FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
"As only Orwell could, he marked the BBC as he left – almost prissily: ‘I feel that I have been treated with the greatest generosity and allowed very great latitude…on no occasion have I been compelled to say on air anything that I would not say as a private individual.’"
That page does not seem to support the claim that 1984 is about or relates to his time at BBC.
The recent HN front-page post linked to Asimov's review of 1984—Asimov claimed it was Stalinism through and through (writing the review in 1980, FWIW).
So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.
Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]
If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.
Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.
The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support
[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )
I don't think anyone minds if you use an LLM to try to track down information like this. But the LLM's output is not what we want. That's merely a clue for you on your quest to find a proper source.
Even school children in the 90s were told that "the search engine" was ludicrous to give as a source. You should know that your LLM is the same.
Those events and times inspired those books, but they didn't actually happen in those countries.
There is a core message about the nature of not just ingsoc but the other governments of the world as well, and their relationship with each that gets left out when talking about 1984. The overbearing surveillance capital state is all people think about, that's part of it, but why that state exists, the motivations of it's leadership, the sheer and terrifying brilliance of the architecture of their government. in many ways, I'm glad the leaders of major countries and political movements don't grasp 1984 well (or at all).
But I agree that in 1948, Orwell's frustration and experience was not just that there was a world war, but that it was the second one in his life time. War-time mentality does approximate the levels of repression he mentions in the book, but in any country, it doesn't quite get there. But it could!
That's the scary part, things like "facecrime" weren't possible in 1984, now not only is it possible, it can be done without humans being involved too much. We have all the surveillance, more than he could have even imagined. But not only that, we have the means to analyze all the surveillance data in real time and do something about it. The capability to implement a world much worse than the one in 1984 exists. The villains of our times and the people they rule over just haven't managed to negotiate the imagination and sophistication of a strategy to abuse it yet.
This is what I mean. just random people are doing the spying parts already. [SPOILER] a very similar scene is in 1984, except with the government behind the cams.
While it’s true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a centralized, surveilled state.
Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all about" when it betrayed the anarchists).
Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!
Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
The Spanish civil war turned him into a socialist. His anti-stalin/anti-Soviet streak was in no way anti-communist. perhaps you shouldn't be so weasel-y with your wording.
Nope. He was unapologetically socialist before his involvement in the Civil War, and that conflict actually did make him anti-communist, and an anti-authoritarian. Socialism of the kind Orwell supported and communism of the kind we have seen in the world are two very different things.
For those reading who are curious on which comment is accurate, I would encourage you to read up on it to confirm for yourself. It's a highly fascinating subject to read about.
Another thing the Spanish Civil War did make Orwell was a hardcore realist.
june 1937, in a letter to Cyril Connolly, written in Barcelona during the Civil War;
>‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’
He was a libertarian socialist at various points, sure, but you're painting him as something he wasn't. He was avowedly a socialist throughout most of his adult life even if he wasn't playing patty-cake with the Trots and the MLs and various other 20th century Euro-centric leftist revolutionary groups
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not.
The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable.
Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
Atlas Shrugged (and the fountainhead) is like a superhero comic book where the almighty good guys fight the flat, faceless "bad guys" with pure and fully justified moral righteousness. The "bad guys" are a slobbering caricature of a boogeyman that everyone can easily despise - wanting to do nothing except take from others like a bridge troll or a grey goo disaster scenario.
Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason.
I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.
Probably because the author was an insufferable person and that that very book was part of the basis for (not "twisted") her inhumane and pretentious pseudo-philosophical spin on libertarianism?
> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.
Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".
But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.
I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same.
The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook.
That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it.
One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion.
There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.
It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name.
There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).
Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.
To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
That's better, but it's still wrong, because there are plenty of organized belief systems whose leaders don't demand blind loyalty. To say that these don't qualify as religions is absurd.
You could say that one of the elements of religion is having faith in something that is not provable via the scientific method and I'd agree. But then you'd lose generals, managers, politicians, etc... from the list above in which case the comment has lost its meaning.
I'd actually go a step further: even science and scientific method require a sort of "faith" that the underlying assumptions (axioms of formal logic and algebra at the very least) are true.
The core difference is that science invites questioning those unprovable assumptions, whereas religion usually does not (and sometimes forbids it as part of the canon).
"Do what we say or lose your income" does require blind faith in the correctness of the hierarchy. The business model and whether or not useful work is being done or if the biological is just shuffling capital around as political rules allow.
It requires ignoring management is just another random person, wielding fiat authority. Physics has not imbued them with special properties. It's allegiance to made up semantics.
> "Do what we say or lose your income" does require blind faith in the correctness of the hierarchy.
That just describes anyone who worked under management. Recognizing that you may be fired for disobeying orders != believing that your manager is physically special.
How do you define blind faith and informed faith? Can't you conceive of someone who follows orders without blindly believing in them?
You seem to have this caricature of an XSXJ in your mind but your definition is so broad it lumps the majority of the world into it, and that's what I'm calling you out on.
This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards.
I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
Forgive me, my bar is high, but I tend to agree with you. I didn’t have a good way to indicate that I find value in a small number of comments like these without potentially undermining my greater desire to avoid toxic comments here.
I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.