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Seventy thousand years ago, there were at least six different human species on earth. They were insignificant animals, whose ecological impact was less than that of fireflies or jellyfish. Today, there is only one human species left: Us. Homo sapiens. But we rule this planet.

Sapiens, the book, takes us on a breath-taking ride through our entire human history, from its evolutionary roots to the age of capitalism and genetic engineering, to uncover why we are the way we are.
Sapiens focuses on key processes that shaped humankind and the world around it, such as the advent of agriculture, the creation of money, the spread of religion and the rise of the nation state. Unlike other books of its kind, Sapiens takes a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges the gaps between history, biology, philosophy and economics in a way never done before. Furthermore, taking both the macro and the micro view, Sapiens conveys not only what happened and why, but also how it felt for individuals.

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Seventy thousand years ago, there were at least six different human species on earth. They were insignificant animals, whose ecological impact was less than that of fireflies or jellyfish. Today, there is only one human species left: Us. Homo sapiens. But we rule this planet.

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Still scrambling to find gifts for your younger loved ones this holiday season? You might want to visit "Ryan's World."

That's the YouTube page of eight-year-old Texan Ryan Kaji, whose videos of toy reviews and other childhood shenanigans earned him a mind-boggling $26 million in 2019, according to Forbes - enough to make him YouTube's top earner for the second year in a row.

Forbes considers the pretax income YouTubers collect through advertising, sponsorships, merchandise sales, and other sources to create its annual list.

Kaji wasn't the only minor to make the cut this year, either. YouTube's third-highest earner is Anastasia Radzinskaya, a five-year-old Russian with cerebral palsy and seven YouTube channels. An additional five of YouTube's top earners aren't kids, but they are gamers who often showcase content popular with youngsters, such as "Minecraft" and "Fortnite."

It's not entirely surprising that YouTube's kid-focused content is some of its most popular - and, therefore, most profitable.

A nationally representative 2018 Pew survey found that an overwhelming 81 percent of parents with kids under the age of 11 let their offspring watch videos on the platform, with 34 percent saying their children visit the site regularly.

There are 33.7 million households in the United States with members under the age of 11, according to United States Census data - so that means a vast number of tiny eyeballs racking up views on videos like Kaji's.

The thriving economy of child-oriented YouTube content has occasionally even provoked bizarre scandals.

And none of this means you should take the success of YouTubers like Kaji as an indication that you, too, could quit your day job and become a multi-millionaire by pumping out kid-friendly video content.

"The vast majority of people who start a YouTube channel, or engage in any career as an influencer, won't make it," internet culture writer Chris Stokel-Walker told BBC News. "96.5 percent of YouTubers don't make enough from advertising revenue alone to break the US poverty line - and with the number of creators on the platform constantly increasing, the competition is only getting tougher."

READ MORE: YouTube's top earners: Eight-year-old Ryan tops list with $26m [ BBC News]

More on YouTube: YouTube Lets Its Stars Break Rules, Say Moderators

Care about supporting clean energy adoption? Find out how much money (and planet!) you could save by switching to solar power at UnderstandSolar.com. By signing up through this link, Futurism.com may receive a small commission.

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YouTube's top earner is an 8-year-old who reviews toys

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Still scrambling to find gifts for your younger loved ones this holiday season? You might want to visit "Ryan's World." That's the YouTube page of eight-year-old Texan Ryan Kaji, whose videos of toy reviews and other childhood shenanigans earned him a mind-boggling $26 million in 2019, according to Forbes - enough to make him YouTube's top earner for the second year in a row.

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Our bodies use electrical signals to send information from cell to cell. An unexpected surge in that electrical activity, though, can cause a seizure - and while not every seizure is the same, they can cause convulsions, difficulty breathing, loss of consciousness, or even death.

Epilepsy is a disease characterized by repeated seizures. It affects approximately 3.5 million people in the United States, and about 3 percent - more than 100,000 - have what's known as photosensitive epilepsy, meaning visual stimuli, such as strobe lights, can trigger their seizures.

That's the background for what may be the most appalling cyberattack we've every heard about - and its perpetrator is still unknown.

During the first week of November, which is National Epilepsy Awareness Month, someone shared images of flashing or strobing lights via Twitter and tagged the posts with the Epilepsy Foundation's handle and hashtags, presumably in an attempt to trigger seizures in as many of the Foundations' 33,300 followers as possible.

The Foundation has filed complaints with law enforcement and is now working with officials to track down the person or people responsible for the 30 reported attacks.

"Twitter is one of the largest places of public gathering that exists today," Allison Nichol, the Epilepsy Foundation's director of legal advocacy, said in a statement. "These attacks are no different than a person carrying a strobe light into a convention of people with epilepsy and seizures, with the intention of inducing seizures and thereby causing significant harm to the participants."

As bizarre as this situation might be, it's not the first time someone has used Twitter to try to trigger seizures.

In 2016, author Kurt Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, opened a Twitter message containing a GIF of a strobe light and the message "You deserve a seizure for your posts."

He subsequently had an eight-minute-long seizure. Three months later, the FBI arrested a man named John Rayne Rivello for the crime, which he reportedly committed because he didn't agree with Eichenwald's criticism of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As heinous as that crime might have been, at least there was some semblance of a motive for Rivello's actions.

In the case of this new attack, it seems the cybercriminal must have something against people with epilepsy in general - or they're just a complete asshole trying to hurt people for no reason other than because they can.

READ MORE: Epilepsy Foundation Was Targeted in Mass Strobe Cyberattack [ The New York Times]

More on seizures: A Wireless Neural Implant Might Jolt the Brain out of Seizures

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Cyberattack aims to cause seizures in Twitter users with epilepsy

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Our bodies use electrical signals to send information from cell to cell. An unexpected surge in that electrical activity, though, can cause a seizure - and while not every seizure is the same, they can cause convulsions, difficulty breathing, loss of consciousness, or even death. Epilepsy is a disease characterized by repeated seizures.

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Getting Dangerous

A new deepfake video portrays President Trump, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office and giving an official address.

It begins with him hinting that he's about to comment on the ongoing impeachment proceedings, but then pivots: the digitally-reconstructed Trump says "Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself."

The video, which could be convincing to a casual viewer, perfectly illustrates how dangerous deepfake AI has become - it's now possible to make the President recite a popular conspiracy theory and blast it all over the internet.

Nearly There

The Trump video is the latest from a YouTube channel called TheFakening, which has been swapping celebrity faces and creating fake political speeches for nearly a year now.

