1984 Big Brother and Modern Times

George Orwell in 1984 and M.T. Anderson on Feed?

Orwell was better at predicting what our present day world would be like because in all actuality all he was doing was depicting the world as it essentially was in the 1940s when he wrote the novel. He merely exaggerated certain ideas for satirical effect, but as everything has become more exaggerated since Orwell wrote the book his novel comes across as entirely prophetic. M.T. Andersen’s Feed on the other hand is more of a sci-fi dystopian sentimental teen romance: it represents our over-reliance on technology and the possibly coming brain implants that will link everyone to the cloud. It satirizes our corporate culture—but it depicts a rather unconvincing world in which countries that are not the US care such a great deal about environmentalism that they are willing to go to war with the US. This is not really plausible and hardly reflects the state of things today: it is much the rest of the world that takes orders from the US (see the situation in Ukraine today and the sanctioning of Russia); China, which is perhaps one of the worst polluters on the planet, does not care about environmentalism and would certainly never go to war with the US over such an issue. Orwell, on the other hand, steers clear of representing the world in such a trendy way (environmentalism is trendy); he paints instead with a broad brush, focusing on the concepts that best explain our modern totalitarian culture—newspeak, wrongthink, Big Brother, two minute hate campaigns, and so on. Orwell understood well how the totalitarian state does propaganda and how propaganda is used to control the minds and wills of the masses—and when propaganda fails how force is used to ensure submission.

One thing Anderson does get right is how caught up in social media people are today: everyone seems to be more interested in reading and posting content online than in actually engaging with human beings in real life. If you go out in public, people are always looking at their phones. In Anderson’s book, the teens are communicating telepathically all the time, always hooked into their feed so that they hardly understand a thing about themselves or the real world. Anderson uses a lot of unbelievable sci-fi dimensions, however, to make this point: Titus and Violet on the moon represents a silly type of SpaceX delusion that most sci-fi fans like to believe in. Considering that we never have been to the moon and that the stories of our going to the moon is Orwell-level Big Brother deception just proves that Orwell was the better master of depicting our actual reality than Anderson, who just buys into the myths and perpetuates them in his novel. But as Dave McGowan shows, the moon landings are a giant farce of epic proportions brought to us by none other than Big Brother who needed to distract a gullible public from very real problems in the real world (like Vietnam).

Orwell understood how the state puts out false narratives to convince the public that something is happening when really the opposite is happening. It is found in the Ministry’s propaganda campaigns: “War is Peace,” and so on. It is also found in the way that anyone who opposes the narrative is simply disappeared. That happens today with cancel culture to some degree: anyone opposing the COVID narrative on Twitter or YouTube was removed; anyone who has tried to present any type of political or historical content that focuses on issues that might be taken as anti-Semitic are canceled. If one talks about the dancing Israelis of 9/11, one’s video is removed. This is what happens in 1984: “In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared… Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out…” (Orwell 21). Today, one cannot go to the bookstore to get a copy of a book by David Irving. One cannot go the library to get a copy of a book by Leon Degrelle, even though he was a popular political leader in Belgium in 1936; the fact is, Leon fought for the wrong side in WW2 and became persona non grata with the totalitarian world power that won the war.

Orwell also does not give a facile, sentimental ending: a world without faith, that relies on sexual freedom as a form of revolution, is one doomed to failure—and that is why Winston winds up back in Room 101 getting tortured back into professing his love for Big Brother. He does not have anything that can withstand the pain. In the Age of Faith, martyrs had something to believe in and to die for—but in the modern age, there is no such faith and nothing worth dying for; thus, Winston crumbles under the heel of Big Brother as O’Brien brings him back into line.

Anderson on the other hand relies on a sentimental tale to communicate the sad dependency of modern youth on technology and social media. He uses the “everything must go” (Anderson 299) trope to tug at the heart strings. It provokes feelings of loss and sadness, but overall it mainly feels gimmicky and inauthentic. The present day world is less capable of poignancy; Anderson’s novel has a spiritual component to it that is altogether beyond the reach of most young people today. Orwell does not imagine such possibilities for his protagonist; once the sex affair is exposed, Winston is not given any sentimental attachments or feelings—he is simply brought back into re-education camp for an “attitude” adjustment. Orwell’s ending is bleak; Anderson’s is bitter-sweet. The world of today is far too bleak to make Anderson’s bitter-sweet ending feel real or true to life.

Orwell simply shows the shallow human passion for eroticism for what it is: empty if not attached to a higher purpose—like family—or even to God. For Winston in 1984, there is the naïve belief that passion itself is all that is needed to render the Party impotent: “not merely the love for one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces” (Orwell 126). Winston is, of course, proven incorrect. Yet in Anderson’s novel there is the sense that passion is still powerful, that it can be a way to rise up out of the malaise—but passion has to be directed toward something meaningful; a rudderless, Romantic passion won’t be of any significance for long.

Orwell was simply presenting the reality in a bold way—with big bright letters so that everyone could see and understand. That is why his novel comes across as prophetic. People today can look around and see Big Brother embodied by the alliance of states and corporations and schools that all tout the Party line, whatever it is—whether it is that COVID is real or that masks work or that Russia is bad or that terrorism must be stopped or that Jan. 6 was a threat to democracy or that everything must be viewed through the lens of racism and environmentalism. Big Brother is clearly running the show. The thing is, Big Brother was running the show way back then in the 1940s when Orwell wrote his book. He was not predicting anything: he was simply writing with bold strokes to make sure everyone could understand. He was simply pulling the mask off the West and exposing it. The West, after all, had supported Stalin against Germany. The West was just as totalitarian as the USSR. It’s only gotten worse. Thus, it appears that Orwell predicted it all—but it was all plain to see back then. Degrelle, for instance, was under no illusions on the matter.