> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts, and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.
Trump states obvious lies so blatant ("prices will go down 200%") that anyone who cares could tell they are untruth without needing to look up any paper trail, but it does not matter.
Mike Johnson just quoted St Paul as saying you should respect the authority forgetting that the Romans beheaded him. And it's not like the Bible isn't available widely.
For instance, Alex Pretti’s murder was recorded from several angles and yet the American right still broadly claims that he attacked the agents, that he pulled his gun on them, etc. You don’t need to be an expert in policing or anything else to watch those videos and see that those narratives are plainly false. That’s of course only one example, but there are many others.
The human nature bit is that we are inclined to follow conviction: belief in an idea. And if someone says something with conviction, whether true or not, our first instinct is to believe them, maybe even trust them.
I know HN is USA centric, but bugger me! I didn't expect to see such a narrow viewing of the world stage in the voting on here.
EDIT: And I'm getting drive-by downvotes for pointing this out! Nice.
The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.
"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.
I feel like people forget that so much of what they blame on social media now existed with television. Propaganda, misinformation, addiction, emotional manipulation, mind rot, overstimulation, excessive advertising, even moral panics blaming it for violence and deviant behavior.
Television didn't create self-reinforcing bubbles of hyperreality because it represented a corporate model of reality applied to an entire culture. It could only do so much being a one-way means of communication, but bear in mind all most people do with social media now is consume. The more social media becomes like television, the worse it becomes.
Asimov was mistaken here. The East German Stasi did implement a system in which many, many people (not literally everyone, but a staggering percentage) reported on each other.
When it collapsed, East Germany was still led by the same people who had created it. The Berlin Wall only existed for 28 years. North Korea is a multi-generational prison.
It spanned more than 40 years, and was absolutely multi-generational.
Excellent point. Something that refutes another of Asimov's critiques in his review, that tyrannies inevitably end through tyrants' deaths, or at least become milder in their oppression. Admittedly he wrote the review in 1980, back when a) the first Kim was still in power and b) no one in the West saw North Korea as anything other than an "ordinary" Communist state—no awareness of Juche, etc.—but still.
China begs to differ.
Isaac Asimov's Review of “1984” (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390752 - March 2021 (6 comments)
Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164679 - Oct 2018 (8 comments)
> Then, too, Orwell had the technophobic fixation that every technological advance is a slide downhill. Thus, when his hero writes, he 'fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. He does so 'because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil'.
> Presumably, the 'ink-pencil' is the ball-point pen that was coming into use at the time that 1984 was being written. This means that Orwell describes something as being written' with a real nib but being 'scratched' with a ball-point. This is, however, precisely the reverse of the truth. If you are old enough to remember steel pens, you will remember that they scratched fearsomely, and you know ball-points don't.
> This is not science fiction, but a distorted nostalgia for a past that never was. I am surprised that Orwell stopped with the steel pen and that he didn't have Winston writing with a neat goose quill.
This is funny for me. The most common type of criticize for Asimov's work is that people complain Asimov did not add enough women in his book. The world is changing so quickly.
>In actual fact, the decades since 1945 have been remarkably war-free as compared with the decades before it. There have been local wars in profusion, but no general war. But then, war is not required as a desperate device to consume the world's resources. That can be done by such other devices as endless increase in population and in energy use, neither of which Orwell considers.
...
>He did not foresee the role of oil or its declining availability or its increasing price, or the escalating power of those nations who control it. I don't recall his mentioning the word 'oil'.
I feel like Asimov completely misses the point here. The fact that we didn't have the kind of "general war" Orwell wrote about doesn't mean this isn't meaningful or relevant, it just means we didn't do that then. Jump forward a few decades and it's not hard to imagine e.g. the Bush years of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan rhyming with Orwell a bit.
And, perhaps it's inevitable given this is from 1980, but Asimov is stuck in the overpopulation-as-demon narrative and peak-oil stuff. Neither of those have lasted the test of time.
We are now transitioning away from oil, world wide, and energy scarcity is more about preventing regulatory structures from getting in the way of new wind, solar, and battery resources.
Overpopulation was also a bugaboo of the time, but I thought that was mostly a leftist problem.
[1]: https://shipwrecklibrary.com/the-modern-word/pynchon/sl-essa...
The one thing Asimov gives Orwell credit for is predicting that there would be three separate great powers? Like, what? The other nations don't matter at all. We're not even sure they really exist or not. Or how he complains that Orwell used a missile strike, instead of calling it what, a 2X00 Plasma Fueled Missile Strike? It's not about the missile strike. It's about the fear the missile strike incites into people. People afraid are easy to control.
