Asimov wrote a great review of 1984 basically calling Orwell an emotionally stunted manchild who wrote a tantrum disguised as a novel. Orwell was a guilt ridden rich kid who played hippie in the slums then got his feelings hurt in Spain and spent the rest of his life writing revenge fantasies against Stalin instead of actually trying to understand how the world works.
1984 was just boring and lifeless rant where nothing happens, and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient. Orwell couldn't imagine women as anything but brainless sex objects or proles as anything but subhuman animals and he thought ballpoint pens were worse than actual scratching steel nibs. The guy was a technophobic elitist with zero forward vision who projected his personal grudge onto the future and millions of people treat his little hissy fit like prophecy. It's frankly incredible that his shallow writing became a cultural icon in the west.
> It's frankly incredible that his shallow writing became a cultural icon in the west.
It’s precisely BECAUSE it’s a fairly shallow “bad government bad” story that it’s such a cultural icon everywhere. People like easy-to-digest things that they can point at and feel smarter.
I find Orwell appeals to the pseudo-intellectual crowd because he says things that don't really have any profound insight, but seem deep to superficial people who want to feel smart. When you look at it critically, his writing has a really strong 'I'm 13 and this is deep' energy to it.
This is beyond silly. The guy who wrote Down and Out… and Road to Wigan Pier, and actually fought fascists in Spain, couldn’t imagine proles as anything but brainless subhumans? Orwell in 1948 didn’t predict computers? Have I been trolled?
I find Orwell to be a much better writer than Asimov, and 1984 was praised by people like Bertrand Russell (who was arguably a greater writer than either of them, even winning a Nobel Prize).
Also, Orwell was shot in the neck in Spain while literally fighting fascists.
Still, thank you for the link to Asimov’s review. I’ll read it later.
In addition, he was riffing on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hub-and-spoke style prison design with a single guard at the hub observing the prisoners in each spoke.
1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.
Asimov seems to have missed that the book does not claim that everyone is being watched at all times, but that everyone could be watched at any time, in any place, and that they have no way to know for sure if they are at any given moment. Therefore, they have to behave as if they are under surveillance at all times, just in case. It’s a very effective and practical means of control. See the famous panopticon concept. You don’t even need a guard in the tower, just the threat of one most of the time, and occasional random, unpredictable enforcement just often enough that the surveilled cannot relax. The cost of doing so is not impractical at all.
Asimov is missing an important point that is pretty clearly spelled out in the novel, and this severely weakens his critique. I find this pretty funny because he starts off the essay insinuating that others who claim to love the book haven’t read it. Same to you for hating it without having understood it, Asimov!
"To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in
a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the
future."
He really got it!
And shows how fundamentally Asimov misunderstands how totalitarian societies work.
"Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report
on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work
well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be
abandoned"
> and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers
I think our current world proves that being watched by humans hits people in a way that being monitored by computers doesn't. Remember those "Surveillance Camera Man" videos? You can see countless examples online of people freaking out at a human engaging in public photography because they filmed them or snapped a picture. Often they do it while standing directly under surveillance cameras. It doesn't matter to people if their ring camera is using facial recognition and logging everything within its field of view and secretly forwarding that data to law enforcement agencies, but try standing on the sidewalk in front of their house and recording everyone who comes and goes and see how they react.
Because one scenario is more directly tied to potential (undesirable) uses of the photos, and more obviously doing something. If people saw consequences resulting from security cameras, they would pay more mind to them. People aren’t ignoring a security camera in a bathroom.
I mean, when it comes to things like ring/nest cameras and ALPRs everybody is pretty upfront about the fact that all the footage they collect is going to be used against you in one way or another. It's pretty hard to get a more direct tie to potential (undesirable) uses. Amazon has made headlines after being sued for giving employees and contractors "unfettered" access to personal videos, and for allowing contractors to listen to people having sex, and for giving police access to the feeds without consent, but people are still buying them up and using them.
A street photographer is a much smaller threat. What's the worst some random person on a public street can do with your photograph? Compare that with the harm that can be done by a massive corporation with billions at their disposal who has been building a dossier on you for decades and who records you 24/7 and is determined to use that data in any way that makes them profit regardless of what you want or what the law says.
It's fine, indeed great, to express a less common point of view on HN. But could you please not fulminate like this? The guidelines specifically ask us to avoid that, and make it clear we're hoping for something better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Somewhat meta: this is perhaps the most fertile ground for an online flamewar I've ever seen. It's got something for everyone. Any ideology I can think of could be applied both for and against with equal ferocity.
How so? Orwell's stories dealt with class protectionism, and how the average person unwittingly contributes to systems of oppression and exclusion. Empire is about outsourcing the bottom end of inequality.
The article is about how removing those books - for the very stated reasons you outlines - could, according to the author, contribute to the rise of the right and the destruction of those ends.
