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...