Or about how the warring nations didn't use nukes. Like, there's no way Asimov didn't understand that it was probably not even the other nations that were responsible, but rather the party itself, right? But that's what it sounds like. It reminds me of how in the Foundation series, one of the characters has an "atomic" wristwatch. Like, you can tell that Asimov thought that would be possible in the future and would be cool, and just had to include it. But really, who cares. As if cool gadgets or what people might use in the future is what makes or breaks science fiction. Not to mention how outdated an atomic watch feels now.
Asimov had great ideas, but his actual writing ability doesn't hold a candle to George Orwell's. Orwell was a true literary master. Asimov was a very creative scientist, with a lot of ideas in his head, and he successfully put them to paper.
> He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Asimov refuses to concede that Orwell beat him at his game. The book is not about predicting future gadgets but societal patterns and operating models.
This is such a core misunderstanding that Asimov seems to have, and it kind of kills his entire analysis for me.
The assumption is that only some small fraction of a fraction of the people who could be surveilled at any time are being surveilled.
The crux of the thing is that everyone COULD be under surveillance at any time, so in effect everyone must behave as if they are being observed because they do not know they are not.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Remarkable that Asimov could overlook this.
I have respect for both authors, but for sure I’d rather have a drink and share a sausage with Orwell at a party than wall-flower with the collective absorbing Asimovs rants didactic. Pretty sure the gin’d be cheap anyway.
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical.
Ok for that last sentence guess we'll have to check if what was true in 1980 still is in 2020's.
Many jobs ago one of my colleagues was Steve Summit, perhaps best known as the comp.lang.c FAQ maintainer. One Friday afternoon, the rest of us except for Steve met up at our usual haunt for lunch and beer. Orders were placed and served, and the table's discussion turned to DRM and the benefits and drawbacks thereof. Half an hour into lunch, in the midst of this conversation, Steve burst in, sat down, and immediately joined in with "The problem with DRM is one of ownership. Any system with DRM is no longer under your total control, therefore you don't own it. You've ceded control, therefore ownership, to some company somewhere."
Then he paused, pointed to another coworker's plate of half-finished fries and said "Are you gonna eat those?"
You couldn't have gotten a better recreation of that Cereal Killer routine if you had scripted it as an homage. But Steve had never seen Hackers; that's just who he was/is as a person.
I think he had enough of it to foresee it for any authoritarian regime. You can find examples of what he describes today.
"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."
Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.
Amusingly, when he writes
> Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned.
I wonder what he’d think of the Stasi, which had a network of informants that was pretty much this. It also happened in other cases, a famous example being also occupied France during WWII.
Also, when he wrote
> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance.
Orwell does not describe how surveillance is done. He actually mentions that just the risk to be caught because you don’t know when someone is looking was chilling. I’m not sure that would be enough to force compliance in our societies, but in the book it does (along with the police and all the repressive tools the party has), and in East Germany it also largely succeeded.
And, finally:
> George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future. He did not have the science fictional knack of foreseeing a plausible future and, in actual fact, in almost all cases, the world of 1984 bears no relation to the real world of the 1980s.
Science fiction does not forecast. FFS. Even him surely could not believe that his robots were something that will happen. This branch of science fiction is about taking an idea and pushing it to see what could happen. Here the idea is an absolute totalitarian government with just enough technology to be dangerous. It is disappointing to see Asimov, who defended sci-fi as a genre that was seen as not literary enough, looking down on 1984 for not being sciencey enough.
>In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.
Based on this quote and others, it seems Asimov didn't believe that Orwell intended the novel as science fiction, although others categorize it that way. I would say he's attacking the interpretation of it as science fiction, but it veers into an attack on Orwell, which is unfortunate.
You write
>Science fiction does not _forecast_.
Not to be overly pedantic but to be fair to Asimov, he didn't exactly say science fiction _necessarily_ does that, but rather it's a knack related to science fiction.
Sound familiar?
... but the latter may greatly benefit from the former
And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.
Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ? "Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."
" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "
Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
>In fact, in one of the more laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower classes in being.
I don't know what everyone else on this page is talking about, really, or why. I don't even know if they're real. Maybe I'm the weirdo, freaking out because a sci-fi giant presented a skewed version of reality.
But there have been enough people in history who've created touchstone works of art intended to last through the ages to say 'this is what it looks like when ordinary people are hypnotised into bloodlust', and I'm not convinced I'd recognise any further signs in time to get off.
I really, really don't want to get off the world wide web. My life is on it, now. But it's a web, and we must remember that webs were not built for the endless entertainment of the flies who explore it.
