4 ms·

this is tangentially related, but i've always loved reading this critique of orwell & 1984 by asimov: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.neww

by j3s 4y ago

this is tangentially related, but i've always loved reading this critique of orwell & 1984 by asimov: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm i've always thought it a valid critique, and it makes me think less of orwell's writings

axxto 4y ago
Thank you for posting this. I really enjoyed it.
pyuser583 4y ago
Asimov spends criticizes how Orwell got future technology wrong. But I wonder how the technology “1984” corresponds to the technology in Eastern Block countries circa 1984. HBOs Chernobyl is praised for its accuracy of Soviet life in the 1980d, and it looks a lot like what Orwell describes in 1984. And some of Asimov descriptions of 1980s tech were fads: > His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors. I’ve purchased two sets of shoelaces and 20 sets of razor blades (in bulk) this year.
- mbg721 4y ago
  1984 didn't have the concept of outsourced manufacturing. (For that matter, I guess the Soviet view of the world didn't either.)
CSMastermind 4y ago
I read it just now and I think Asimov is being far too hard on Orwell in that review. > The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression. > One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched. Except as I sit here and write this now with tape over my webcam "television set is two-way" hardly seems like an idea worthy of derision. Nor does the idea of government mass surveillance seem laughably impractical. Of course, we have computers now that make this type of mass surveillance possible, Isacc couldn't conceive of the advances in computer and ML that have unlocked these terrifying government capacities. In this way it was Asimov not Orwell lacking imagination. And he takes George to task for not mentioning computers: > Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical. Oh the irony. As for the rest of the review he dresses down Orwell for not envisioning the rise of new drugs (vices) or the liberated role of women in society. These are only flaws if you assume Orwell's goal was to accurately predict the future. Personally I don't. I wouldn't criticize Animal Farm for not having the most accurate of farm equipment in its depiction and I don't read 1984, especially now, to get a sense of what the world will actually be like in 1984. It's a silly and unfair framing of the objective. I read both Animal Farm and 1984 as allegorical retellings of historical events which separated from the specific details of those events allow us to see general patterns and apply them to our own societies. Animal Farm isn't less of a book because Stalin was not literally a pig and 1984 is not less of a book because gin wasn't the primary vice of the youth in the literal year 1984. To dismiss the book for saying so is to miss the point completely.
bliteben 4y ago
this is great, but I smirked at this line >Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical. Which is very not true as punch cards (hollerith machines) were very important to the Nazis, and the second part is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps no relationship actually exists there.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Yeah, that's clearly wrong. The Nazis were about as far away from Luddites as you can get. The whole point of the post-WWII recoil at the horror of Nazi-ism was the realization that a culturally-advanced high-tech progressive society was capable of using all of that advancement as a lever to do the same barbaric and horrible things humans had done before, only much more efficiently.
  - bliteben 4y ago
    much better put
schuyler2d 4y ago
I enjoyed reading Asimov's review, but I'm surprised that it makes you think less of Orwell rather than understand that they're two polar points in perspectives on writing. I don't think I've read a character in Asimov that had more than 1 or 2 deviant terms in an otherwise averaged society utility function -- and he's far more interested in what the future 'looks like' While Orwell engages (similar to Dostoyevsky, et al) the psychological aspects that deviate from an Enlightenment world-view/vision. It's even more hilarious to read > The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. > This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. It sure is inefficient! -- all of our web-browsing and Internet connections would be so much faster and efficient if 80-90% of it wasn't spying on us -- but that hasn't stopped the big tech companies, nor did it stop the Soviet Union, the Nazis, or J Edgar Hoover. And I don't think those things in Heaven and Earth, Asimov dreamt of in his philosophy.
robocat 4y ago
Wow - awesome! Asimov’s review reads like every engineer’s nit-picking arguments (including my own!). In this case they are almost all strawman arguments, seemingly painting 1984 as a work of science and prediction. Asimov saying Asimov’s writing is great, and another style is bad. Big Brother was not a person, but an immortal simulcrum of the party. Asimov ignores that and assumes that Big Brother is just an individual dictator that will die. Pick a sentence in the second half, and think about whether Asimov is critiquing like an engineer or not. 1984 is not a book written as a coherent hard sci-fi novel, it is more akin to a allegorical fairytale where you need to pick up the concepts by implication. Asimov is annoyed 1984 uses Stalin as a setting. That is like being annoyed that Asimov uses starships as a setting. The story is not the setting.

by j3s 4y ago

axxto 4y ago

Thank you for posting this. I really enjoyed it.

pyuser583 4y ago

Asimov spends criticizes how Orwell got future technology wrong. But I wonder how the technology “1984” corresponds to the technology in Eastern Block countries circa 1984. HBOs Chernobyl is praised for its accuracy of Soviet life in the 1980d, and it looks a lot like what Orwell describes in 1984. And some of Asimov descriptions of 1980s tech were fads: > His hero finds it difficult in his world of 1984 to get shoelaces or razor blades. So would I in the real world of the 1980s, for so many people use slip-on shoes and electric razors. I’ve purchased two sets of shoelaces and 20 sets of razor blades (in bulk) this year.

mbg721 4y ago
1984 didn't have the concept of outsourced manufacturing. (For that matter, I guess the Soviet view of the world didn't either.)