As with any other deepfake, there are glitches in this new video. Trump's mouth movements incorrectly make it look like he's pronouncing a "th" sound several times towards the end of the announcement, creating a telltale mismatch between the audio and video. But as the underlying technology progresses, errors are getting smaller and less frequent.

Limited Ban

Videos on TheFakening are clearly labeled as deepfakes, though it's conceivable that someone could rip and reshare the video, trying to pass it off as real. For now, there would be relatively little anyone could do to stop them.

California has banned political deepfakes under certain circumstances, but by and large there's not much keeping deepfake propaganda from spreading across the internet.
More on deepfakes: Deepfake Pioneer: "Perfectly Real" Fake Vids Are Six Months Away

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Watch a deepfaked Trump say Epstein didn't kill himself

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A new deepfake video portrays President Trump, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office and giving an official address. It begins with him hinting that he's about to comment on the ongoing impeachment proceedings, but then pivots: the digitally-reconstructed Trump says "Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself."

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If Black Mirror could be summed up in one sentence, it'd probably be "Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it." The anthology series had a seven-episode run on Britain's Channel 4 from 2011 to 2014, and Netflix is now producing new episodes, but the show hasn't changed much. It's still serving up cautionary tales about how people interact with media, the culture, communications, and technology, and how our obsessions and behaviors today might logically extend into horrors in the future. At its best, it's insightful, satirical, and bleak enough to shock even viewers jaded by the endless, pummeling violence of shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. At its worst, though, it can read like any other science fiction story processing our anxieties about the future: the hand-wringing fear of everything we take for granted can seem overblown and paranoid. As The Toast's Mallory Ortberg put it on Twitter, "What if phones but too much?"

"Nosedive," the first installment of Netflix's new six-episode season, replaces "phones" in that sentence with "social media." The script, written by Parks And Recreation's Michael Schur and Rashida Jones, turns social platforms' self-curation and validation-seeking into the backbone of a future society. But the issues at play go beyond the ways users project their best, most enviable selves onto their Instagrams and Facebook feeds. Almost exactly a year ago, Verge reports editor Josh Dzieza published a piece called "The ratings game: How Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses." The gist was that the combination of an on-demand economy and a new class of ratings-dependant employees was turning customers into entitled, hypersensitive critics. That article could have been the road map for "Nosedive." Just as Uber drives started offering riders free water, candy, and other perks to ingratiate themselves with increasingly demanding customers, the characters in "Nosedive" nervously tailor their lives to be ingratiating online, within certain very narrow guidelines.

Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker says "Nosedive" is intended as a satire, which helps explain its arch, bright, over-the-top tone. In the episode, augmented reality and a single ubiquitous social-media platform let users rate all their online and in-person interactions on a five-star scale. Everyone in this brave new world walks around with a user-generated score glowing in front of their faces, and that score determines their value in society, their access to services, and their employability. Protagonist Lacie Pound (Bryce Dallas Howard) has a respectable 4.2 score, but she envies the higher rating of her childhood friend Naomi (Alice Eve), and starts taking calculated steps to boost her ranking. The episode title hints sharply at what comes next.

The barrier for entry in "Nosedive" is fairly high. Viewers have to accept that there's no competition for the social-media app that rules everyone's lives, and no way to rate businesses or other institutions. In the real world, people who have bad experiences with airlines or car-rental companies often go straight to Twitter or Facebook with their complaints, and often rack up instant, insincere public apologies from online customer-service reps. Lacie has no such option; when a company screws her over, showing no remorse and giving her no recourse, she's expected to retreat meekly and politely. As judgmental as her society is, it doesn't turn any of that judgment on institutions.

In the real world, there would be so many horrible ways to chase ratings

The episode also suggests that the only way to approach the coveted 5.0 rating is to project a Martha Stewart Living illusion of graceful, plastic beauty. Pride and Prejudice director Joe Wright gives Lacie's pre-nosedive life a peach-and-pastel glow that's luminously pretty on-screen, but so flavorless and fake, it's impossible to imagine it's the only standard for five-star life. And yet there's no hint that anyone but the most low-rated outcasts in Lacie's world value any other form of achievement or art. In the real world, at minimum, there would be ways for people to degrade themselves for quick bursts of approval, like in the mesmerizing first season Black Mirror episode "Fifteen Million Merits." In "Nosedive," the only option for people who like grit or grunge is to drop out of the system, and take the consequences.

But "Nosedive" isn't out for reality. It's out to extrapolate the endgame of customer ratings systems, which turn the world into a lopsided giant prisoner's dilemma of applied power. And as exaggerated and unlikely as it is, it's also an effective story, because even in the broadness of its metaphor, it's relatable. Howard's performance goes a long way toward making the story work, because she projects such a fragile, brittle form of happiness when she's working hard for validation, and she's so rawly naked and afraid when her tricks stop working, and her real self starts pouring past the dams she's built. That feeling should be familiar to anyone who's censored their own image on social media out of fear of exposure, or just in hopes of a sparking a particular response from a particular person. It should be familiar to anyone who's ever had someone else post an unflattering photo of them, or fielded a hateful comment from a stranger.

And it should also be familiar to anyone who's been in an online sphere where they can be rated and ranked - anyone who's owned a business that's featured on Yelp, or released a podcast or a YouTube video, or even just sold items on eBay or Amazon Marketplace. There's a personal bruising effect that comes with a bad ranking, especially when it's anonymous. It's the feeling of being judged not just by one jerk, but potentially by the entire world.

And that's where Black Mirror takes its clever turn. What happens to Lacie amounts to an exaggerated morality play about the dangers of conformity and the small pleasures of individuality, but the broadest gestures don't matter. It's the small details that make this a recognizable world. Other stories, like Cory Doctorow's 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, or the Community episode "App Development and Condiments," have addressed this same idea, about how social approval might translate into power, and what that might entail for a society. But "Nosedive" makes it darkly, awfully funny, in the way advertisers manipulate Lacie by slapping her image into a billboard reflecting her fantasy life back at her, or the way she and her brother add insult to injury by down-rating each other after a fight. The episode can be strident and obvious, but like so many of Black Mirror's episodes, it understands human nature very well.

