Scrolling through Instagram to see the pictures from the March for Science, I marveled at the protest’s display of teasing American wit. (“Remember polio? No? Thanks, science!”) And then I thought of Neil Postman, the professor and the critic and the man who, via his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, argued preemptively against all this change-via-chuckle. Postman wasn’t, as his book’s title might suggest, a humorless scold in the classic way—Amusing Ourselves to Death is, as polemics go, darkly funny—but he was deeply suspicious of jokes themselves, especially when they come with an agenda.

Postman died in 2003; were he still with us, though, he would likely be both horrified and unsurprised to see protesters fighting for the fate of the planet with the help of a punnified Labrador—or, for that matter, to see the case for women’s inalienable rights being made by people dressed as plush vulvas. He might whisper that, in politics, the line between engagement and apathy is thinner than we want to believe. He might suggest that fun is fun, definitely, but, given its amorality, a pretty awkward ethic. He might warn, with a Cassandric sigh, that there is something delightful and also not very delightful at all about a trio of Tyrannosauri who, in the name of saving the world, try their hardest to go viral on Facebook.

Postman today is best remembered as a critic of television: That’s the medium he directly blamed, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, for what he termed Americans’ “vast descent into triviality,” and the technology he saw as both the cause and the outcome of a culture that privileged entertainment above all else. But Postman was a critic of more than TV alone. He mistrusted entertainment, not as a situation but as a political tool; he worried that Americans’ great capacity for distraction had compromised their ability to think, and to want, for themselves. He resented the tyranny of the lol. His great observation, and his great warning, was a newly relevant kind of bummer: There are dangers that can come with having too much fun.

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In 1984, Americans took a look around at the world they had created for themselves and breathed a collective sigh of relief. The year George Orwell had appointed as the locus of his dark and only lightly fictionalized predictions—war, governmental manipulation, surveillance not just of actions, but of thoughts themselves—had brought with it, in reality, only the gentlest of dystopias. Sure, there was corporatism. Sure, there was communism. And yet, for most of the Americans living through that heady decade, 1984 had not, for all practical purposes, become Nineteen Eighty-Four. They surveyed themselves, and they congratulated themselves: They had escaped.

Or perhaps they hadn’t. Postman opened Amusing Ourselves to Death with a nod to the year that had preceded it. He talked about the freedoms enjoyed by the Americans of 1984—cultural, commercial, political. And then he broke the bad news: They’d been measuring themselves according to the wrong dystopia. It wasn’t Nineteen Eighty-Four that had the most to say about the America of the 1980s, but rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. “In Huxley’s vision,” Postman noted, “no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history.” Instead: “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”