Winston Smith “set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.” This is nothing compared to the expression of smug and idiotic blowhard certainty that it is advisable to wear when facing the cameras on MSNBC or Fox.
Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite history. He obeys the party slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Some LeftRight Party members tear down monuments to Civil War soldiers who died bravely having no idea they were wrong, while other LeftRight Party members dress in red baseball caps that declare they’ll make America what it always has been.
In 1984 a language, Newspeak, has been invented to replace English. The purpose of Newspeak is “to limit the range of thought” by removing all previous mental associations and nuances of meaning from the vocabulary. The people of Oceania will be forced to use this language. Members of the LeftRight Party have been much more creative. They’ve invented not one but several languages that limit the range of thought. And they have gotten people to speak those languages without using force. Thus no one is crippled or blind or deaf anymore, much less a moron. They are all “differently abled.” And no one even tries to discover the truth because the “lamestream media” is full of “fake news.”
Orwell has a party member say, “Orthodoxy means not thinking.” Members of our conjoined twin LeftRight Party aren’t thinking twice as much.
“The heresy of heresies was common sense,” thinks Winston Smith. With double the heresies we have half as much sense.
In 1984 the party teaches that “Sexual intercourse is to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema.” But now we’ve got both #MeToo and chastity education in the public school curriculum.
Orwell described life in the year 1984 as “decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage.” A fair description of antifa locales in Portland, Oregon, or hip, artisanal Brooklyn. On the other hand, it’s also not too different than the rust belts and trailer parks from which the alt-right pours forth.
“We make the laws of nature,” the Inner Party interrogator and torturer O’Brien tells Winston. That sounds to me like both sides of the LeftRight climate change debate.
Likewise we have doubled our Thought Police forces, with one squadron apprehending visiting lecturers who fail to address college students in Newspeak and another squad circulating among Republicans in the House of Representatives arresting any notion that they can be reelected without Trumpthink.
But what is the goal, what is the objective of the LeftRight Party? Why do they oppress and overpower us? (Or, rather, why do they trick us into oppressing and overpowering ourselves?)
Orwell goes straight to the point. O’Brien tells Winston, “Power is not a means; it is an end . . . The object of power is power.”
What the LeftRight Party wants is power. And what will the LeftRight Party do to us with its power?
Again, Orwell is clear. O’Brien asks:
“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?”
Winston thought. “By making him suffer,” he said.
“Exactly. By making him suffer. Unless he is suffering, how can you know that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is inflicting pain and humiliation.”
And thus Orwell neatly summarizes our choice in the current presidential election. Will you vote for pain? Or for humiliation?
Whose Bright Idea Was It to Make Sure That Every Idiot in the World Was in Touch with Every Other Idiot?
Social media comes in for a lot of other criticism as well. The big corporations that operate social media platforms have the ethics of opioid addicts with jobs as Oxycontin pharmaceutical sales reps.
User privacy is equivalent to getting a prostate exam in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve while you and your urologist ride the ball drop.
Social media turns us into easy victims of fraud and financial manipulation. (Darn it, of all the Nigerian government officials, I spam blocked the one who actually had $100 million that needed to be wired to my bank account.)
Social media is giving young people a bad case of “phone face” with a big, permanent Samsung Galaxy Note 9 pimple between their eyes. And it makes our kids into victims of bullies or perpetrators of bullying—depending on whether our kids are dorks or jerks, and in my experience every kid is both.
Social media polarizes our politics by allowing us all—no matter how wrong we are about a political issue—to find a large, enthusiastic group of people who are even wronger.
But those are the small problems with social media. There’s a bigger problem. Consider just the top six Internet social networks.
Facebook—2.3 billion users
YouTube—1.9 billion users
WhatsApp—1.5 billion users
Facebook Messenger—1.3 billion users
WeChat—1 billion users
Instagram—another billion users
Plus there are at least sixteen other social networks with more than 100 million users each. Do the math. No, don’t. Stop the math! Quit adding. With just the top six we’ve already reached a tally of 9 billion social media accounts. And there are only 7.5 billion people on the planet earth.
We’ve run out of things to talk about—1.5 billion social media posts ago.
The first broadly functional social media network, SixDegrees, wasn’t introduced until 1997. At the height of its popularity it had 3.5 million subscribers. But since then we’ve created a world where we can hear what everybody’s got to say.
Nobody’s got that much to say.
Social media is CB radio. “Breaker, breaker.” “You copy?” “I’m wall to wall and treetop tall.” “What’s your handle, good buddy?” Except it lacks the intellectual depth. “And that’s a big 10-4.”
We’re just blithering. The brilliant media theory philosopher Marshall McLuhan said in 1964, “The medium is the message.” (Or,