It's Peeple all over again

Back in 2015, a startup announced it was working on an app called Peeple, which was, in its original incarnation, almost exactly what "Nosedive" portrays: a "Yelp for people," complete with five-star ratings system. The internet loudly rebelled, complaining that Peeple would magnify the anonymous, cowardly bullying of other social platforms, and subject non-users to humiliation they couldn't control. The company fled from the public eye, and eventually emerged months later with a neutered version of the app, sans ratings and with ways for users to reject bad reviews. The instant outcry at the idea of Peeple makes the world of "Nosedive" seem even less likely than it would otherwise - we saw hints of this future on the horizon, and instantly rejected it. But at heart, Black Mirror isn't really about the future. It's about the things we take for granted in the present, and how it takes an exaggerated, satirical version of the world we live in to make us see ourselves clearly.
"Nosedive"ratings:
Relevance: Moderate. Yes, modern app ratings systems can have problematic applications and emotional effects. But competition (between driver services, between social media outlets, between everyone, really) will probably keep us safe from the one monolithic ratings system to rule them all, and the one acceptable monoculture we all have to copycat for approval.

Aesthetics: Glowing. Wright gives parts of the episode a gorgeous, sunlit gleam that powerfully highlights the difference between the eternal-magic-hour world of the haves and the grubby reality of the have-nots. Howard's vulnerability and determination really sell the material, even when the script overplays its hand. And it's all worth it for the telling, well-tuned moment when Lacie starts to come apart, and the bleeps of her plummeting rating start showing up in the episode's soundtrack.

Squirm factor: Incandescent. Knowing exactly where this episode is going to go makes it uncomfortable. Watching it play out in flop-sweat-covered real time is an exercise in slow-burn agonizing empathy.

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Black Mirror's "Nosedive" is a vicious take on social media

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If Black Mirror could be summed up in one sentence, it'd probably be "Technology is exciting, but people are awful, and they keep finding the worst ways to apply it." The anthology series had a seven-episode run on Britain's Channel 4 from 2011 to 2014, and Netflix is now producing new episodes, but the show hasn't changed much.

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Since the news never seems to slow down these days, here are a few stories from the past few weeks that you may have missed:

Things, to put it mildly, are weird.

Too often these days, reading the news feels like an exaggerated science-fiction dystopia of corporate greed and omnipresent consumerism. Specifically, it feels like the 1980s films that depicted some version of a bleak near-future America as a corporate wasteland where the rich get richer and the rest of us waste our life watching TV and buying products like absurdly large cars (years before Hummers were sold in every city) and Sunblock 5000 to counter the effects of climate change.

Watch any documentary on the decade and you'll hear a narrator tell you about how the Reagan '80s were a time when consumerism and the push to deregulate business bloomed. Many Americans were desperate to forget the social struggles and political tragedies of the 1960s and 1970s, so the '80s were the decade when mainstream culture turned away from the political messages of hippie culture, and embraced open materialism in hits like Madonna's "Material Girl."

But something that tends to get overlooked amid all this is the underground counterculture that bloomed, exemplified by cult classic science-fiction films as well as hardcore punk bands like Minor Threat, Suicidal Tendencies and MDC and hip-hop acts like N.W.A. and Public Enemy - all figures who viewed this new American utopia as a nightmarish hellscape. Black Flag satirized people who had nothing better to do than sit around all day drinking beer and watching television while the burgeoning cyberpunk genre, guided by writers like William Gibson, envisioned a world of corporate control and technology run amok.

Because whatever 2019 reality is, it isn't subtle.

Like the music and books of the decade, '80s sci-fi films weren't subtle. Take Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, a movie about a police officer who is turned into a cyborg when the Detroit police department is taken over by a megacorporation called Omni Consumer Products. In the world of RoboCop, global corporations control the government while most of the public wastes away watching TV. Or take John Carpenter's They Live, where an elite ruling class (who are secretly aliens) controls the population through subliminal advertising that turns people into bland yuppies obsessed with consumerism. Paul Michael Glaser's The Running Man, based off a Stephen King novel of the same name, takes place in a 2019 where people watch a brutal game show that's a cross between reality TV, American Ninja Warrior and The Most Dangerous Game. The mode of these '80s films is less "light touch" and more sledgehammer to the skull.

But the lack of subtlety is exactly what makes these films so prescient. Because whatever 2019 reality is, it isn't subtle. Is RoboCop's "Omni Consumer Products" any more absurd than "Comprehensive Health Services," the Orwellian name of the branch of Caliburn that runs migrant child detention centers in contract with the federal government? While aliens may not run our corporate advertisements, the vision of They Live is hardly more dystopian than a world where tech companies target us with advertisement algorithms that know more about us than our own family members.

Unrestrained capitalism and mindless consumerism are sadly not the only things that 1980s dystopias got right. Margaret Atwood's seminal 1985 science fiction novel The Handmaid's Tale envisioned a future where far right evangelicals enacted extreme control over women's bodies. Last week,Georgia signed a law that "all but bans abortion" in the state and could even put women who travel to another state for the procedure in jail; this week, Alabama and Missouri signed similar bills. Protesters dressed as characters from the Hulu adaptation of Atwood's novel could be seen at their various state capitals.

The underground hardcore punk of the 1980s was both influenced by and a major influence on these dystopian films. Movies like Alex Cox's Repo Man feature punks who strive to forge their own identities in a world of "ordinary fucking people." The hardcore punk of the era often featured similar political satire that seemed to predict our current problems, such as the Dead Kennedys' song " Trust Your Mechanic" that warns, among other things, how the medical industry traps patients with rising costs until "you're ensnared by the medicine man paying up the ass again and again." Given that today Americans collectively borrow billions upon billions of dollars just to pay for basic healthcare, it seems like singer Jello Biafra was on to something.

In 2019, it's hard not to feel like the more ominous predictions of the 1980s came true. Perhaps we're streaming Netflix shows and downloading podcasts on our cellphones instead of sitting in front of television sets. We're not hacking sentient cyberpunk computers, but we're busy "lifehacking" while corporations "data mine" our virtual lives. Perhaps it isn't aliens controlling us, but rather massive social-media companies built on complex, invasive algorithms.

Whoever's to blame, at the end of the day, we're living in the corporate dystopia the 1980s warned us about. And we didn't even get hoverboards.

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Are We Living in the Dystopia the 1980s Warned Us About?

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Since the news never seems to slow down these days, here are a few stories from the past few weeks that you may have missed: Things, to put it mildly, are weird. Too often these days, reading the news feels like an exaggerated science-fiction dystopia of corporate greed and omnipresent consumerism.

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Dystopias help us understand the world we live in; but what happens when concepts like “precrime” become a reality?