(just an example; it really can be framed from pretty much any angle)
You have to twist a small government ideology like libertarianism pretty hard to arrive at support for book banning. But I suppose these days you can dismiss it as niche or extreme or archaic instead.
I am sad to say it but I am not sure it is possible in the short term. It seems that there is a taste for conflict in the air and we are cruising towards another world-level spasm of violence before we can return to some semblance of sanity.
Orwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
> it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
This exactly, I hope for opportunities to repeat as much.
Sometimes I find myself wondering what "thinking" even means. Someone proposes a frame, and then people who buy into that frame rally around it and work to reinforce it. Is that really thinking?
I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.
> Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values.
I think this is very clearly not the case. MAGA acts in direct opposition to christian values and Trump's actions demonstrate that he proudly rejects the teachings of Jesus. Whatever it is that attracts people to MAGA its despite their religion not because of it.
>MAGA acts in direct opposition to christian values
I agree with what you're saying, but personally, I think this is what the corruption of the Christian faith community looks like. Church communities may not actually take Jesus's teachings all that seriously, but they have Christian broadcasting, schools, the historical view that America is a Christian nation, and a sense of crisis about certain progressive ideas like abortion and such. At this point, I think Trump comes across not so much as a messiah but more as a kind of "warrior" for them. He has moral flaws, but he fights against the forces that are attacking us. In other words, the role of group protector takes priority over personal piety.
Historically speaking, whether a form of religion survives isn't determined solely by how pure it is, is it? In the end, it comes down to what kind of explanation it offers for the anxieties of life. First of all, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely no intention of dismissing your Christian faith. I want to emphasize again that I agree with you that they are violating Christian values, and that devout believers like you are the ones suffering the consequences.
Every time real world communism fails, people say "that wasn't true communism." And every time Christian communities repeatedly support political forces that go against the teachings of Jesus, people say "it's not because of the religion." If we keep doing that, we end up arbitrarily severing the relationship between ideology and reality. Just as we call the state of the modern world the corruption of capitalism, I think the MAGA movement shows what happens when a Christian community follows the wrong shepherd.
First of all, I'm sorry if I unintentionally attacked your faith. But I also respect Jesus. He was a remarkable person. It's just that, as you know, I'm criticizing the act of leaving a stain on his name.
I should have been more clear. I myself am not Christian, but I did grow up in a Christian household and have studied the faith. I think there is a worrying amount of idolatry in MAGA, but I'd agree that Christian nationalism plays a huge part (as does Christofascism).
While ultimately Christianity is whatever its followers say it is, I think it's still worth calling attention to the clear contradictions. Not only out of acknowledgement/courtesy to those who really do try to follow the bible's teachings, but also on the off chance that it causes some MAGA supporter enough cognitive dissonance that they're forced to really think about what it is they've been supporting.
> We can see similar patterns today. The European working class can no longer seek status in the colonies, so it is turning to the political right. Deprived of the security and opportunities promised by neoliberalism, the working classes increasingly seek inclusion through the exclusion of others.
I see the same on HN when a topic about H1 B visas is posted.
Going by comments on such posts Immigration seems to be fine as long as it is affecting blue collar work.
The pitchforks are out when it concerns one's own job. Then they talk about quality of programmers, outsourcing companies, the process of H1B not being fair etc.
Makes me think that it's insecurity about finance and status, but not limited to a certain economic class.
> Populist parties frame migration as an economic and cultural threat. They blame migrants for problems ranging from crime to unemployment. And while social democratic parties are campaigning on ideological platforms, many voters still prioritise material security. Voting patterns suggest that class remains central.
This framing of the issue suggests that the issue is not real, while it could be a simple matter of people being worried about their financial well being and safety.
Consider the Pakistani Grooming gangs in UK with estimates suggesting up to 250,000 potential victims nationwide over several decades.
Many of the victims were young working class. Their plight was ignored so as not to antagonize a community.
Dismissive attitudes towards victims: Many of the victims were working-class, vulnerable, or living in state care. Authorities often stigmatized them as "troubled" or "consenting," systematically ignoring their cries for help and failing to implement a child-centered approach.
As per BBC - Institutional paralysis: Police forces and local authorities lacked adequate training and suffered from severe bureaucratic dysfunction. In some instances, agencies viewed the gangs’ ethnic minority status and cultural backgrounds as "no-go" zones, allowing criminal networks to operate hidden behind the shield of "cultural sensitivities"
So to ensure that you are not being 'against migrants' created a situation that was hell for a lot of women.
We don't know if European Working class in other countries are seeing similar issues that happened in UK but were brushed under by the police and the British Media.
Let's not paint the working class as naive and just against migrants as 'seek inclusion through the exclusion of others."
The working class was not against migrants all along. If something changed, we should try to find out what the real issue is.
