What Does George Orwell's '1984' Mean in 2024?

""Make Orwell fiction again,…""

Tragically, in the present political and economic environment it's a lost cause.

Just about everywhere governments are against it with their incessant push towards increasing surveillance and backdooring encryption.

Big Tech—Google, Meta, Microsoft et al including their greedy shareholders—are now financially dependent on income from surveillance and ensuring privacy is nuked. If "Making Orwell fiction again" were to actually happen the economies of these trillion-dollar companies would be in jeopardy.

With such enormous sums at stake and dogged persistence from authoritarian governments it's just not going to happen anytime soon.

Larry Ellison recently said that “Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on”.

In UK we’ve recently introduced a series of laws that force people to identify themselves online and the introduction of a digital ID scheme.

We’ve recently had some high profile arrests for free speech violations.

We even have TVs and cars that spy on us.

These fuckers are actively trying to build a boot to stand on the face of humanity.

https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...

With EU Chat Control, we are making yet another big step towards the fears that this article hints at. It could have been the television that watches you, with SmartTVs all around, but no. It is your universal mobile communcation device that watches you, which is even worse. Almost as if your pen would submit your writing to the party.

Since Von der Leyen, I am afraid of what the EU has become and will do to us in the future. It is the perfect mirror of "Big Brother", a system that started out with good intentions, and has clearly become malevolent.

I really thought we were more resilient against a post truth world. There were always signs that we are headed into the post truth direction but I was not expecting it to flip like a switch.

I find Aldous Huxley's Brave New World much more relatable to 21st century US society. A great deal more from the society of The World State and Fordism maps to current structures.

It's amazing how keen Orwell was in describing the twisted mind of dictators. All of that applies today as it did then.

Fascism and authoritarianism are often mischaracterized as strictly left- or right-wing ideologies, but both extremes can manifest in ways reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. The core of authoritarianism lies in control and conformity, not in a specific political alignment.

The far-right, often rooted in ethno-nationalism or white supremacy, mirrors 1984 by enforcing a rigid hierarchy where inclusion depends on immutable traits like race. If you don’t fit the prescribed identity, you’re inherently an “other,” excluded or dehumanized, much like the Party’s rigid caste system in Orwell’s dystopia.

Conversely, the far-left can embody 1984 through ideological conformity, punishing “wrong-think” with social or institutional ostracism. Questioning narratives—whether about COVID-19 origins, vaccine safety, or other politically charged topics—can mark you as an outsider, silenced or vilified for deviating from the approved orthodoxy.

The far-left often stifles open debate, dismissing dissent on contentious issues as misinformation or heresy, creating a culture where only sanctioned ideas prevail. The far-right, while sometimes more permissive of free speech, demands unwavering adherence to traditional values or legalism, where any challenge to authority or “law and order” is met with condemnation.

Both extremes weaponize conformity—whether through identity or ideology—to suppress individuality and enforce control, echoing the totalitarian essence of 1984. True freedom lies in rejecting these rigid dogmas and embracing open, principled discourse.

'While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation, the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.'

Sure, they're much worse, relying instead on conditioning people to discipline themselves, removing the need for a symbolic Brother, Daddy, Брат (Brat), when subduing the masses.

Orwell was reflecting on the stiff, monotonic and easily identifiable mass communication of Stalin and Goebbels, which fell out of fashion at around the same time as the novel was published. While the Soviet never managed to invent a new totalising regime, it's main opponent did and exported it by hard as well as soft forms of power.

If only our problems was a Big Brother and inscrutable bureaucratic mazes hidden away in concrete buildings, that would seem almost utopian compared to our current predicament.

The absolute irony of modern American conservatives using the phrase "Make Orwell Fiction Again" boggles the mind.