1984, 1985, and Beyond

Long live Big Brother! But what happens after he dies?

[Continued from last week.]

George Orwell may have imagined the world of Big Brother, but György Dalos actually lived in it. The Hungarian poet was educated in Moscow. In 1968, while the Cultural Revolution was going on in China, he was accused of "Maoist activities." Imprisoned and tortured just like the fictional Winston Smith, he was eventually released but booted out of the Communist Party and kept under police surveillance. I don't know when he first read the novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he must have thought, "This is about ME!"

Dalos is only four years older than I am, so roughly a contemporary. But while I was reading the book and watching the movie, he was growing up under the exact kind of despotic totalitarianism Orwell had depicted. Later, while making a living as a translator and poet, he ventured to write a sequel titled, appropriately enough, 1985 (Pantheon, 1984). This slim volume is a wonderful gloss on history, with resonances reaching back to Orwell's novel and the then-recent Cultural Revolution, and forward to the events that we now know were soon to follow: the unraveling of the Soviet Union and the other States of the Eastern Bloc.

The book pretends to be a compilation of memoirs and official reports of the years following the death of Big Brother and the collapse of Oceania. It begins with the official account of BB's death, in itself a wonderful satire of colorless reportage by committee. The leader is admitted to the hospital for "a temporary indisposition." During treatment first one limb, then another is "temporarily removed." Then one lung is "temporarily removed." His condition goes from Critical to Improved, then to Critical and Unchanged, then Unchanged and Critical. Finally he perishes "as the result of a temporary indisposition." So the condition of the leader becomes symbolic of that of the State, kept alive only through the most extreme measures.

If that's not enough to cheer you up, Oceania then suffers a crippling military defeat which causes it to sue for peace with its rival Eurasia. The collapse of its government soon follows, after an interim struggle for power in which the late BB's wife leads one faction, much the way the wife of Chairman Mao became part of the Gang of Four. By now it is apparent that the author has mimicked the way Orwell reversed the roles of foreign and domestic politics. His description of the corruption and demise of Oceania (the West) is clearly about the immanent fall of the USSR.

One fact that brings this home is the way it is revealed that Eurasia is vastly superior in technology. Their foreign delegation declines the limousines that meet them at the airport and instead levitate their way to the hotel with the aid of some kind of devices in their clothing. Later a multifunction ballpoint pen is found to also serve as a radio. (Commonplace now, this was futuristic in 1980.) By comparison, remember how hard it was for Winston Smith to find razor blades, not to mention food, in Oceania.

This reminded me of a revealing article that was published in the 1980's in a US computer magazine. The author had been to Moscow and had managed to get hold of a Soviet personal computer. At the time this beast was so rare it had seldom been seen in the wild. Not only did it not work very well, but disassembling it revealed a spaghetti mess of hand-wiring inside, evidence of abundant errors and problems with the printed circuit boards. The device was selling for the equivalent of $10,000 if you could even get one. Meanwhile in the US, Apple was designing the first Mac.

Analysis of the Soviet microchips revealed they had been directly copied from Western designs. Engineers had actually opened up the chips, used a photographic enlarger to blow up the circuitry, cleaned it up, and shrunk it back down again for production. They had not even bothered to remove the manufacturer's logo and code numbers. However, due to some distortions introduced by the copying process, they could not be reduced to as small a size as the originals. This led to a gag boast that "Soviet microchips are the largest in the world!"

The really interesting bit was that at the same time China had begun to mass produce very serviceable and inexpensive clones of the IBM PC. In the three-way race for technological supremacy the Chinese were catching up, while Russia was falling farther behind. The writing was on the wall (pun intended) for all to see.

Just as interesting as the politics are the personal stories in 1985. Winston Smith and his lover Julia both emerge as revolutionary figures, and even form a bizarre partnership with O'Brien, the same officer of the Ministry of Love who had overseen Winston's torture. The Chestnut Tree Cafe, frequented by those recently released from brainwashing, becomes the center of revolutionary discussions and partisan debates.

Sadly, Dalos did not dare to imagine the groundswell of popular support that was to buoy Lech Walesa into office in Poland, or that would support Boris Yeltsin against a possible counter-revolution in Russia. But no doubt that was due to his experience of the abortive uprising in his native Hungary in 1956, when they had failed to get the support of the West and were crushed by Soviet tanks.

