Just because it's so true people are sick of it doesn't change the fact that it is, indeed, 1984.
Also Brave New World, weirdly enough.
Good news - we didn't have to pick a dystopia. We're getting them ALL. At the same time.
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2026
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It's also beginning to feel like Children of Men with all the microplastics in everydude's balls.
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It's literally a cyberpunk dystopia only less cool.
The people with the resources to change things took those stories as guidebooks... "Ooh sick robots!"
And none of the cyberpunk. Just the shitty corpos controlling everything.
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If it's Brave New World please send me to Iceland.
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Ok, I’ll take the bait. It’s a good book, and not all that long!
The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern "degeneracy") that stuck around at least until the 2010s.
It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn't put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.
I mean saying it isn't as good as anything by LeGuin is hardly an insult. Nearly everyone isn't as good as LeGuin.
Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidencesupporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity:[4][5] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.
The romantic sub-plot... That's a misunderstanding. It's a love triangle between Winston, Julia and Big Brother. It's not really a sub-plot at all.
But you're right. Le Guin runs rings around it.
It might not be the best book ever written, but I think it's important to read. It's one of the most cited books to support whatever people want. Once you read it, you can interpret it for yourself, and you actually know what it's about.
The thing most people know from it is Big Brother watching you. It's just surveillance state stuff. That's a relatively small part of it though. It's more about shaping culture through information control. Yeah, surveillance is part of it, but even that's not just cameras; it's also about having people inform the government about their neighbors, or parents, or whatever else.
Which was of course already incredibly contemporary with what Goebals, Himmler and Stalin had been up to. Everyone sees the novel as the endgame of the opposing ideology, though it’s basically a warning against those who would seek to cement their power by making opposition impossible.
I think the premise is not linguistic relativity, it's the political bullshit itself. Something like "all countries bullshit against their own citizens, so that those citizens defend things going against their own best interests. Watch out when yours does it." If what I'm saying is correct, the only role of that relativity would be that Orwell incorrectly believed to be one of the tools used to craft bullshit.
I'm saying this based on two things. One is the book itself; in plenty situations there's no relativity, the bullshit pops up because people forgot what happened. Check the first two quotes for examples.
The other reason is another text Orwell wrote, Politics and the English Language. IMO the six points are bad advice (and often propagated by muppets, who didn't understand the text in first place), and Orwell was completely clueless about language, but the premise itself is related to the one in 1984; something like "stop hiding bullshit behind walls of babble". The last quote shows it
Quotes
[1984] It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
[1984] Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.
[Politics and the English Language; emphasis in the original] In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. […]
EDIT - moved quotes to spoiler tags for less clutter.
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It's the one with all the animals, right?
It insists upon itself.
I dropped it about halfway through. I'm sure at the time it was bold, but today you can find totalitarian regimes reshaping society unrecognizably in an average YA romance novel. I got tired of it explaining how awful the depicted world was when I got it the first time. Basically no plot was happening at all. Just one long, establishing scene setting up the world as Winston did his 9 to 5.
I read some summaries about the later parts enough to write a report on it. So I knew that (Spoilers ahead) eventually he starts attempting to rebel beyond sneaking out to hire a prostitute once. But he doesn't really accomplish anything significant before getting captured and converted, because the entire point of the book is to show how awful that potential future is supposed to be, meaning of course the characters don't need real agency.
The lesson it's trying to explain is pretty obvious to anyone with basic familiarity with history around WWII. Of course we shouldn't let governments get enough power to establish a police state that can preempt rebellion. They will use propaganda to rewrite even recent events, establish a bogeyman enemy to blame any problems in society on, change what terms and values are acceptable, and otherwise control every aspect of their populations' lives. Obviously, some people need to hear that, but it was mind-numbing to listen to someone use a boring dystopia to argue for something you already agreed with. It was nearly as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451.
as unsubtle and anvilicious as Fahrenheit 451
How do you feel about Bradbury's claim that it was less about a totalitarian state than a condemnation of the effects of mass media?
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jorjorwel??!!!
Meesa JorJor, meesa JorJor Well
France is bacon
You don't need to read 1984 to understand the basic meaning people get out of it. The significant aspects can be summed up as a few bullet points or a few short paragraphs.
Unfortunately because its message is so broad, it is often used in support of all sorts of opposing arguments, small and large, Jacob Geller discussed this topic in detail.
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Some recommended reading about George "I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler" Orwell:
- Isaac Asimov's 1980 review of Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Orwell's 1940 review of Mein Kampf
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list
- https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/George_Orwell
one could say the widespread misperception of who he actually was and what he stood for is rather... orwellian 🙄
The guy fought Nazi supplied Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. This take is nuts, he almost died for the CNT-FAI. He's not a Nazi sympathizer.
And went on to literally work for the British intelligence services and provide them lists of communists, you could read the provided sources.
Just a thought experiment: since you apply this logic that fighting the Nazi-supplied nationalists in the Spanish civil war makes one an antifascist, do you agree that the greatest antifascist force in Europe was the USSR as the only country supplying weapons, munitions, tanks and airplanes to the Republican and Anarchist during the civil war?
The USSR didn't supply the anarchists. ~~They~~ The Communists actively refused to give them arms and worked against them. That was the cause of Orwell's disdain towards them. source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-on-anarchism#fn70
Edit: Correcting sentencing after being corrected in a reply.
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"I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity."
I think the first sentence was taken a bit out of context. In the second he says would kill him if got the chance to. I think he's just trying to say that Hitler was charismatic.
Its a bit off topic, but its really amusing in that Isaac Asimov article how he talks about the Spain thing where Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists were at odds. Basically, the left righting amongst themselves.
The more things change...
The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the
television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and
see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and
are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom.
Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'.
This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under
control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other
person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian
society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great
development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression.
Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible, like it’s right now
What no Foucault does to a MF.
The idea that every person will only behave as though they are being watched if they are actually being watched, fails to recognize that if people know that they could be watched at any time, but can't actually see if the watcher is watching them, they will behave as though they are being watched all the time.
Panopticon goes brrrr
Interesting that someone like Asimov has not seen how technology would make this possible
He did. A few paragraphs later he says:
Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
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ohh hell nah they made a tanky conservapedia 💀
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I've read 1984, and yeah that's basically it
Double plus good
Was at the library a few weeks ago for the first time and got 1984. Didn't touch it and had to return it. Now when someone asks I can show them that I borrowed it and claim that I reread it recently 👌
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Literally 1984
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