Books — what I read and what I think about it.
I first read Brave New World in school and thought it was a fun bit of nonsense. The second time, years later, as someone who builds software for a living, I stopped laughing. Not because it reminded me of “society,” but because it reminded me of my own work. In 1932 Huxley didn’t describe the future of the powerful. He described the future of product designers.
I’ll deliberately leave the worn-out line aside — “Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley those who’d make sure no one wanted to read one.” It’s true, but it has become too comfortable. That comfort is precisely the subject.
What it’s about
The World State has solved every problem. No war, no scarcity, no aging, no loneliness, no pain. People are no longer born but decanted from bottles and pre-programmed for their caste by sleep-conditioning — from the elite (Alpha) down to the dulled workers (Epsilon). Anyone who still has an unpleasant feeling takes soma, a drug with no hangover: “a gramme is better than a damn.” Deep bonds are abolished — “everyone belongs to everyone else” — along with family, art, religion, and science, because all of it makes you unstable.
Into this frictionless world stumbles John, “the Savage,” raised outside it on Shakespeare and real suffering. And at the end comes the true heart of the book: a conversation between John and Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers, who knows exactly what he gave up — and defends it anyway.
Soma is not a pill
The first mistake is to take soma for the drug. Soma isn’t the substance, soma is the principle: the systematic removal of friction. Every unpleasant feeling gets an instant antidote before it can grow.
And that is exactly my job. I spend workdays removing friction: one click fewer, one wait shorter, one form simpler, one onboarding smoother. “Time to value” down, “friction points” out — those aren’t insults in my industry, they’re goals. Huxley’s soma removed the friction of feeling. Modern products remove the friction of waiting, of being bored, of being alone, of thinking. None of it is evil. But in aggregate we’re building exactly what the book warns about.
AI is the next stage of conditioning
This is where it gets genuinely uncomfortable for me, because it’s my actual field. Orwell’s control needed a boot. Huxley’s control needed only an upbringing. And the most effective control is the one you’re grateful for.
Sleep-conditioning was what was technically imaginable in 1932 — crude, repetitive, imposed from outside. What we build today is the same goal with infinitely finer tools: recommendation systems that don’t censor but reinforce. They take nothing from you; they give you more of what already holds you. No one needs to forbid you from thinking something uncomfortable — it simply never gets suggested. And here’s the tell: people defend “their” algorithm the way the citizens of the World State defend their soma. We call conditioning “personalization” and consider it a service. As someone who helps build such systems, I can’t pretend I’m standing outside them.
And now the unease: Mond is right
You read the book waiting for the moment the villain is unmasked. It never comes. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, is no fanatic and no fool. He’s read Shakespeare, he knows God, he understands exactly what was abolished — and he calmly explains why. Stability and happiness on one side; art, science, truth, suffering, and freedom on the other. You can’t have both at once. They chose.
Science
Truth
God
the freedom to be unhappy
Health
Eternal youth
No war
Reliable happiness
I believe the bargain is wrong. But I notice how hard it is to prove it without appealing to something the World State has simply deleted: that growth needs suffering, that meaning needs friction, that a life without the possibility of failure isn’t fulfilled but merely sedated. Mond would smile mildly and say: good for you, but no one here misses it. And in his world, he’d be right.
The comfortable take is itself soma
Here I have to be honest against myself. The line “we already live in Brave New World” feels clever — and that’s the trap. Saying it gives you the pleasant shiver of being awake without changing a thing. You quote Huxley, feel superior, and then reopen the same app. Recognizing the dystopia, coffee in hand, is part of the comfort, not the way out of it. Writing this piece protects me from nothing.
No good way out — and that’s the point
That leaves John, the Savage. We want him to be the hero, real suffering humanity against the hollow happiness machine. But John is also a fanatic who whips himself, can’t live among people, and breaks in the end. Huxley later admitted as much: he’d left his hero only two options — the insane comfort of the World State or the savagery of the reservation. He never offered a sane third way. The book has no good answer.
And honestly, neither do I. Maybe that’s exactly the lesson — not the cheap “resist the soma,” but the uncomfortable admission that comfort this total has no clean exit. A civilization that solves all its problems may also dissolve the very tension that made it worth anything. It’s the same motion I’ve written about elsewhere — that wealth lasting too long eats what created it. Huxley just gave it its exact ending.
Who it’s for
Read it if you build something that makes people’s lives easier — and have the nerve to find yourself standing not with John, but with Mond. It isn’t a cozy book. It’s only written as if it were one.
Related
Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World” (1932). Huxley’s later self-criticism is in the 1946 foreword; his sense that it was arriving faster than he’d feared is in “Brave New World Revisited” (1958).
