Rereading 1984
Upon rereading 1984, it’s interesting to contemplate the accuracy of Orwell’s vision. Orwell peered 35 years into the future to write 1984, and his vivid if sinister projections were clairvoyant, but in some cases overly pessimistic, and in others not pessimistic enough.
Orwell‘’s vision of mass surveillance is the dominant image retained by many readers. The idiom “Big Brother is watching you” and the notion of ubiquitous video surveillance are routinely invoked to support modern paranoia about surveillance by governments and online services. Interestingly, modern society has realized much of the infrastructure required for Orwell’s vision, with tiny video screens by the billions, most of which are now delivered with at least one integrated camera. What we haven’t realized, and what Orwell never actually considers in detail, is the human and organizational resources required to analyze all of that video content. The failures of content moderation on social media indicate the challenges of surveillance at global scale. Modern machine learning may suggest a scaleable solution, but in practice these systems can barely handle relatively banal tasks like recognizing pornography or healthcare scams, and are routinely defeated by the adversarial humans who disseminate disinformation or conduct fraudulent commerce. So unless you believe in the theory of an omnipotent government security apparatus, or embrace the conjecture that online platforms operate in bad faith, this technology seems to be a modest risk, hardly worthy of comparison to Orwell’s darkest projections. Caveat: I cannot speak for the systems operating in the People’s Republic of China.
If we exaggerate the threat of the surveillance state, we also risk ignoring another basic pillar of Orwell’s dark vision, the manipulation of history. We too easily forget Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth, processing requests to update the written past to make it consistent with the official version of the present. Orwell described an elaborate bureaucracy for this purpose, but with the Internet we’ve created a much more scalable model. We’ve empowered publishers to maintain and revise their own history. In so doing we’ve created a cloud of uncertainty over all of Internet-based history, a comparable effect to the Ministry of Truth, but decentralized, without the mammoth bureaucracy, in the style of the Web.
It’s hard to identify anything in America with the ritualized regularity of the Two Minute Hate, but if one accepts a less rigid schedule, our political rallies and certain sporting events begin to evoke similar patterns of tribal behavior.
Finally, Orwell considers the use of poverty to maintain a population in ignorance. He seemed to believe that individuals, given safety, comfort and discretionary time, would achieve such a level of enlightenment that they would reject the state of subjugation. Interesting, our modern example does not confirm this part of Orwell’s conjecture. Perhaps he underestimated the capacity of public to practice ignorance en mass, even when they have the resources and comfort to afford their own betterment.