This article is a preview from the Autumn 2016 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

If you’ve ever shop-lifted, it’s possible that your face is on a database that over 10,000 UK retailers can see. Very few people have heard of face-profiling software Facewatch, but its implications are serious. Launched in 2010, Facewatch is a searchable, shared database of CCTV images of people considered to be suspicious or criminal, which businesses add to directly. Facewatch’s website markets the database as a “watch list showing images of suspects of interest” that helps retailers to target “theft, fraud, and anti-social behaviour”. It’s also directly in use by the police.

What this means is that if a shop, restaurant or other public outlet using Facewatch considers you suspicious, whether due to alleged crime or the much more nebulous “anti-social behaviour”, video footage of you can be stored on a database, and used to profile you as a “suspect” in other places. Businesses can also fill out an online report which gets sent to the police. You don’t need to have been convicted of anything in order to be put on the database – reports are up to whoever is using the software.

Is this “precrime”? It’s a form of surveillance profiling based on reports from unaccountable private businesses: all that’s needed is that someone, at some point, thinks you’re suspicious. If you committed a crime once, you go on the watchlist: a criminal “type”, likely to reoffend. There is no online information about how to have your image removed from the database, or what to do if you are profiled without having done anything. The aim is to prevent crime before it happens: it’s a dystopian technology in action.

Philip K. Dick’s classic short story “The Minority Report”, published in 1956, made the idea of precrime famous. Dick imagines a society in which crime has been overwhelmingly abolished by the introduction of precrime intelligence. In the story crimes are predicted by a group of three “pre-cog mutants”, before they are committed, and the future perpetrators arrested and sent to a detention camp by the Precrime Division. As the story’s protagonist John Anderton states: “In our society, we have no major crimes . . . but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.” Along with Orwellian concepts like the “thought police” and “Big Brother”, the idea of precrime is compelling because it is so frightening: that you may be penalised by the state for something you haven’t yet done.

Facewatch’s creators are currently working with facial recognition software companies Imagus, Herta Security and NEC to automatically compare stored images of “suspects” to people entering businesses. The website boasts that upgrading Facewatch to use facial recognition will “enable alerts to be provided to businesses the instant that someone on their watch list enters their premise”. The consequences of this are obvious: a database full of images of people profiled as suspicious, run by private companies in collaboration with the police, in which simply entering a shop can trigger a series of automatic alarms.

Precrime is a classic concept in dystopian art – and when a dystopian writer appears to have predicted the future, it hits home. It also says something about the politics and priorities of the world it was written in. Dystopian societies are nightmarish, bleak: and the fact that we interpret them as such makes clear where our values lie.

Anti-fascist speculative writers have explored variations on the rise of fascism at length: Donald Trump’s current campaign slogan “Make America Great Again!” was used by afrofuturist writer Octavia Butler in her 1998 novel Parable of the Talents, which imagined the takeover of the US by religious extremists. The slogan is used by the fictional US president Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret: a Christian fundamentalist whose followers go around murdering “heathens”. Trump’s use of the same approach is telling: he’s a speculative fiction writers’ dream of a neofascist politician. He’d seem unbelievable if only he was made-up.

As pictures of a dystopian future go, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is one of the best. Her post-apocalyptic vision is also full of prescient material. The books outline how a human-made viral epidemic wipes out all of humanity but one, the main character Snowman – before, poignantly, going back in time to describe how we got there. Published in the early 2000s, Atwood’s society is not that dissimilar to our own now: the rich live in gated communities controlled by biotech companies with names like HelthWyzer, OrganInc, RejoovenEssence. Food is genetically modified for corporate profit: everyone eats artificially grown chicken breasts called Chickienobs and drinks Happicuppachinos, modified coffee beans which put smaller growers out of business. Atwood’s portrayal is staunchly anti-capitalist: corporations rule the MaddAddam world – even the police are named the CorpSeCorps – and eventually bring about its destruction. Oryx and Crake, the first volume in the trilogy, was published the year before the Googleplex was built. Now, parts of its world have become our reality.

Dystopian stories as a body of work are surprisingly accurate and rich in plot that later becomes prediction. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring presents a view of the near future that hints at inner-city gentrification in reverse: set in Toronto after an economic collapse, the world is one in which the rich have left the city for the suburbs, leaving violence, homelessness and gang control in their wake. Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult film Born in Flames imagines a lesbian feminist terrorist group led by a woman of colour, uprising against a violent, white supremacist, patriarchal state: the world they’re fighting against isn’t the world we live in today, but it isn’t far off.

Dystopia acts as a powerful critique of the society we live in. But there are also key points of departure that make the reading much more enjoyable. So far, and thankfully, we do not have semi-conscious pre-cog mutants chained to a crime prediction machine. Global conflict and endemic diseases have not yet killed everyone. Artificial intelligence has not entirely taken over.

But when reality starts to catch up with past dystopias, as with the spread of precrime-esque software, there is good reason for concern. Other instances of real-life precrime make it clear how and against whom profiling software might be implemented. The disproportionate targeting of young men of colour by police using stop and search laws is well documented. Reading back over Anderton’s description of a “detention camp of would-be criminals” is even more haunting as detention camps proliferate around the UK, increasingly full of people who are effectively prejudged as criminal due to being migrants or refugees. It’s also now possible for any two policemen to give someone they suspect of being a sex worker a “prostitute’s caution”, meaning that police are able to target not just those who actually are street-based sex workers, but anyone they may perceive as “undesirable”, including homeless women. For the caution to be given there doesn’t need to be any evidence of a crime having been committed, and it stays on your record with no right of appeal.

In certain ways, our present resembles the dystopian futures imagined by novelists – the move towards total surveillance is a case in point, as is the growth of far-right politics in Europe and in the US. Being able to delve into speculative fiction and contrast what hasn’t happened with what has can be frightening. But to do so is important. Using art to contextualise horror makes it easier to push back against the spread of the false pragmatism that says, “That’s just how things are.” It shows us how quickly things can get worse. And at its best, speculative fiction could point towards a better future: not one in which people are wiped out by conflict, but one in which resistance wins out.

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Dystopias help us understand the world we live in; but what happens when concepts like “precrime” become a reality?

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5 Signs We’re Already Living In A Dystopia | Dystopic

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There’s no doubt about it – we’re living in a dystopian reality. Here are five reasons why.

