“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. But I tell you, Winston, reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
John Hurt mouths it in the film and you should feel it in your teeth. At fifteen I thought 1984 was melodrama. At forty I watch my feed and the hair on my arms stands up. That quote is the knife. It cuts open the mechanics of how gravity works now. Reality is being edited. Not by God or the market alone, but by code, procedure, surveillance warrants, moderation policies, and whatever human or machine is hungry enough to push the delete button.
Orwell’s telescreen looked like a box nailed to the wall. Ours is a black rectangle we pay for and kiss goodnight. It broadcasts propaganda. It listens. It sells you promiscuous convenience and asks for the price in intimate metadata. The law has not been idle. In Australia there is a statute that lets authorities force companies to hand over or break encryption, to assist access to your private messages. There are laws that empower security services to impersonate accounts and disrupt devices. Over in the UK they built an Investigatory Powers regime with warrants that let spies sift through bulk communications. In the United States the post 9/11 security architecture and its later amendments keep the infrastructure of surveillance live. Canada wrapped similar powers into modern statutes. The names change, but the architecture is the same: a standing invitation for state actors to peer into private lives under the claim of safety.
You could squint and say this is trade-off for security. You would be wrong, and you would be human. Security is a baited word that gets thrown on the grill every time someone wants a bigger tool. Those tools never stay small. Every new capability creeps. Every temporary measure hardens into permanent architecture. That is the pattern Orwell sketched. He described a world where the state rewrites history and makes you believe it. We do that now with a different set of instruments. We do it using infrastructure and policy and the corporate appetite for scale.
Memory holes are not literal chutes anymore. The memory hole is a policy and an API. An account vanishes, a research paper disappears behind a press release, an inconvenient video gets deplatformed, and the story evaporates. You do not need soldiers with torches to erase a thing when algorithms and terms of service will perform the same magic. The book was simple. Burn the book and deny it ever existed. We don’t burn books. We bury them behind copyright claims, we label them as dangerous, we make them invisible by making the platform algorithm find other things more relevant. The end result is identical. History gets edited.
Newspeak was supposed to narrow the range of thought by eliminating words. Today we punish with code. Words are demonetised, channels throttled, search results deprioritised. Corporations make decisions about what is tolerable speech and what is not, sometimes guided by the state and sometimes guided by their own commercial calculus. That means ideas that challenge power simply find less oxygen. They do not end. They go quiet. That quiet achieves the same outcome as forbidden language in Newspeak. People find fewer tools to articulate dissent. They lose the vocabulary to complain effectively. That is subtle, and therefore lethal.
Two Minutes Hate in 1984 was a ritual of manufactured rage against a chosen target. Social media perfected it without the ministry directing the crowd. The algorithms turned attention into a product, and the product is outrage. The mob forms spontaneously and viciously. You can watch it in slow motion or consume it in real time. It is always cheaper for platforms to stoke rage than to cultivate nuance. Rage keeps the lamps on. Brands and political operators both learned that distribution of attention is the new currency. Campaigns now exploit that. The result is a public that is raw and exhausted and, crucially, easy to manipulate because they are already in fight mode.
Doublethink. That is the one I keep returning to. Doublethink is not a fancy idea. It is the habit of holding two opposing realities and repeating both. We do it like it’s a sport. We cheer privacy and watch state CCTV networks expand. We demand free speech and celebrate deplatforming people we dislike. We howl about predators and then sign away our surveillance rights to chase them. We accept predictive policing because it feels modern while ignoring the fact that every biased data set hardwires prejudice into police work. Doublethink lets us feel moral while we make our actions immoral. And if you can live inside that cognitive dissonance, you are well on the way to being a useful citizen for a system that needs obedient contradictions.
Let’s be concrete. Facial recognition in public streets was once the stuff of sci fi. Now it is routine trial programs in cities worldwide. Cameras with live matching databases can finger and track people in a crowd long before a human processes the data. Predictive policing promises efficiency by forecasting where crimes are likely to happen. That forecast is nothing but past bias coded into an algorithm. It targets neighbourhoods with a history of over policing and then justifies more patrols because the algorithm says crime is there. The loop feeds itself. Think about the consequences. A kid in a surveillance zone will be surveilled, arrested more often, then fed into the dataset that says that area is a problem. The technology does not heal the problem. It amplifies it.
