from, not a claim that coercion has ended. Second, as Fridman points out, the evidence at the level of nations is tangled: the leading cultural exporter is also the leading military power, and "it's hard to disentangle the two" [3]. Third, none of these speakers is a researcher on social media. The strongest statistic in the set, the reported spike in millennial suicides, is Howes relaying a documentary [1], and the casino comparison is an analogy, not a study [2]. The mechanisms Wallach cites (Seligman, Hershfield, the somatic marker hypothesis) are real research traditions as he describes them, but they explain why people think short-term, not how much any particular platform is to blame [2]. Fourth, convenience isn't the same as control: Howes's 30-second food delivery and Malice's gratitude for social media [1][3] are real goods. The danger lies in not noticing the trade-off, not in the tools themselves. Finally, Wallach warns against overcorrecting: most of the day should still go to handling what's right in front of you, and he asks for a wider lens only part of the time, not constant future-gazing [2].

If compulsive phone use, low mood or anything like the despair behind the suicide figures Howes mentions is affecting you or someone close to you, a doctor or mental health professional is the right place to start.

What To Do With It

1. Name the fire. Bell's point is that this fire "doesn't even announce a self as fire" [1]. Make the invisible visible. When you open an app or see an ad, recall Bell's phrase for its message, "Had this, not this, bought this" [1], and answer it with his you are enough. You are enough exactly as you are [1].

2. Ask Bell's filter question. Before following a feud, a feed or a combative relative, ask: "How does filling your head with that help you do what you're here to do?" [1]. If the answer is that it doesn't, set a boundary. As Bell says, you don't have to go to the ninth awkward Thanksgiving [1].

3. Build a converter. When outrage builds, notice that it's "going to consume me and not take me anywhere interesting," and turn that energy into one concrete act of doing your part [1]. Watch for Bell's undernet trap of typing with your thumbs and thinking you've done something [1].

4. Guard your space the way Malice does. Malice blocks sneering accounts instantly: "You're not going to sneer at me in my space" [3]. Curate what reaches you, and remember his line on online point-scoring: "If you've proven that someone else is stupid, that doesn't mean you're smart" [3].

5. Notice when influence is doing the work. Following Malice, when you find yourself holding a view the whole culture seems to share, ask whether you reasoned your way to it or "bought into it" through entertainment, feeds and social pressure [3]. Following Bell, ask who gains from the current arrangement, since power and money are often lurking [1].

6. Step out of stimulus and response every day. Huberman passes on James Hollis's practice of spending five to ten minutes a day with eyes closed, stepping out of stimulus-response mode to connect with your deeper wishes [2]. Bell's version is a morning walk with a mantra: everything he needs for today, he'll have when he needs it [1].

7. Use Wallach's in-the-moment cue. When a short-term urge or an argument comes up, Wallach says the words "long path to himself and asks what he's really trying to do, or asks am I being a great ancestor?" [2].

8. Make your future self feel real. Following Hershfield's research, Wallach printed an aged photo of himself and taped it to his bathroom mirror: "That's how I make better decisions today" [2]. He also keeps a shelf of family photos ending in a blank frame for generations to come [2].

9. Write a letter to your future self. Wallach's most-used tool is a letter to be delivered five years later, through longpath.org or future-me sites. He notes "the change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write it," because writing it forces you to decide who you want to become [2].

10. Question the stories you inherited. Wallach's "Why Tuesdays" practice, which he compares to cognitive behavioral therapy, asks why you do what you do, keeps what serves you and rewrites the rest, so you see yourself on spaceship Earth "not as a passenger but as crew on this vessel" [2]. A passenger gets entertained. Crew members steer.

Sources

1. The Spiritual Guide to Inner Peace, Mastering Grief & Understanding God with Rob Bell · The School of Greatness
2. Ari Wallach Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols · Huberman Lab
3. Thanksgiving Pirate Special · Lex Fridman Podcast