What's left of Oceania -- now stripped down to the bare essentials of the British Isles -- ends up as a struggling socialist state of which Julia is a prominent minister but from which Winston has been ousted as overly radical. One imagines this was both the hope and the worst fear of the author, that change might come that was not much change at all. Indeed, things have not gone swimmingly in Hungary since the regime change, and conditions in the wake of the global financial meltdown are now critical, as Dalos reported in his recent article, "A Peaceless Democracy."

Needless to say, 1985 could not be published in Hungary back when it was written. It appeared first in German and French translation in 1982, and in English in -- when else? -- 1984. What a year.

Orwell's novel was of course forbidden throughout the Soviet empire, but I know how at least one copy made its way in. I once met a man who had been with US Army Intelligence in Germany during the 1960's. He used to cross into East Berlin sometimes, and once smuggled a German translation of the novel across the border for a friend. 

"Weren't you afraid of being caught?" I asked him. He replied no, because he knew the border guards were mostly green kids conscripted from the farms. All he had to do was to place some West German skin magazines on top of the book in his bag. These, of course, they immediately confiscated. What about the book? "I'm practicing my German," my friend told them. "Oh, that's all right then," they said, their eyes bulging with visions of naked breasts. And so the empire falls.

Back When 1984 Was the Future

"Who controls the present controls the past ... who controls the past controls the future ..."

- George Orwell, 1984

One night back in about 1956 when I was only nine years old, my father roused me from my sleep and invited me to stay up late with him to watch a movie on TV. It was the original film version of 1984, starring Edmund O'Brien as Winston Smith, and Dad knew I wouldn't want to miss it because I was so fond of science fiction. (This is how I got to see things like Destination Moon and The Man From Planet X on our fuzzy gray 17" screen.)

A tale of life under a brutal dictatorship which includes brainwashing and torture might not be the sort of entertainment most parents would inflict on their children. But my dad, who almost certainly had read the book and knew what it was about, trusted me not only to withstand it but to understand it as well. He was introducing me to one of the core myths of our age.

In those days of Cold War hysteria the producers of the film felt obliged to present it as a cautionary tale about what life might be like if the Communists were to take over, just to insure that they couldn't be accused of questioning the authority of our own government. After all, Big Brother ruled over not just England but the rest of "Oceania," which included North and South America. The story implied not only that the USSR might absorb all of continental Europe into "Eurasia," but that the US and its allies would be transformed into a regime just as ugly by the demands of decades of prolonged conflict.

My dad, having recently fought a war against Germany, was more concerned about Fascism taking over -- perhaps in the person of a demagogue like Joseph McCarthy, who was currently raking people over the coals, destroying careers, and driving people to suicide in the halls of Congress. So Dad was attuned to the intentions of author George Orwell, who had clearly imagined the tripartite "balance of terror" that would hold sway over most of the rest of the 20th century.

Orwell's dark vision, in which civilization descends inevitably into a state of permanent war and the enslavement of populations, has haunted us ever since. But for much of my early life 1984 was in the distant future. To a child, 30 years from now might as well be forever, in another lifetime.

As we lived through the real history of those years, events played out both better and worse than Orwell dreamed. On the home front we seemed to still have democracy and freedom, at least in our personal lives. Life was good, food and entertainment were plentiful. Orwell seemed to have got the idea of the "telescreen" completely wrong. Instead of it watching us, we watched it. Instead of citizens having their privacy invaded, the government seemed to be under a public microscope more so than ever before. Television got Kennedy elected, brought the Vietnam War into the living room, called the Nixon administration to justice, and changed history.

But at the same time we lived increasingly under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Orwell failed to include nuclear weaponry in his arsenal, but even in this he may have been accurate. In his view it was never the intention of the superpowers to destroy one another; instead, the rulers of each one used the continual threat of destruction as a tool to maintain power and control over their own populations. And so, even though the bombs never fell on us, they were always hanging over our heads and keeping us in line. With slogans like Better Dead Than Red and My Country, Right or Wrong, the rabid right could defend almost any actions in the name of curbing the spread of Communism.

Still, the closer we came to the fateful year, the more 1984 seemed to be a vision of some other reality than our own, an alternate "what if" universe in which things had worked out differently. It was like a story about how things would be if Germany had gotten the Bomb or the South had won the Civil War.

In 1982, all grown up now, I started making plans to have a 1984 party to commemorate the difference between the prediction and the reality. We would celebrate Ronald Reagan as Big Brother, discuss the politics of Emmanuel Goldstein (the fictional false enemy of the State), and drink Victory Gin.