Then there is the corporate Ministry of Truth. Platforms do content moderation at national scale. Much of it is human moderation across poor working conditions, but the bulk is algorithmic curation. The companies sell the idea that they are neutral pipes. They are not. Their ranking engines decide which ideas spread and which starve. They can boost a narrative, bury a report, and tilt public discourse with remarkable subtlety. This is not conspiracy theory. It is product logic. Attention is scarce. Decisions about ranking are commercial decisions first and civic decisions only if pressed.
And here’s where Animal Farm creeps in. Animal Farm is about how a revolution for equality morphs into a new hierarchy. The original slogans mutate, privileges harden, and the elite rewrite the rules. We now have slogans as tribal badges. They are short, easily memed, and difficult to argue against because the argument is framed as betrayal. Identity politics can be noble. It can also be a convenient lever for social signalling and moral closure. The problem is not the demands themselves. The problem is the form. A slogan simplifies complexity and then becomes the excuse for excluding nuance.
Corporate elites grow richer. The public gets busier arguing over signage. The modern pig wears a suit, floats a press release, and expands an offshore structure during a budget cycle everyone was screaming about the latest outrage. Animal Farm was not a story about animals. It was a love letter to subtle capture. It was a manual on how to play the citizen like a fiddle. That trick has not aged. It has simply gone institutional. Pigs now make policy and then fund narratives that keep the rest of the herd distracted.
Perpetual war is another borrowed page. 1984 kept the people in a state of endless external danger so the state could ration rights and demand sacrifice. Today’s version is strategic ambiguity and long-term defence commitments. Endless military engagements, global proxy conflicts, and ever rising defence budgets create exactly the climate that makes civil liberties easier to curtail. You do not have to put tanks on your streets to reshape public consent. You just keep the threat drum beating and ask citizens to take one more small step so the nation stays safe.
And the final trick: the incentive structure. Most of the mechanics we are talking about are economically rational. Companies maximise attention because that is how they survive. Security services expand powers because they can bill themselves as indispensable. Politicians trade quick wins for longer term erosion of liberty because the public attention is fungible and partisan advantage is immediate. That is not a moral failure alone. It is institutional design. People respond predictably to incentives, and we have built incentives that reward growth of surveillance, growth of division, and growth of control.
What does resistance look like in this landscape? Orwell offered no instruction manual, just stark warnings. Our job is to build practical fences and cultural muscles to keep the memory and the public vocabulary alive. We need legal constraints that are specific and enforceable. Blanket powers dressed as safety must be replaced by narrow warrants, outside oversight, and meaningful sunset clauses. We need transparency about how algorithms moderate speech and how decisions are made to deplatform or deprioritise. We need counter speech funded and scaled so that visibility is not the sole purview of commercial ranking engines. We need audits of predictive systems and real participation from the communities those systems will affect.
You do not have to be pure to do any of that. You have to be stubborn. You have to demand that the people designing these systems and writing the laws explain their choices in human terms. And when they refuse, you have to make the refusal visible. We can do that in small ways. Insist on public registers for surveillance trials. Insist on independent oversight of moderation appeals. Insist on data access for researchers who want to audit police algorithms. Not everything will be won, but you hold the line, and you build pressure.
Read the John Hurt line again. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else. That is either terrifying or liberating. Terrifying if you let others habitually edit the mind for you. Liberating if you know that the task of democracy is to defend the space where people can think clearly and disagree without being erased.
So, stop flattering yourself with the myth that you are immune because you vote one way or another. Stop pretending the next outrage is the thing worth spending your life on. Read the signs. Know the laws, know the systems, and push back where the machinery tells you it is permanent. The cage looks fancy now. Leather seats, chrome trim, subscription plan. But it is still a cage. The difference between being alive and being useful to the machine is noticing you have a choice.
Pick up the book again, not as a relic but as a manual. Don’t let the memory hole get tidy because you are distracted. Don’t let the words that allow thought get hollowed out because a headline needs clicks. Keep talking. Keep arguing. Keep being loud enough that algorithms cannot flatten you into silence.
That is the work. That is the point. That is the blunt end of the truth Orwell was warning us about. This is not dramatic paranoia. It is a ledger. We can tally it. Or we can scroll.
