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 telev

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.