When I took 1984with me on vacation recently, I didn’t expect to read it. Unlike the two other books with me—Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist—I had already read Orwell’s classic work. Or had I? It had been at least 25 years. Most of what I remembered seemed to…
60 years ago this year, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World Revisited, which concluded that the real world was moving towards the future predicted in his classic dystopian novel much more quickly than he had first imagined. Brave New World, published almost three decades earlier, foresaw a future in which social control had been perfected…
The Guardian ran an article yesterday by one of its editors, David Shariatmadari, that both proves and disproves its own theme at the same time: “An Information Apocalypse Is Coming”. Now, I don’t fancy the term apocalypse in a setting like this, it feels too much like going for a cheap thrill, but since he…
George Orwell’s 1984 featured a dystopian England, and indeed, a world, of three superstates that all ran according to the same principles. Eternal war, eternal ignorance, and eternal subservience, whether realized or not. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU was this book’s addition to the American lexicon for many, many people. The means of surveillance were…
Google has taken the unprecedented step of burying material, mostly from websites on the political right, that it has deemed to be inappropriate. The problem, however, is that the world’s largest search engine is a left-leaning company with an ax to grind. Let’s face it, deep down in our heart of hearts we knew the…
George Orwell’s 1984 is a classic book depicting a populace ruled by a political regime that persecutes individualism and independent critical thinking as “thoughtcrimes” that must be enforced by the “thought police.” This party seeks power above all, and, through the propagandist Ministry of Truth, presents the people with their version of truth. Sound familiar? Within the…
