1984

ThoughtStorms Wiki

Hot take: "I'm reading 1984" is just virtue signalling for people who think they are above virtue signalling.

You wouldn't read it for fun, because it's miserable and depressing.
You already think totalitarian oppression is bad, so you don't need it to tell you that.
If you want to know how it feels, you could read dozens of first hand accounts by people actually lived under totalitarianism. So why choose a disgruntled English anarchist imagining how it would feel, largely based on his experiences at the BBC?

OTOH 1984 doesn't tell you anything about where totalitarianism comes from, how it arises, why people support it or how to prevent it.

As to how totalitarianism works, the 3 biggest ideas in 1984 are :

mass surveillance,
orchestrated hatred of enemies, and
systematic gaslighting.

These are important ideas, but we now know that they happen everywhere there's mass communication, including here and now in our not totalitarian systems.

Mass surveillance is not only with us, but we've individually embraced and welcomed it in the form of SocialMedia.

Orchestrated hatred of enemies can come from private media companies, religions and interest groups as easily from the government.

Systematic gaslighting is what pretty much everyone experiences after TheEndOfConsensus. When the world is full of apparently mainstream beliefs we fundamentally reject.

None of this is intended as a dig at Orwell's book. Which was a fine polemical discourse of it's time. But far from being an important document to help us understand totalitarianism, 1984 actually confuses us, simultaneously misleading us towards unwarranted optimism and unwarranted pessimism.

The unwarranted optimism is that these are no concern to us because we don't live in totalitarianism.
The unwarranted pessimism is that if any of this is happening, totalitarianism is just around the corner.

But governments manufacture consent everywhere. Again, Orwell's experience with propaganda were within the British empire and UK fighting the second world war. You can argue that he was just extrapolating tendencies he saw in the British state. But that, alone, is good reason to think that these activities should be understood as much broader than products / symptoms of totalitarianism.

The truth of what's going on today is far more strange and unnerving than anything Orwell imagined. The coming of mass communication, the internet and information economy is causing havoc in the MemeticEcosystem and we are struggling to figure out how to deal with it. The problems are real. The cartoon "Orwellian Totalitarianism" is neither the cause nor the symptom of them.