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The modern world looks to many like a dystopia - a version of "the darkest timeline", to borrow a term from the American sitcom Community. Whose dystopia, though? Which writer best imagined this moment of turmoil and dysfunction? The greatest contributions to the tradition of dystopian fiction are two defining masterpieces from the 20th century, both of them bestsellers at the time and ever since: Aldous Huxley's 1932 Brave New World and George Orwell's 1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The two dystopias have many details in common. Both writers saw a future shaped by weapons of mass destruction - biological and chemical weapons in Huxley's case, nuclear war in Orwell's. They agreed about the danger of permanent social stratification, with humanity divided into categories determined by biological engineering and psychological conditioning (Huxley) or traditional class combined with totalitarian loyalty systems (Orwell). Both men imagined future societies completely obsessed with sex, though in diametrically opposite ways: state-enforced repression and celibacy in the case of Orwell; deliberate, narcotising promiscuity in the case of Huxley.

Both men thought the future would be dominated by America. Both men thought that future governments would spend a lot of effort permanently trying to incite economic consumption - not that either man thought of anything as wildly fantastical as quantitative easing. Both began their books with a short sentence designed to signal a world which was familiar but also disconcertingly futuristic: "A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories," begins Brave New World. We are supposed to gasp with amazement at the "only". Nineteen Eighty-Four begins: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Thirteen! The horror!

Both men were writing warnings: "the message of the book", said Huxley, was, "This is possible: for heaven's sake be careful about it." In his vision, humanity was facing a future world tranquilised by pleasure and drugs and the voluntary distractions of "civilised infantilisation". For Orwell, humanity was facing a permanent state of war and totalitarian mind-control, summed up by the image of "a boot stamping on a human face, for ever". For all the overlap, though, they are usually seen as contradictory, conflicting versions of the future.

The difference between the two dystopias is rooted in one of imaginative literature's central distinctions. Many writers of speculative fiction - a term preferred over science fiction by Margaret Atwood, among others - like to stress that their work is a vision of the present, magnified and intensified. "The future is here," William Gibson has said, "it's just unevenly distributed." Atwood made it a rule in writing The Handmaid's Tale that she "would not put any events into the book that had not already happened . . . nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities." Orwell did create some technological innovations for his future world, but in essence his Nineteen Eighty-Four is a deep look into the heart of already existing totalitarian societies. Some of the details may be from the straitened world of the 1940s - the novel is pervaded by the smell of boiled cabbage - but the story goes far past that into the depths of the human heart and the totalitarian project to reshape it.

The meeting room named Only Good News - can you guess whether that belongs to Huxley's World Controller, or Sheryl Sandberg?

No one could have been better placed than Orwell to see into this present and project it into the future. His life-long involvement with leftwing ideas was both theoretical - nuances of perspectives from the Independent Labour party to the union movement through anarchism, Trotskyism and Stalinism - and directly lived. It was characteristic of him that when he went to the Spanish civil war to write about it, he found himself unable to stand back and report, but instead, once he saw the reality of what was happening, immediately joined the Trotskyist militia to fight the fascists. The utter ruthlessness with which the Soviet-backed faction suppressed the other groups on the republican side, their willingness to lie and murder their own allies, gave Orwell the impetus and insight to write his great novel about totalitarianism.

It is because of that, in this difficult historic moment, that the Orwell vs Huxley contest might seem to have been concluded in Orwell's favour. I was recently on a plane just after the start of the school holidays, and in the course of wandering up and down the aisle, noticed the startling fact that three different young people were reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, in three different languages (English, Italian, Portuguese). Not bad for a 70-year-old book. The Orwell estate has always been well run, attentive to the business of keeping his reputation in public view - that was one of the inspirations behind the creation of the annual Orwell prizes for political writing. You could even say that Sonia Orwell, who married him on his deathbed, was being attentive to his reputation in taking his pseudonym as a surname, given that his family knew him as Eric Blair. (This point was made to me by a relative of Orwell's, someone who thrillingly-to-me knew him as Eric.)

Nothing, however, but nothing, could rival the sales boost provided by Donald Trump. This president embodies the insight that given a willingness to lie without compunction, norms of veracity can be abolished with extraordinary speed. It is one of the central demands of the Party, in Orwell's book, that you "reject the evidence of your eyes and ears". Trump put that maxim into effect on his very first day in office, with his insistence that people ignore the evidence of their senses about his Inauguration day crowds. The world is not divided up into three dominant totalitarian superstates, as in the novel, but in a time of ascendant strongmen, dictators, anti-Semites and state-sponsored liars, many of Orwell's other prophesies have come true. Consider North Korea, an inherited communist dictatorship many of whose features - a society based on hierarchies of loyalty to the leadership - might have been directly transcribed from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Wait a minute, though. Orwell was right about many things, but Huxley was right too. Huxley's background was similar to Orwell's - not only did they both go to Eton, Huxley went back there as a young man (and even taught Orwell French). Despite that, Huxley's milieu was very different, scientific and philosophical rather than politically engaged. The Huxleys were scientific and liberal aristocracy: Aldous's great-uncle was the poet laureate Matthew Arnold; his grandfather Thomas was "Darwin's bulldog", the first high-profile public defender of Darwin's ideas; his brother Julian was a prominent biologist and public figure, the first director-general of Unesco, co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund. Julian was also a leading eugenicist, dedicated to the idea that science could be used to weed out inferior genetic stock for the public good.

The emotional texture of Brave New World is very different from that of Nineteen Eighty-Four; there is a playfulness, a lightness, not at all like the grim, repressed, grey-toned landscape of Orwell's novel. The question of eugenics offers us a clue to the reason for this. Huxley was interested in eugenics, which held a fascination for many intellectuals of the left as well as of the right. He came to see it as a sinister field - correctly, since the thought that the poor have genetic traits which could and should be bred out of them is indeed one of the darkest and most dangerous ideas of the 20th century. But he had first felt the lure of the idea that modernity can improve us, that science can cure some of the pain and difficulty of being human. The fact that Huxley had been tempted by these thoughts helped him depict his ideas with a lighter, more exploratory touch than Orwell.

Huxley's dystopia was the other sort of speculative fiction from Orwell's: not a deep burrowing into the present, but a projection of existing trends into the future. He genuinely was trying to think about what the future would be, if things carried on in the direction they were headed. He was well placed to see trend lines in many of the sciences and made good guesses about where they were going. As a result, we can make a strong claim that it is he, and not Orwell, who did a better job of predicting modern life in the developed world. The revolutionary change in attitudes to sex, for instance, is not something many people foresaw in 1932, but Huxley did: the separation of sex and reproduction is complete in Brave New World, as it is near-complete in modern life. He guessed correctly about the development of new technologies in contraception, and guessed correctly about their consequences too.

