1984 Big Brother and Modern Times Essay

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George Orwell in 1984 and M.T. Anderson on Feed?Orwell was better at predicting what our present day world would be like because in all actuality all he was doing was depicting the world as it essentially was in the 1940s when he wrote the novel. He merely exaggerated certain ideas for satirical effect, but as everything has become more exaggerated since Orwell wrote the book his novel comes across as entirely prophetic. M.T. Andersen’s Feed on the other hand is more of a sci-fi dystopian sentimental teen romance: it represents our over-reliance on technology and the possibly coming brain implants that will link everyone to the cloud. It satirizes our corporate culture—but it depicts a rather unconvincing world in which countries that are not the US care such a great deal about environmentalism that they are willing to go to war with the US. This is not really plausible and hardly reflects the state of things today: it is much the rest of the world that takes orders from the US (see the situation in Ukraine today and the sanctioning of Russia); China, which is perhaps one of the worst polluters on the planet, does not care about environmentalism and would certainly never go to war with the US over such an issue. Orwell, on the other hand, steers clear of representing the world in such a trendy way (environmentalism is trendy); he paints instead with a broad brush, focusing on the concepts that best explain our modern totalitarian culture—newspeak, wrongthink, Big Brother, two minute hate campaigns, and so on. Orwell understood well how the totalitarian state does propaganda and how propaganda is used to control the minds and wills of the masses—and when propaganda fails how force is used to ensure submission.One thing Anderson does get right is how caught up in social media people are today: everyone seems to be more interested in reading and posting content online than in actually engaging with human beings in real life. If you go out in public, people are always looking at their phones. In Anderson’s book, the teens are communicating telepathically all the time, always hooked into their feed so that they hardly understand a thing about themselves or the real world. Anderson uses a lot of unbelievable sci-fi dimensions, however, to make this point: Titus and Violet on the moon represents a silly type of SpaceX delusion that most sci-fi fans like to believe in. Considering that we never have been to the moon and that the stories of our going to the moon is Orwell-level Big Brother deception just proves that Orwell was the better master of depicting our actual reality than Anderson, who just buys into the myths and perpetuates them in his novel.

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But as Dave McGowan shows, the moon landings are a giant farce of epic proportions brought to us by none other than Big Brother who needed to distract a gullible public from very real problems in the real world (like Vietnam).Orwell understood how the state puts out false narratives to convince the public that something is happening when really the opposite is happening. It…

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…had supported Stalin against Germany. The West was just as totalitarian as the USSR. It’s only gotten worse. Thus, it appears that Orwell predicted it all—but it was all plain to see back then. Degrelle, for instance, was under no illusions on the matter.Anderson does some predicting in terms of the neurolink that wires everyone’s brain into the feed, allowing them to communicate telepathically and to be totally controlled by the corporate state. However, that is about the only seemingly plausible prediction Anderson makes. The idea of people being on the moon is implausible. That is all state propaganda and is not going to happen. The idea of other states warring with the US over environmental concerns is also not going to happen. Environmentalism is just more state propaganda—just like COVID, just like Putin is the new Hitler, just like [insert latest outrage].Orwell understood all this. It was not about technology, or ideology. It was always about control. The regime in power today is the same as the regime in power at the end of WW2. They controlled the media, the financial industry; they took over the schools; they took over the culture (see the Frankfurt School). They did a good job of convincing the world that they were not the problem but that the boogeyman—the “enemy” (always changing)—was the problem. Just like in 1984. And just like in 1948 when the novel was published, it was all a reality back then as now. So it that sense we can’t really say that Orwell was making predictions about what would come true.….....

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