Can I be manipulated?
reviewing a 70 year old book that predicted the dystopian NOW!
1984 by George Orwell, caught my attention due to the July 2009 event, when Amazon inaptly removed it from the library of thousands of Kindle users without informing the readers. The book, that gave English language words like newspeak. Big Brother, doublethink and so on, vanished just like it has been thrown into the memory hole. While I was reading 1984, I also happened to watch the documentary “The Great Hack”, which is about the blue social networking giant and issues linked to Cambridge Analytica. The film elucidates on how the company used user data for psychological profiling that leads to behavior change or decision-making during last US, Brexit and many elections around the world including India (from where I come). Adding to these thoughts with couple of interviews by Richard Stallman and Edward Snowden on the amount of freedom we have as a user in this digital era, I feel we are in the Orwellian days. This gave me the inspiration to write the review of 1984 relating it to the dystopian era we are presently living, maybe that inspires even more people to read it.
The Book is a search for Brotherhood, the only possible rebellion against the totalitarian regime of Big Brother in Oceania by a party member Winston Smith. The reason for this quest is a personal journey to find his own individuality questioning his reality to the fabricated party reality. The Party is an oligarchy that rules Oceania, with its motto — War is Peace | Freedom is Slavery | Ignorance is Strength. Here everybody inside the Party is watched continuously and those seldom watched are the proles, who are believed to have nothing but less will to revolt against the Party, even when they are the majority. The telescreens and microphones are hidden everywhere, and nobody can ever do or think anything without the Big Brother watching it. Big Brother is omnipotent, the Party changes the history to make every decision ever made by the Big Brother to be the right one. The protagonist, Winston begins his subtle rebellion, by keeping a diary for his secret thoughts or thoughtcrime, when the Thought Police only approved the usage of speakwrite. On his journey to find Goldstein, the leader of Brotherhood, Winston falls in love with Julie. They both discusses the possibilities of overpowering the Party and reestablishing freedom and justice to their world. This leads them to O’Brien, who is an inner party member but is also part of the Brotherhood. The second part of the Book, after Winston gets caught by the Though Police, O’Brien schools him on how the party works and how it’s not a dictator rule or how far it is from socialism, which the party claims its roots are from. As days go Winston fights his own reality to the one O’Brien narrates to him through severe pain and isolation.
2019 is not so far from the dystopian world of 1984, where there are eyes and ears to all actions, a true privacy is far from achieving and the countries are being ruled by extreme right-wing oligarchies or parties. State now possess these digital arms that extends to every single citizen’s freedom and thoughts. These data we share across the monopolies could not just know out past actions but could predict our future thoughts or move. Our thoughts, our future and our lives are no longer in our hands to protect, we are in the never-ending war of inequalities where we gave our freedom away for convenience and our ignorance led to this surreal dystopia. The question remains from the film (The Great Hack), Can I be manipulated? and 1984 doesn’t end well answering this question.