In Brave New World promiscuity is not just normal, it is actively encouraged; total frankness in all aspects of sexuality, ditto. Sex is a distraction and a source of entertainment, almost a drug. Huxley would have looked at our world of dating apps and sexualised mass entertainment - and perhaps especially shows such as Love Island and Naked Attraction - and awarded his predictions a solid A+. ( Naked Attraction is a Channel Four dating show on which people choose a partner based on whether or not they like the look of their genitals. The audience sees the genitals too. When you describe this show to people, they often think they've misunderstood, and that you can't mean that people stand with their faces concealed and their genitals exposed and are chosen by a prospective partner on that basis - but that's exactly what happens. I recommend this programme to anyone who doesn't agree that norms around sexuality have changed.) Orwell saw a future in which the state discouraged sex. In this respect he was completely wrong and Huxley was completely right.

Huxley was also more broadly right about pleasure. Orwell wrote about a world which was sensually constrained, pinched, grey - that was one of the main respects in which he was channelling the spirit of the 1940s. Huxley looked ahead, and saw a future in which life was very pleasant - lullingly, deadeningly, numbly pleasant. Undemanding pleasures and unchallenging entertainments are central to the functioning of society. Sources of distraction play a vital role. The "feelies", the main source of mass entertainment, are all about escape from the self. "When the individual feels, society reels," is the motto, and every effort is made to stop people from feeling strong emotion. The preferred method for this is soma, a side-effect free drug which guarantees dissociated happiness. Here, again, Huxley could look at the modern use of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and sedative medications, and conclude that he had nailed it.

One particular area of Huxley's prescience concerned the importance of data. He saw the information revolution coming - in the form of gigantic card-indexes, true, but he got the gist. It is amusing to see how many features of Facebook, in particular, are anticipated by Brave New World. Facebook's mission statement "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" sounds a lot like the new world's motto "Community, Identity, Stability". The world in which "we haven't any use for old things" dovetails with Mark Zuckerberg's view that "young people are just smarter". The meeting room whose name is Only Good News - can you guess whether that belongs to Huxley's World Controller, or Sheryl Sandberg? The complete ban on the sight of breast feeding is common to the novel and to the website. The public nature of relationship status, the idea that everything should be shared, and the idea that "everyone belongs to everyone else" are also common themes of the novel and the company - and above all, the idea, perfectly put by Zuckerberg and perfectly exemplifying Huxley's main theme, that "privacy is an outdated norm".

We can still change direction. There will be life after Trump and Putin. There may even be life after 'Naked Attraction' and Facebook

This theme, of an attack on privacy, is central to Orwell's vision too. Thought crime is one of the most serious crimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is at this point that we can start to see his and Huxley's novels not as competing visions of the future but as complementary, overlapping warnings. Our world has sex on display everywhere, entertainment to take you out of your mind whenever you want, and drugs to make you stop feeling. It also has an increasing number of strongmen leaders who rewrite history and ignore the truth, and a growing emphasis on crimes-by-thought. We don't have an official "Two Minutes Hate", as Orwell's state of Oceania does, but our social media equivalents come pretty close. The idea of permanent low-level war as a new norm looks a lot like our 18-year global war on terror - in fact the GWOT would fit in nicely in Orwell's world of acronyms and Newspeak. The idea of a society permanently stratified into inherited or genetically determined social classes maps well on to a modern world where the most unequal societies are also the ones in which people are most likely to inherit their life chances.

A globally dominant society ruled by a party and a strong leader, a society which uses every possible method of surveillance and data collection to monitor and control its citizens, a society which is also enjoying a record rise in prosperity and abundance, and using unprecedented new techniques in science and genetics - that society would look a lot like a blend of Orwell's and Huxley's visions. It would also look a lot like modern-day China. The developing Chinese "citizen score", a blend of reputational and financial and socio-political metrics, used to determine access to everything from travel and education and healthcare, is such a perfect blend of dystopias that we can only credit it to a new writer, Huxwell. Some commentators on the subject have begun saying that the citizen score is being misunderstood, that it is only a Chinese attempt to develop something as all-encompassing and socially determinative as we in the fortunate west already have with credit rating agencies. They're missing the point: that isn't what's good about the citizen score. It's what's bad about it.

Huxley and Orwell both wrote their books to try and prevent their dystopias from coming true. Their success at prophecy is also their failure - because the righter they are, the more their projects didn't do what they were supposed to. Neither man would have thought that a reason to give up hope. Their warnings are still valid. We can still change direction. There will be life after Trump and Putin. There may even be life after Naked Attraction and Facebook. Last word to Huxley, in the foreword to his dystopia, written 20 years later: "though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it".
John Lanchester's new novel 'The Wall' is published this week by Faber Who best predicted the future with their dystopian novel - George Orwell or Aldous Huxley? We want to hear your thoughts. Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Letters in response to this article:
Do not discount the totalitarian terror of 'We' / From Luc Haenen, Boechout, Belgium Two depictions of dystopia that are 'doubleplusgood' / From Daniel Seifert, Singapore Waking up to a city transformed / From ADH Leishman, Cape Town, South Africa

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Orwell v Huxley: whose dystopia are we living in today?

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The modern world looks to many like a dystopia - a version of "the darkest timeline", to borrow a term from the American sitcom Community. Whose dystopia, though? Which writer best imagined this moment of turmoil and dysfunction?

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Totalitarianism. Fascism. Authoritarianism.

It is safe to say that times are looking fairly bleak in the year of 2017. These are all words that have surged in use by the media this past year and much of it is due to the dark political climate sweeping across the planet as of late.

But it also seems so familiar, doesn't it? Almost as if we've read about this already. That's because we have.

Dystopian fiction is a genre of literature that has picked up in recent years with large scale depressing visions of the future being mass produced in Hollywood including such big names as The Hunger Games and Max Max.

These dark prophecies have been put in place to warn us of impending tragedies before they happen. They envision key mistakes made along human trajectory based on trends in reality which could lead us down the wrong path.

And between the fall of democracy, the ignorance of human rights, and the denial of scientific advancement, now is looking like an especially good time to revisit that copy of George Orwell's 1984 " sitting on your bookshelf to help you prepare.

So before it's too late, let's learn from these nine signs that the end times are already upon us.

9) Our disdain for the poor.

In Veronica Roth's Divergent series, individuals are divided from one another at a young age to fulfill one of five roles in a caste-like structure. But when they feel they can't continue or if they are not strong enough to make the final cut, rather than placing them into another area of expertise, they are cast aside to join the "Factionless" - a group of homeless youth and adults who rely on the kindness of the Abnegation Faction to survive.

