> 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 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.
Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience—they’re talking about people with access to the facts and choosing not to believe them.
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.
I wonder what Asimov would write if he were to re-do that review now? Now that we actually do have televisions that can hear us as well as show us ads and in which governments of every nominal political stripe are falling over themselves in the rush to buy Palantir's products and to inject monitoring software into every mobile phone and 3D printer.
One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.
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.
I would go so far as to say that the criticisms of broadcast television were completely correct; and that for all the problems of modern centralized social media and other internet use, one major good thing that it has done is kill off broadcast television. It is much easier now than it was for much of the 20th century for random ordinary people who weren't members of established mass media organizations to broadcast their ideas to the world, and try to build an audience that cares about their message. And even though this results in a lot of bad content being made (or just content that is uninteresting to you personally), it also allows a lot of gems to rise to people's attention that never would have under the old mass culture making system.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say.
The commentator mannykannot didn't really comment on the politics other than to agree that 1984 is a criticism of Stalism (which... I don't think anyone would argue with?).
Orwell also wrote "Animal Farm" which is a criticism of Fascism, and Asimov leads with this.
I love Asimov for the same reason I love Orwell, namely clear 1940s-style writing (which I've also seen in Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight), so I find it funny and sad that one is criticizing the other.
>Orwell's mistake lay in thinking there had to be actual war to keep the merry-go-round of the balance of power in being. 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. (This sounds like a very Leftist explanation of war as the result of a conspiracy worked out with great difficulty.)
>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.
The perpetual war is just a framework for Orwell's autocrats needing to direct the anger of the populace away from themselves. We have this today with government propaganda stirring up renewed hatred of brown people to deflect from their ineptitude. Conveniently blowing up in their faces when it turns out to be much easier to hate pedophile protectors.
Asimov was definitely stuck in the moment of 1980, energy insecurity from the oil crisis of the 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.
>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.
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.
And North Korea maintains a system of neighborhood surveillance, mandatory self-criticism sessions, and hereditary social classes which are perhaps closer to “1984” because they are so well established now.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have a lot of respect for Asimov, but he is more than a bit myopic here. He absolutely wants 1984 to be anti-Stalinist and he misses the fact that all dictatorships use the same playbook, and that there is nothing intrinsically Stalinist in the tools and methods used by Ingsoc. Far-right fascist wannabes are doing exactly the same thing right now.
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.
Asimov comes across as jealous of Orwell's unmatched contribution to not only literature but also culture. Asimov never came close to having the same impact, maybe that irked him.
"1984? Yeah, RIGHT, man, that's a typo. Orwell's here now and he's living large. We have no names, man, no names. We are NAMELESS. Can I score a fry?" —Cereal Killer, Hackers, whose words ring even more true today even as we watch tech billionaires attempt to build an all-watchful god in silico
Right before that, he says, "FYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day." Whenever I rewatch that movie, I think 17 is a tiny number compared to today. Probably 17,000+ now.
Indeed. On one of the many occasions I rewatched it with my wife, when it came to that bit I said "17? Those are rookie numbers these days."
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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)
The commentator mannykannot didn't really comment on the politics other than to agree that 1984 is a criticism of Stalism (which... I don't think anyone would argue with?).
Orwell also wrote "Animal Farm" which is a criticism of Fascism, and Asimov leads with this.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.