""The future," as George Soros, the financier and philanthropist once observed, "is not only unknown: it is unknowable." Given that, it seemed like a good idea to take Neil Postman’s two extremes to see how our networked future might unfold. Which kind of future—the Orwellian or the Huxleyean—seems more plausible? Postman thought that the two were mutually exclusive: humanity might have one or the other. But an even gloomier conclusion is that we might wind up with both."