1984 was just boring and lifeless rant where nothing happens, and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient. Orwell couldn't imagine women as anything but brainless sex objects or proles as anything but subhuman animals and he thought ballpoint pens were worse than actual scratching steel nibs. The guy was a technophobic elitist with zero forward vision who projected his personal grudge onto the future and millions of people treat his little hissy fit like prophecy. It's frankly incredible that his shallow writing became a cultural icon in the west.
It’s precisely BECAUSE it’s a fairly shallow “bad government bad” story that it’s such a cultural icon everywhere. People like easy-to-digest things that they can point at and feel smarter.
His work house experiences informed 1984. The original poster in this comment thread is just trolling beyond belief, and also, seems to have no grasp of the topics at hand what so ever.
Also, Orwell was shot in the neck in Spain while literally fighting fascists.
Still, thank you for the link to Asimov’s review. I’ll read it later.
It's totally idiotic the state we have reached, with an absolutely equal number of stupid people on the left and the right.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.
1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers
1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.
I think our current world proves that being watched by humans hits people in a way that being monitored by computers doesn't. You can see countless examples online of people freaking out at a human engaging in public photography because they filmed them or snapped a picture. Often they do it while standing directly under surveillance cameras. It doesn't matter to people if their ring camera is using facial recognition and logging everything within its field of view and secretly forwarding that data to law enforcement agencies, but try standing on the sidewalk in front of their house and recording everyone who comes and goes and see how they react.
jruohonen•1h ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737387