Think where you have seen that before, heard of it. Think what book is famous for tiny wrongnesses sprinkled here and there to create a world of doublespeak and wrongthink.
THINK what the article is about, and why. What the book is about and why it was written - what you know, not what you are being told. It really is that easy to deceive thinking people, if you slip the relevant details carefully into well written texts about apparently irrelevant sources.
The first sentence of 1984 is 'it was a bright, cold day in April, when the clock struck thirteen'. The first line of that book is the most famous example of 'ok cool that's just setting the scene, onto the next... Hang on hang on, is that right? That feels off, but it's too small a detail to analyse why. I can't sanity check every innocuous sentence. It's Orwell, a serious writer, not sci-fi. My spider senses are overreacting...'
And then think why that might be relevant today. Anybody who has read the article and commented here as if the article is straight fact, this is your wake up call.
This is how it will feel to be propoganidised into reading blatant fiction as fact, skipping past all the red flags in the text and honestly not even seeing them. This is how it will feel to read an article that hinges on the premise that 2 + 2 = 5, and agree unquestioningly, because your fact-checking mind has been slowly, subtly exhausted by countless red herring tangents.
The article has some absolutely wild, insane takes like >"To be sure, the Nazis organised mass meetings of delirium [anti-Semitism] that every participant seemed to enjoy, but it had no permanent effect. Once the war moved on to German soil, the Germans surrendered as meekly as though they had never Sieg-Heiled in their lives"
That is quite literally absolutely contradicted by EVERY reasonable interpretation of history. Not even the most fervent Hitler apologists seriously claimed that anti-Semitism was a fleeting, minor flash in the pan or that Germany surrendered at the first hint of pushback. But people here appear to have taken the statement as fact, or at least, not important enough to question the honest veracity of the rest of the article. How many of you are going to go the rest of your lives with the impression that Orwell was, in fact, an elitist snob who hated the proles, because you read it somewhere (this article) and it just kinda embedded itself in your mind, not important enough to challenge? How many other things do you think or feel, because of ideas planted there even more subtly, more deliberately and pervasively, than a bloody opinion piece on the book about "The Party [convincing] you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command", linked on a site about hacking, with a title that should make any literate westerner begin with a strong sense of 'well something ain't right'?!
And you know what, it still works. The trick, the little lies mixed with the absurd ones, they still confuse you. By the time I'd clicked on the article, I'd forgotten about the 'Isaac Asimov' part enough to believe the rest. I started writing the comment below until it occurred to me that, of all the books to be reviewed with a glaring sense of wrongness and weirdness, 1984 seemed a little too on-the-nose to be accidental. Halfway through writing, I went back and looked more at the article, read about the Nazis being benign and anti-Semitism a momentary lapse of reason, read about Orwell fighting in the Spanish civil war yet unfit to fight in WWII (presented with no further explanation), and a bunch of things that didn't add up.
Then I looked at the rest of the comments on this page, with the sinking feeling that we as a society are failing an open-book test. If we lose, it's war, all over again. The answers are all right there in front of us. In this case, there's an entire book on DO NOT BELIEVE THE SHADOWY AUTHORITIES CHANNELLING YOUR HATRED TO CONVINCE YOU THAT 2+2=5, the book has been opened and put on the table right in front of us, the title and author practically circled in red ink... ... And yet, the first thing I spotted was how silly Americans are. And everyone else appears to be lost in the debate of why we must always be vigilant to the threat of our eternal enemies, Eastasia.
My comment, abandoned when the brain ticking got a bit too loud to ignore
> However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full.
Honestly, this line broke the immersion I didn't realise we need to enjoy non fiction biographical / analytical articles as much as fiction. It was like a scrolling ticker in red letters saying 'this is based on an American cultural transposition of a true story'.
The writing was good, informative, bite-sized without seeming shallow, but after that line it was like ... like reading a well balanced article from a trusted source on a non-controversial topic like the history of coffee, that casually mentions a region in Africa that would later be the birthplace of the US president Obama or something. Not really relevant to the rest of the article, not impossible to understand why an author could make that error. But such a jarring divergence from your culture's values and truths that your brain is slapped into the wobbly existentialism of remembering that 'truth' and 'facts' are entirely subjective and dependent not on honesty or intelligence so much as who is around you and how you were brought up.
Which is pretty unnerving when reading Kafka or deep philosophy (or the news, nowadays), and really not what I was prepared for in the middle of a benign article about a the famous author book I know very well, somehow via a technology forum, which I had only clicked on to see why said famous author had morphed from Eric Blair, to his chosen nom de plume George Orwell, to Isaac Asimov.
Then, when I realised