Sounds horrible, right?

Well, it also sounds very much like what is happening around us right now.

In large cities, homelessness is a problem that seems impossible to do away with entirely. Poor individuals request spare change on sidewalks while busy middle-class workers must walk past in a hurry to get to where they need to be. Governments have addressed the issue recommending potential solutions such as additional shelters to hide them from the world but until a system is in place to ensure human beings each are given enough to survive and afford a place to live, homelessness is not a problem that will go away overnight.

8) The Earth's surface is likely going to dry out.

Over 97% of scientists agree that global climate change is real. It is even predicted that some parts of the planet will be uninhabitable by the end of the century. Yet we refuse to act on any significant change. President of the United States, Donald Trump, has even gone so far as to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement on grounds that it is "unfair" to the United States.

In 2014 Oscar-nominated film, Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway play characters living in a decimated landscape. Crops catch fire spontaneously, dust storms are on the rise, and humanity relies on intergalactic space travel to find a new planet that can host us.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that but time is ticking.

7) Humans have become oblivious to their own evil.

In Lois Lowry's 1993 classic, The Giver, human beings live in a state devoid of colour and memory. This is all beautifully exacted in the name of structure. In a world where there are no feelings, there can be no pain. With no pain, we are all obedient and safe.

But the world we know does exist with pain and most of the time, we are just too scared to see it. We're aware of many of the problems affecting others including poverty and hunger, yet we choose to dwell more on our minute concerns such as which restaurant we want to order from on Ubereats. The same can be said for the problems of both the future and the past. We know that North America was taken from the indigenous and that was something inherently wrong. But is anyone going to give it back anytime soon? Ehhhh...

6) We lack empathy for the lives of others.

Suzanne Collins' brilliant trilogy, The Hunger Games, paints an elaborate portrait of a land divided into 13 districts. As retribution for a siege mounted 74 years prior, two tributes between the ages of 12-18 are sacrificed annually to fight to the death on television for onlookers to enjoy.

Based on reality television shows like Survivor and Big Brother (which was based off of another dystopian tale), the concept doesn't seem like a very far stretch. We love watching others go through hardships. We feed into celebrity gossip. And we're always the first to tweet about these human beings in derogatory fashion because we know that we'll likely never be in the same room with them again. But just consider, when Britney Spears experienced a real mental health crisis in 2007 and shaved her head, were you one of the ones laughing or did you defend her?

5) We are living in a state of fiction.

1984 is George Orwell's signature dystopian novel. It is the story of Oceania, a superstate which controls the media and inverts the truth with contrary language. In a world where "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength", the main character's job is to falsify past newspaper articles so the government may essentially rewrite history to fit their needs.

In a time before the internet where documentation was readily available, this terrifying conspiracy theory could have been true. The truly terrifying part is that it kind of was. We all know that history is written by the victors; apparently, so does the President of the United States' advisor. How else could "alternative facts" ever be suggested as a viable rationale to making up a massacre for political gain?

4) Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

In George Orwell's *other* smash novel, Animal Farm, a group of pigs mounts an assault for revolution on the farmers on the inspirational grounds of equality for all animals. It isn't long before one of the pigs decides he wants all the power to himself and quickly overthrows the other, smearing his name just to remain the authoritarian leader.

There are a lot of parallels here to the real world. See Adolf Hitler for one. If you want a more modern example, let's just say that politics haven't changed very much in 80 years.

3) Humans shun progress.

Humans crave familiarity. That's why society looks surprisingly similar to the archaic realms that existed thousands of years ago. We like structure and we like to see things we recognize.

So in The Chrysalids, John Wyndham's novel about telepathic human evolution, it comes as no surprise that the remainder of society seeks to banish or kill anyone who is different from them.

Geez, it's almost like in 2017, we're still trying to pretend that homosexuality is unnatural and that transgendered individuals are sexual predators out to attack people in bathrooms. After all, if it doesn't affect you in any way, shape, or form, it should probably be illegal.

2) Equality ≠ Fair Representation.

One of the biggest dystopian stories of the year is Margaret Atwood's feminist classic, The Handmaid's Tale. Set in a post-nuclear world where not all women have the ability to procreate, those who can are forced to become handmaids, tools used only for their reproductive organs. They are brought into the bedroom to engage in some cultish phenomenon where the wife watches as her husband rapes the handmaid against her will.

Feminism has come a long way in the last hundred years but don't let the illusion fool you, there is still much work to do before the word "equality" catches up with how we see it enacted in society. Women still don't receive equal pay for the same jobs and there's yet to be a female president of the United States. "But her emails," a faint voice calls in the distance.

1) An apocalypse is inevitable.

This one goes out to the nihilists out there. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a bleak tale of what happens after some tragedy destroys the world. The reader never discovers what causes the events but what we do know is that human nature will turn us against one another. Few will seek to retain their humanity while others become cannibals seeking only to stay alive.

The world as we know it in 2017 is dark. We cover it up with things to distract ourselves from the terrible occurrences we know are waiting for us. Perhaps, it's a defence mechanism or perhaps we're just living in ignorance. Regardless of what it means, there is still time to stop it. As a society, we need to remember what is truly important and put aside our differences (whether they be race, sexuality, gender, religion or class) to work together and enjoy life for as long as we can. After all, the alternatives aren't the most promising stories we've looked at.

What do you think? Was there any dystopian tale missed with a lesson we could learn from today? Mention it in the comments below!

Are you looking for more dystopian fiction?

C.E. Zulin is the author of Saints of the Paradise Valley, the gripping story of Starseed, a seventeen-year-old girl looking for answers in a world that provides none. Caught in between a war between traditionalism and science, will Starseed be able to find her parents and at long last, Paradise?Learn more at here and look for SOPV in the Amazon or Kobo bookstores.

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9 Signs We're Already Living in a Dystopian Universe

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Totalitarianism. Fascism. Authoritarianism. It is safe to say that times are looking fairly bleak in the year of 2017. These are all words that have surged in use by the media this past year and much of it is due to the dark political climate sweeping across the planet as of late.

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When we say the word 'dystopia', most people immediately think of the Hunger Games, or one of the other ever-so-popular novels we see around us in the world today. The two consistent things we see are these: those who live well, and those who they step on.

