The least prophetic and most distracting part of Brave New World is the presence of the World Controllers in the first place. The idea that there is even someone to argue with about the preferred state of society is off - the folks driving forward a culture of consumerism and sounds byte dialogue are as much desparate consumption addicts as the rest of us!
>The idea that there is even someone to argue with about the preferred state of society is off
I completely agree. The idea of someone, or a small group of someones, who control the world is another scapegoat, a kind of fantasy we sometimes revel in to explain why everything is going wrong. "At least someone's in control".
The fact is, we're all in this together. Certain people have more influence on the direction of certain societies, it's true, but the whole mass is some kind of undulating, chaotic consciousness constantly trying to adapt to itself. The people "not in control" compose most of the mass, influencing the people "in control" from the bottom-up, like how plate tectonics et al cause tsunamis, while those "in control" attempt to place restrictions on the crowd. There is not usually a state in which one body can contain the other, unless we do have a society akin to what we have in 1984, or unless we don't have class mobility (distributing influences).
Fortunately, in societies dominated by European and "western" philosophies, we have class mobility and we have sectors of the mass actively attempting to keep the upper influences manageable and the greater mass informed. Our focus on intellectualism, scientific thought, and individualism are, in my opinion, the biggest reasons why this is the case. We want to understand how the world works, we want to know where we fit as individuals and how our individual power contributes to the collective. We want to mark our place on the world, which means we generally strive to expand our individual influence radius as far as it can go, which means any top-of-the-pyramid actors do actually have much less control of anything that might shake the boat (since we tend to shake the boat very often).