I was dismayed when some of my friends told me they would come in costume as Alphas, Betas, or Gammas, revealing that they had confused 1984 with Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's variation of a dark future in which humans were "decanted" instead of born and were genetically altered into graded subspecies suitable to their roles in society. On reflection I decided this meant it was time to put the fear of 1984 to rest. People seemed to have forgotten to be afraid, which was the surest sign it had not come to pass. It seemed fitting that it was now Huxley's future that haunted us, because it seemed more like where we were headed, and because, well, it was still in the future.

A new version of 1984 was filmed -- in London and in 1984 -- with John Hurt as Winston Smith. It was very well done, but went largely unnoticed by the public. However, in the same notable year a sequel was published by a citizen of our Eurasian adversary ...

[Next time: 1985 and beyond.]

Long Live Big Brother!

1984 becomes the first unbook, but probably won't be the last ...


What a coincidence -- no sooner was the digital ink dry on my recent blog about the 25th anniversary of 1984 than Orwell's notorious novel made news again by disappearing from Amazon's Kindle readers everywhere. This must mean it's time to reflect once more about the issue of copyright and rights management in the digital era.

Apparently Amazon was notified by the legitimate copyright owners that their digital editions of 1984 and also Animal Farm had been obtained from an illegitimate third party source, so they were obliged to stop distributing them. What makes the story bizarre, and should put consumers on alert, is that Amazon went way beyond what was required of them and decided to use their "Whispernet" back door into all Kindles everywhere to recall (i.e., delete) all the copies that had been downloaded previously.

Customers received refunds, but were not even told that their books were now vanished as if they had never been. They had become "unbooks."

Now, as everyone should remember, Winston Smith, the diligent worker bee of Orwell's imaginary world, toiled away at his desk in the Ministry of Truth carefully excising past references to news that had been revised and people who had been done away with: "unpersons." He did this by pasting brown paper over their pictures in old newspapers, and by redacting the text until it resembled a passage of testimony on the Iran-Contra affair. The operative government slogan was: Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future.

But just when we thought we were safe because things have worked out differently, along comes this new digital technique capable of instantly removing all references to any digital content. The battle is not lost yet, because regardless of Amazon's deletions there are still lots of hard copies of Orwell out in the world, and perhaps some legitimate digital copies as well -- maybe even a fugitive one living on a Kindle somewhere, saved only because it is in some remote area of the planet where Whispernet cannot reach. But the example shows what is possible and should give us cause for concern.

With the immanent demise of the print editions of all newspapers, we will soon get used to the idea that our sole source for information is the digital archives of the Internet. And alas, the memory of online sources is brief and subject to loss and revision. Under a regime with the will to do so (let's pick China as an example), the nerve-nexuses of the Internet can be constricted, spying software can be installed on your computer by law, and what you can and cannot access can become very much a matter of centralized control.

And never mind deleting books or articles -- how about just revising them, perhaps while they are still being read? Remember that election last year where our editor lambasted the other party's candidate? Well, as you can see, you are mistaken, because he was clearly backing the winner from the start. Remember the famous photo of the young man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square? Well, your memory must be playing tricks on you, because you can search all day and you will never again find a copy of that photo.

Our defense against this potential tyranny is still vigilance, as always. The battle of information flow between the top-down central authority model and the bottom-up grass roots model gives hope that there is at least an alternative. But we also need to start choosing our battles while we can still win them. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is still a winnable debate.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has stripped us of some basic rights that we used to take for granted when we bought a book or record. We need to make up our minds to resist. We can do it economically, by boycotting publishers and distributors who engage in practices we don't approve of, or politically, by demanding legislative change, or in courts, where organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up on our behalf. (Check out their take on this issue here.)

One commentator on the irony of this fate befalling 1984 observed that it might have been even more ironic if it had happened to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, about a society that had burned all its books. But there is probably small chance of that happening as long as the publishers need to have something to sell us. Rights management is really about having a way to sell us the same thing multiple times, the way we are expected to pay every time we watch a movie.

I'm much more concerned about the possibility that the next time I read it there will be something funny about the ending of 1984. Winston Smith, bright and shiny after graduating from the rehab program in the basement of The Ministry of Love, joins the Anti-Sex league with his pal Julia. They move into a plush new apartment suitable for Inner Party members and live happily ever after. Winston can't imagine what ever got into him to question things the way he did. But that's all in the past now, where it can be safely ... revised.