Recently, I attended a writing convention, and the keynote speaker was an author named Dan Wells. Maybe you've heared of him, maybe you haven't, but he said one thing that put many things in perspective. "This world is a dystopia, we're just District One." He proceeded to tell us just how bad our world was, just how many people suffer day to day. According to him, one child dies every minute due to hunger. It might be true, might not be. One thing we all know is that everything we have is thanks to someone else who may never earn enough money to earn what they make. So yes, our world is a dystopia.

However.

It doesn't end there, and will never end there. In the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin, it speaks of a wonderful paradise where everything is perfect to everybody. If your definition of perfect was a world of drugs, that's what it would be. Your definition of perfect was that world. Most of the short story consisted mainly of the author talking about how wonderful it was. Nevertheless, later on in the story, it explained that at a certain age, people were taken down to a small, dark basement. They would be shown a child who, for the sake of everybody else, lived a miserable life. They were tortured in every way: starved, abused physically, mentally, emotionally, and sexually. Then the person would be given a choice. Either live in Omelas without heed of the child, or leave right then and there. Hence the name, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". Despite this, Dan Wells, the very person who told us about the many people in the world who are suffering, said that there was probably another choice.

To fight the system.

He then turned to our generation, nicknamed the "Millenials". He told us that in the past, the novels labeled as dystopian told about a problem that could not be solved. In these books, the good would fail. Then, he turned to our books. In every single one of our dystopian novels today, the good guys win. They prevail over evil. Every. Single. Time. Sure, it might take a while. Sure, it was hard. But the main characters fought, and they won. That is our generation. All over the world, care programs are taking place, fundraisers for the less fortunate are held. People do extraordinary things for the sake of others. The Millenials are often displayed as the worst generation, feeling as if they are owed everything. But he told us different. He told us that we are the generation that strives for change. He told us that our predecessors saw a problem and went "Oh, poor us." He told us that we see a problem and go, "Well, how can we fix it?"

Now, this might not be true. He might have just been buttering up a few hundred clueless teenagers to get lots of book sales. But I desperately want to believe otherwise. I want to prove him right and change the world. There is hope, and always will be, as long as you look in the right direction: forward. Some things have gotten worse some things have gotten better. That is how the world works.

So here is my conclusion: even though our world may be a dystopia, we can be like the protagonists in our favorite stories and change it. We can make things better. It's not so bad to have the heart of a child.

Edit: it's been several years now, since I posted this. I am now attending college. Here's what has changed and what has stayed the same: our world is still very clearly a dystopia. I applaud my younger self for wanting a happy ending to my statement, and I stand by it. In every case, I will continue to try and see the positive side. I had to delete a large portion of this because I went on a significant rant over how important it is to keep moving forward. I have to admit, I'm still pretty wishy-washy when it comes to this topic!

If there's one thing I have come to disagree with in this essay, it's the focus on generations. I'm actually gen-Z, but what does it matter? Anyone is capable of changing, of making things better. It doesn't matter how old you are.

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Answer (1 of 14): It matters not just who you are, what skills you have, but also how much you know about the “real world.” Ignorance is bliss (until someone stabs you in the back because of it.) I would not recommend people know as much as possible about the real world less they don’t care to ...

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After being recommended such a read, I took it upon myelf to look into futurism, taking interest in the works of Yuval Noah Harari. In Homo Deus, Yuval touches on multiple areas of civilisation, be it the workforce, religion and the general structure of society. ‘Sapiens’ took me on a breath-taking ride through our entire human history, from its evolutionary roots to the age of capitalism and genetic engineering, to uncover why we are the way we are. It is a book that constantly questions why we are the way we are today. What key processes were taken to shape humankind, agriculture, money’s creation and much more. Taking what they believe is a multi-disciplinary approach that bridges the gap between history, biology, philosophy and economics in a way never done before.

We are talking about an egoistic species, capable of ruling the world due to believing we are the only animals to have gained the ability to believe things that exist purely in our own imagination, such as gods, extraterrestrial species, states, currency and rights for our singular species. The book continues to describe the human species as ecological serial killers--the treatment of animals (and deforestation) in modern agriculture may turn out to be the worst crime in history. This sparks interest for the human mind, especially for those who can comprehend the debate of what it is to be human, the purpose of life and the reasons behind the ongoing, never-ending push forward of the journey to evolve as a species.

It's an interesting read, one that makes me wonder about what possibilities will unravel in the near future, what downsides will be caused by such things. Labourers have always been at the mercy of technology, and if they're taken up, will the same happen to those working in the arts?

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I attended a lecture with a group of young adults to explore the influence of drug intake. It was a lesson that essentially touched on how it's accessibility was an issue especially for those living on the streets. The lecturer also spoke on the effects having drugs being portrayed in the media can bear a certain influence. Of course, this is common knowledge, but if we take note of recent developments in film and TV, an issue revolves around such media consumption.

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I was given the opportunity to volunteer on an interview shoot as part of they crew. We were filming Malala Yousafzai,  known for her Pakistani activism for female education. As an editor, I found I wanted to explore other aspects of the film world, and so I took it upon myself to volunteer as a camera assistant. Through this, I was able to learn how to operate a range of cameras such as a C300 and Alexa Pro Mini. In addition to this, I had also set up and floor planned the lights as well as the cameras, giving myself more work to do and try my hand at multiple roles.

I think its good to find some sense of versatility within the film world, taking up and honing more skills to better one's range.

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1. From Sapiens to Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari on 'Homo Deus'

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5.  Life in 2116 - Yuval Noah Harari on 'Homo Deus'

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the portrayal of drug taking in media has always been at some degree influential. With the series indirectly directed at teen/young adult audiences, the portrayal of drug intake in Euphoria is (on surface level) edgy and trippy. However, despite such things, the portrayal of drugs is actually more positive than most assume. The show itself delves into drug addiction as a mental health issue, a condition. It's one that can be resolved though compassion, treatment and sensitive understanding. The show's portrayal of the 'druggy' character Rue is one that causes the audience to essentially hate on her, feel fed up and rightfully so feel angry at her actions. But when looking back on such anger for the character, we realise that this is a common reaction to those who have lived with someone or know of someone struggling and can feel exhausted by this.

I think what's to be learned here is that we need to educate ourselves on these topics more, attending such small talks and lectures. If our first reaction to a mental condition is to look away or feel frustrated, we are not doing enough to help these people, no matter if you're doing it voluntarily to themselves or because they are suffering to addiction.

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4. Death is Just a Technical Problem - Yuval Noah Harari on 'Homo Deus'

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Eco-thriller starring Pearl Mackie, with theme music by Bonobo.