Diamond hands

 How do we present a 1984 society from developing in the modern day? I don't think that there is a way to stop it short of bombing ourselves back to the stone age. With the technology we have today and in the near future it is becoming more and more trivial to track the every movement of every person on earth. We already see a social credit system in place in China, where they are using facial recognition to doc the social credit of people seen littering. In my mind, there is no doubt that every major government is doing the same level of tracking of their own citizens, they just haven't given people a score yet. People simply don't value their privacy very much at all. When Google automatically recognizes the people in your photos and labels them we think "cool" and not "creepy". People gladly put trackers in their car to save money on car insurance. As a society we don't value privacy nearly as much as convenience and so we will keep building an ev...

 In the end all Winston ended up doing was wasting everyone's time. He ends up roughly where he was at the start of the book, but no longer has any doubts about big brother. He used to live in constant fear of big brother, but now when he sees big brother he feels happy and safe. I think that this ending is actually a happy ending. Winston defeats his fear of big brother by learning to love big brother. He ends the book with a better living situation than he had at the beginning. As a member of the party he is living a better life than pretty much everyone else in the country. I don't think that Orwell intends this ending as a happy ending, but speaking objectively, Winston has moved up in the world from the start to the end of the book. Orwell suggests that because Winston has lost his free will, his life has lost value and therefore he is worse off by the end of the book. I don't think that this is the case. Would you rather live as Winston on the first page or on the las...

 Winston caving to continued torture didn't surprise me even a little. He has been such a pathetic character the whole book its pretty fitting that he gives up the last of his dignity rather than face a little more torture. I think if Winston was a little smarter he would have dismissed any thoughts of rebellion right at the start of the book and lived a normal life loving big brother like everyone else did. If he was a little dumber he wouldn't of had any second thoughts about big brother and would have lived happily in his ignorance. The thought police that we see from Winston's seem like they were designed to target the not too smart and not too dumb demographic that Winston falls into. They leave obvious traps like O'Brien so gullible dissenters take the bait. The Two Minutes Hate is perfect for catching people incapable of hiding their true feelings. The room that Winston rents suspiciously has no telescreen, but Winston doesn't even think to check for hidden t...

To anyone with critical thinking ability, it was pretty obvious that Winston was going to get caught. Winston himself knows that he had no chance of succeeding, any yet he he held out hope that the brotherhood was real and that O'Brien was going to come and save him until the last moment. I think it is just part of human nature to believe that the most outlandishly perfect version of events will occur until it becomes thoroughly clear that it will not. Recently, I've been watching an internet investing forum called Wall Street Bets. They have been in the news for driving interest in Gamestop, driving its stock price from a $4 to a high of $470. This was a major success akin to Winston having sex in the woods with Julia. With this success, members of the forum were putting their life savings into bets that Gamestop would hit $1000 or more. Even after Gamestop fell back down to $50, people were still confident that another miraculous squeeze would happen and they would be able to...

Rewriting history and faking statistics to make it look like the party hit its production targets is Winston's job in 1984, and it occurred to me that a lot of people do that job in our world too. Usually its hedge funds and banks instead of the government. Bernie Madoff ran an enormous hedge fund from 1960 to its collapse in 2008, every year producing amazing returns for his clients. With over 50 billion invested it appeared that he had found an amazing investment strategy, while in reality it was a ponzi scheme of massive proportions. His fund reported imaginary profits, like Winston recorded imaginary production of shoes, until he eventually ran out of cash in 2008. More recently Well's Fargo was caught opening several accounts per customer to pad their internal numbers. Cooking the books at a massive scale happens daily at every major financial firm. If a company was faking records to the scale that happens in 1984, do you think it would stay in the news for more than a day...

I thought that the part in chapter 9 where the party switches from fighting Eurasia to fighting Oceana and people blame the confusion on Emmanual Goldstein's agents was relevant to modern politics. On January 6th, fringe right wing talking heads were quick to call out Antifa for staging the capitol riots to make them look bad. Blaming an ill defined enemy for all your groups problems is a common tactic in politics. During WW2 Hitler blamed the Jews living in Germany and FDR blamed the Japanese living in the US. In the 50s it was the communists. Today right wingers like to blame Antifa and the deep state. I think this kind of political tribalism is what Orwell is referring to with the agents of Emmanual Goldstein. What other political scapegoats do you see today or remember from history.