The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia circa 2032

A graphic novel about heroism, corporate greed, and the convergence of Wall Street and Chinatown.

Some two thousand years ago, Chinese general Sun Tzu penned The Art of War — an ancient military treatise that went on to become one of the most timeless and revered strategy books of all time, its insights extending beyond the military and into just about every domain of tactical intelligence. In The Art of War: A Graphic Novel (public library), writer Kelly Roman and illustrator Michael DeWeese adapt the classic to a futuristic world where wars are waged on a militarized Wall Street, China is the dominant global superpower, and Sun Tzu’s ancient teachings unfold in a dystopian interplay between corporate greed and the undying human capacity for empathy.

Though exceedingly gory and lacking the edutainment value of graphic novels as serious nonfiction, The Art of War: A Graphic Novel peels away the many layers of what heroism means, what it can be and should be, to paint a portrait of a world that might be around the corner if we don’t align our corporate strategies with our cultural and human values.

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Aldous Huxley on Freedom, Propaganda, and the Future of Technology: A Rare and Prophetic 1958 Interview by Mike Wallace

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”

Aldous Huxley — author of the classic Brave New World, little-known children’s book wordsmith, staple of Carl Sagan’s reading list — would have been 118 today. To celebrate his mind and his legacy, here is a rare 1958 conversation with Mike Wallace — the same masterful interviewer who also offered rare glimpses into the minds of Salvador Dalí and Ayn Rand — in which Huxley predicts the “fictional world of horror” depicted in Brave New World is just around the corner for humanity. He explains how overpopulation is among the greatest threats to our freedom, admonishes against the effects of advertising on children, and, more than half a century before Occupy Wall Street, outlines how global economic destabilization will incite widespread social unrest.

It’s extremely important, here and now, to start thinking about these problems — not to let ourselves be taken by surprise by the new advances of technology.

[…]

We can foresee, and we can do a great deal to forestall. After all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Wallace reads a passage on American political campaigns from Huxley’s Brave New World Revisted (originally written under the title Enemies of Freedom) that rings with remarkable, and remarkably unsettling, timeliness:

All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere; political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.

Complement with Huxley on drugs, democracy, and religion, then revisit his little-known children’s book.

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Anti-Suffragette Postcards from the Early 20th Century

A brief pictorial history of socially sanctioned sexism.

Among February’s vintage Valentine’s Day postcards from the early 1900s was some anti-suffragette propaganda. That brand of misogynist messaging, it turns out, wasn’t reserved just for Cupid’s favorite holiday — in fact, as the suffrage movement swelled into a groundswell in the early 20th century, the picture postcard industry was enlisted in producing propaganda that discredited and denigrated women fighting for the vote. Here are a few more anti-suffragette postcards from the period, a reminder at once amusing and appalling of our culture’s history of socially sanctioned bigotry. (No doubt, Tea Party signage on marriage rights and immigration will appear in similar contexts in the cultural criticism of tomorrow.)

If this wasn’t amusingly appalling enough for you, up the ante with this Victorian list of don’ts for female cyclists, but then lift your spirits with a look at how the bicycle actually emancipated women.

History Extra @matthiasrascher

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Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

How the economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception.

I like to believe the role of public media — of good public media, at least — is to frame for people what matters in the world and why. E. B. White, ever the idealist, famously said that the role of the writer should be “to lift people up, not lower them down” because “writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.” But the currencies of what’s essentially a question of motive change dramatically when public media become big business, and the kind of life they inform and shape can become a gross and dangerous aberration of reality, of what really matters from a humanistic perspective. Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (public library) by Ryan Holiday lives somewhere between The Influencing Machine, The Filter Bubble, and The Information Diet, exploring precisely what happens when these motives become business motives and not motives of civic responsibility. And Holiday should know — former media strategist for clients of Dov Charney’s notoriety and current marketing director of American Apparel, the college-dropout-turned-communications-mastermind has been, as he puts it, “paid to deceive” on behalf of world-famous authors, musicians, movie moguls, and politicians alike.

Holiday proudly professes:

Usually, it is a simple hustle. Someone pays me, I manufacture a story for them, and we trade it up the chain — from a tiny blog to Gawker to a website of a local news network to the Huffington Post to the major newspapers to cable news and back again, until the unreal becomes real. Sometimes I start by planting a story. Sometimes I put out a press release or ask a friend to break a story on their blog. Sometimes I ‘leak’ a document. Sometimes I fabricate a document and leak that. Really, it can be anything, from vandalizing a Wikipedia page to producing an expensive viral video. However the play starts, the end is the same: The economics of the Internet are exploited to change public perception — and sell product.

If it sounds appalling and revolting and like the end of the free press, it’s because it is — but lest we forget, Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator is also a product, and if selling it requires a calculated maneuver of scandalization, then it’s both fair game and meta-commentary on the very system within which Holiday plays.

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