Watching the Watchers

25 years after 1984, Orwell's ghost still haunts us  ...


Way back in 1947, with the scars of World War II surrounding him, George Orwell spent one of the final years of his life laboriously retyping the manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the archetypal dystopian fantasy of a world gone wrong. This book was prophetic of so much that it no longer matters if its future is now in our past.

It might have been possible for others to imagine the looming Cold War, but how uncanny was Orwell's vision of a three-way balance of terror maintained between Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia? One of the telling moments is during a Hate Week speech when the orator is interrupted by the delivery of a small piece of note paper, after which his speech continues as before, but with the names of friend and foe reversed. Just plug in the names of America, Russia, and China, then contemplate how Richard Nixon's peace overtures  to Chairman Mao may have tilted the balance of power to put more pressure on the Soviet Union.

Or consider how the wacky linguistics of Newspeak, an attempt to make it impossible to formulate a critical thought against the government, was magnificently surpassed by the Nixon White House with its "inoperative statements" (lies) and deleted expletives. Or the Bush White House with its "extraordinary rendition" (kidnapping) and "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture). At least now both of them are unpersons, which has to be doubleplusgood.

Also fascinating is the role played by the media, especially television, in the nightmare world of 1984. At first glance it would seem as if Orwell got it wrong, because Big Brother used video strictly for propaganda and surveillance--the video screen was two-way and the government used it to keep a watchful eye on the citizenry. In reality, Joe McCarthy was able to use TV in the 1950's to further his Communist witch hunt, but we all know the real propaganda was commercial advertisements that sold us the American Dream of consumerism.

Long before 1984, television as an entertainment medium had grown to a scale that dwarfed the ability of governments to put out press releases. And in America at least, with its tradition of a free press, the media seemed to be doing a much better job of keeping an eye on government excesses. Thus Nixon was brought down first by a newspaper, then by televised hearings. And without the TV coverage, would the public really have cared enough to force the President's abdication?

But the implications of long-range and widespread viewing are still playing out. Over the last ten years online video has put the power to broadcast into the hands of anyone with a cell phone or cheap digital camera, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter have provided the means for rapid dissemination of anything that sparks an interest. This past week in Iran these potent new tools were used by an aroused population to bypass the censorship of its government and organize a demonstration just one note shy of open rebellion.


So, does this mean Orwell had it backwards, and that the watchful eyes of the public will be enough to keep our governments in line? As much as I'd like to think so, there are other possibilities to beware of. First of all, social networks are two-edged swords. You can certainly use them for protests and social change, but just by signing up and identifying our friends we have created a perfect database that could be abused in order to shut that protest down. It is far too easy to imagine a national emergency that provoked enough fear that the government could demand access to such information in order to round up "conspirators" and all their associates.

Consider how the Iranians turned those networks into weapons to attack government websites. Any doubt how our own government might react to an attack like that? Under the Patriot Act, which still holds sway over the Land of the Free, all you have to do is raise the specter of terrorism and any defensive measure becomes permissible.

And if you think we are not being watched, think again. Miniaturization and falling costs are making it possible to put cameras anywhere and record anything. Cameras are capturing the license numbers of cars committing traffic violations. Banks, airports, stores, warehouses, workplaces, even public streets are under constant surveillance in the name of public safety. Soon the military will be employing miniature robots the size of flying insects with the ability to see and hear, to literally be a "fly on the wall."

It remains to be seen which way the balance will tip, and if our watching the watchers as they watch us will be enough to keep them under control.

Several film versions of Orwell's 1984 have been made -- most recently in the famous year itself, in the real London, or at least part of it that was scuzzy enough to stand in for the one in the book. John Hurt played Winston Smith, with a benignly malevolent Richard Burton as his government tormentor. Interesting casting. You could easily imagine them with the roles reversed, the way Burton and Peter O'Toole were known to switch parts when they were playing Becket on Broadway. Music was nominally by the Eurythmics, but someone forgot to tell anyone to use their work in the film (except the closing credits), so if you want to hear it you need to get their album of the same name.

My favorite, though, is the 1956 version starring Edmond O'Brien. (It's not on Netflix, but you can buy it from Amazon and other vendors.) The stark noir character of the black-and-white, along with the fevered background of Cold War nuclear hysteria, makes you feel you are really there in that alternate reality. Long Live Big Brother!