'While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation, the Party’s

'While most contemporary societies are nothing like the book’s dystopia, in the context of today’s proliferating misinformation and disinformation, the Party’s primary propaganda slogans—“War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength”—don’t seem all that far-fetched.' Sure, they're much worse, relying instead on conditioning people to discipline themselves, removing the need for a symbolic Brother, Daddy, Брат (Brat), when subduing the masses. Orwell was reflecting on the stiff, monotonic and easily identifiable mass communication of Stalin and Goebbels, which fell out of fashion at around the same time as the novel was published. While the Soviet never managed to invent a new totalising regime, it's main opponent did and exported it by hard as well as soft forms of power. If only our problems was a Big Brother and inscrutable bureaucratic mazes hidden away in concrete buildings, that would seem almost utopian compared to our current predicament.