CSMastermind 4y ago

I read it just now and I think Asimov is being far too hard on Orwell in that review. > The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. To have a person being watched at all times means that some other person must be doing the watching at all times (at least in the Orwellian society) and must be doing so very narrowly, for there is a great development of the art of interpreting gesture and facial expression. > One person cannot watch more than one person in full concentration, and can only do so for a comparatively short time before attention begins to wander. I should guess, in short, that there may have to be five watchers for every person watched. Except as I sit here and write this now with tape over my webcam "television set is two-way" hardly seems like an idea worthy of derision. Nor does the idea of government mass surveillance seem laughably impractical. Of course, we have computers now that make this type of mass surveillance possible, Isacc couldn't conceive of the advances in computer and ML that have unlocked these terrifying government capacities. In this way it was Asimov not Orwell lacking imagination. And he takes George to task for not mentioning computers: > Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical. Oh the irony. As for the rest of the review he dresses down Orwell for not envisioning the rise of new drugs (vices) or the liberated role of women in society. These are only flaws if you assume Orwell's goal was to accurately predict the future. Personally I don't. I wouldn't criticize Animal Farm for not having the most accurate of farm equipment in its depiction and I don't read 1984, especially now, to get a sense of what the world will actually be like in 1984. It's a silly and unfair framing of the objective. I read both Animal Farm and 1984 as allegorical retellings of historical events which separated from the specific details of those events allow us to see general patterns and apply them to our own societies. Animal Farm isn't less of a book because Stalin was not literally a pig and 1984 is not less of a book because gin wasn't the primary vice of the youth in the literal year 1984. To dismiss the book for saying so is to miss the point completely.

bliteben 4y ago

this is great, but I smirked at this line >Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical. Which is very not true as punch cards (hollerith machines) were very important to the Nazis, and the second part is in the eye of the beholder, perhaps no relationship actually exists there.

mbg721 4y ago
Yeah, that's clearly wrong. The Nazis were about as far away from Luddites as you can get. The whole point of the post-WWII recoil at the horror of Nazi-ism was the realization that a culturally-advanced high-tech progressive society was capable of using all of that advancement as a lever to do the same barbaric and horrible things humans had done before, only much more efficiently.
- bliteben 4y ago
  much better put

schuyler2d 4y ago

I enjoyed reading Asimov's review, but I'm surprised that it makes you think less of Orwell rather than understand that they're two polar points in perspectives on writing. I don't think I've read a character in Asimov that had more than 1 or 2 deviant terms in an otherwise averaged society utility function -- and he's far more interested in what the future 'looks like' While Orwell engages (similar to Dostoyevsky, et al) the psychological aspects that deviate from an Enlightenment world-view/vision. It's even more hilarious to read > The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way, and that the people who are forced to hear and see the television screen can themselves be heard and seen at all times and are under constant supervision even while sleeping or in the bathroom. Hence, the meaning of the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you'. > This is an extraordinarily inefficient system of keeping everyone under control. It sure is inefficient! -- all of our web-browsing and Internet connections would be so much faster and efficient if 80-90% of it wasn't spying on us -- but that hasn't stopped the big tech companies, nor did it stop the Soviet Union, the Nazis, or J Edgar Hoover. And I don't think those things in Heaven and Earth, Asimov dreamt of in his philosophy.

robocat 4y ago

Wow - awesome! Asimov’s review reads like every engineer’s nit-picking arguments (including my own!). In this case they are almost all strawman arguments, seemingly painting 1984 as a work of science and prediction. Asimov saying Asimov’s writing is great, and another style is bad. Big Brother was not a person, but an immortal simulcrum of the party. Asimov ignores that and assumes that Big Brother is just an individual dictator that will die. Pick a sentence in the second half, and think about whether Asimov is critiquing like an engineer or not. 1984 is not a book written as a coherent hard sci-fi novel, it is more akin to a allegorical fairytale where you need to pick up the concepts by implication. Asimov is annoyed 1984 uses Stalin as a setting. That is like being annoyed that Asimov uses starships as a setting. The story is not the setting.