1984 by George Orwell | Hacker News Reader

1984 by George Orwell

george-orwell.org

24 pointssova7 comments

Open articleView on HN

PDF of the novel: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/1984.pdf

Epub, Mobi: https://www.planetebook.com/1984/

Audiobook: https://archive.org/details/George-Orwell-1984-Audio-book

1984 is a great book, but I wish more who invoke it had read it or understood it.

What's disturbing is that the dystopian vision is slowly oozing our way from the bottom up, not so much the top down.

Same. And I only see it referenced to talk about mass surveillance, while at least to me, it wasn't even the most frightening part of the novel. The erasure of History, the formation of Newspeak, or the indoctrination of children were way more terrifying.

Even if you don't want to read the book, the Wikipedia articles on it and its concepts are fantastic reads:

Main article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

Themes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Themes

------

More links to articles on concepts from the book:

Big Brother: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(Nineteen_Eighty-F...

Doublethink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink

Thought Crime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

Newspeak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

Telescreen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen

(Several more linked in the main article)

------

It's easy to draw parallels between the concepts of the novel and the state of the world today, and technology plays a huge part. It's incredible. And frightening.

For instance, you can, to an extent, equate IoT and smart home devices with Telescreens. It's not hard to get access to these, and suddenly, you have a window into the most intimate parts of someone's life. Keep in mind, none of this is regulated.

In many lesser developed countries, people are persecuted/prosecuted for their beliefs and opinions: Thoughtcrime.

The Chinese government is essentially Big Brother, what with constant surveillance, authoritarianism, complete lack of privacy and people being given "social scores" by computers that analyse their actions, and these scores deciding what they are and aren't allowed to do.

Newspeak: Seen in many, many nations, but for example, concentration camps being called "re-education camps" in China. Here's a list of real-life examples: http://mattjennissen1.weebly.com/uploads/7/1/0/7/7107262/rea...

And so on...

Telescreen == Alexa?

na, there are memory holes and all sorts of things that have no real-world analog...yet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com