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1984 is very unrealistic. I personally found it boring. People should study what happened in the Easter European countries from the Warsaw Pact, like Romania.

1984 is very unrealistic. I personally found it boring. People should study what happened in the Easter European countries from the Warsaw Pact, like Romania. The interesting thing about our former communists and their security apparatus was that they did not need high tech gadgets, video cameras or online social networks to keep tabs on everybody, you simply need an army an informers. And in a society where people want to be more equal than others, you'll find plenty of people that want to be informers, on every street, in any apartment building, in any group, people that will betray their friends and colleagues for free. Plenty of unrealistic things in the 1984 novel actually. "Newspeak" for example doesn't need to happen because of a government mandate to ban words. Oh no, there's no need for that. Language simply gets stupid over time, as the public discourse simply becomes "wooden language", from the French "langue de bois", as a natural consequence of having uneducated people in charge yielding unlimited power and controlling the media. The threat is actually not Facebook or Google, but rather the people, which are guilty of normalizing behavior that should not be normalized ;-)

adrian_b 9y ago
I agree with these observations. Unfortunately the people who lived all their lives in North America and Western Europe are very naive about what the communist societies really were and they are not aware that during the last 25 years their countries have evolved continuously, becoming every year more and more similar to the former communist countries. This refers not only to surveillance, censorship and loss of rights, but also to the creation of quasi-monopolies in almost every domain. Most people seem not to realize that communism was not different from capitalism, but it was the worst form of capitalism, where everything was done by a monopoly.

adrian_b 9y ago

I agree with these observations. Unfortunately the people who lived all their lives in North America and Western Europe are very naive about what the communist societies really were and they are not aware that during the last 25 years their countries have evolved continuously, becoming every year more and more similar to the former communist countries. This refers not only to surveillance, censorship and loss of rights, but also to the creation of quasi-monopolies in almost every domain. Most people seem not to realize that communism was not different from capitalism, but it was the worst form of capitalism, where everything was done by a monopoly.