39 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 22.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48737387
1984 was just boring and lifeless rant where nothing happens, and the technology is nonsensical like having humans watch every citizen on camera instead of just using computers which even Asimov in the 1980s could see was laughably inefficient. Orwell couldn't imagine women as anything but brainless sex objects or proles as anything but subhuman animals and he thought ballpoint pens were worse than actual scratching steel nibs. The guy was a technophobic elitist with zero forward vision who projected his personal grudge onto the future and millions of people treat his little hissy fit like prophecy. It's frankly incredible that his shallow writing became a cultural icon in the west.
https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
It’s precisely BECAUSE it’s a fairly shallow “bad government bad” story that it’s such a cultural icon everywhere. People like easy-to-digest things that they can point at and feel smarter.
Also, Orwell was shot in the neck in Spain while literally fighting fascists.
Still, thank you for the link to Asimov’s review. I’ll read it later.
1984 was published in 1949. It's a bit harsh to expect him to have anticipated computers
1984 imagines a telecom-enabled nationwide panopticon, which made for good speculative fiction in the 50’s (and also does now). Asimov wishes he had been that prescient.
Asimov is missing an important point that is pretty clearly spelled out in the novel, and this severely weakens his critique. I find this pretty funny because he starts off the essay insinuating that others who claim to love the book haven’t read it. Same to you for hating it without having understood it, Asimov!
"To summarise, then: George Orwell in 1984 was, in my opinion, engaging in a private feud with Stalinism, rather that attempting to forecast the future."
He really got it!
And shows how fundamentally Asimov misunderstands how totalitarian societies work. "Furthermore, he has a system of volunteer spies in which children report on their parents, and neighbours on each other. This cannot possibly work well since eventually everyone reports everyone else and it all has to be abandoned"
I think our current world proves that being watched by humans hits people in a way that being monitored by computers doesn't. Remember those "Surveillance Camera Man" videos? You can see countless examples online of people freaking out at a human engaging in public photography because they filmed them or snapped a picture. Often they do it while standing directly under surveillance cameras. It doesn't matter to people if their ring camera is using facial recognition and logging everything within its field of view and secretly forwarding that data to law enforcement agencies, but try standing on the sidewalk in front of their house and recording everyone who comes and goes and see how they react.
A street photographer is a much smaller threat. What's the worst some random person on a public street can do with your photograph? Compare that with the harm that can be done by a massive corporation with billions at their disposal who has been building a dossier on you for decades and who records you 24/7 and is determined to use that data in any way that makes them profit regardless of what you want or what the law says.
(just an example; it really can be framed from pretty much any angle)
It's totally idiotic the state we have reached, with an absolutely equal number of stupid people on the left and the right.
There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.
In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.
> it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.
This exactly, I hope for opportunities to repeat as much.
I keep coming back to this article's whole framing around the "culture war." Maybe it's because I'm not sharp enough to fully follow what smart people are saying, but this piece feels less like thinking and more like its arguments are running wild. The article ends up repeating the very error of the identity politics it sets out to criticize. It takes aim at identity centered interpretation, yet its own argument sets up class and identity as rivals in a zero sum game.
On the mechanisms of imperialism that the article lays out, I think it overreaches. Yes, we need to examine how relative status security works, things like class anxiety fused with racial superiority and imperial citizenship, and how material class anxiety gets politically channeled through identity hierarchies like race, nation, nationality, and gender. That's a worthwhile line of inquiry.
But the article seems to be offering a reductive, first order causal explanation of imperialism. The main drivers of imperialism were numerous: interstate competition, capital accumulation, bureaucratic organization, and more. The notion that the metropolitan working class and lower middle class derived psychological compensation from imperial status looks less like a cause of imperialism and more like a legitimizing mechanism after the fact. I suspect the author is channeling Orwell's own perspective as a socialist here. If not, then the level of analysis is simply too shallow.
And can we really pin the rise of the modern far right on economic anxiety alone? I don't think so. Not everyone facing similar economic conditions turns to right wing populism. What matters is how political leaders, the media, the collapse of local industry, generation, education, the loss of cultural status, and the party system organize that anxiety into a particular political language.
Forces like MAGA are fundamentally rooted in the Bible Belt. Their lives are bound up with religious community, and they become right wing based on those values. In the end, it's a complex entanglement of cultural and geographical positioning. That said, I do agree that some political demagogues use cultural codes as fuel.
So honestly, I don't really know.
It's frustrating not being able to write logically in English, as if I've been muzzled. It's not my native language. But here's the core of it: even if we assume AI was behind the exclusion, we don't know the premise behind that decision. So how can anyone call it a "purge"? It could be an AI hallucination. Or maybe the AI judged that dystopian novels don't fit the modern context. Without any account of the process, I find it hard to follow the logic that just leaps straight to framing it as class warfare.
I think this is very clearly not the case. MAGA acts in direct opposition to christian values and Trump's actions demonstrate that he proudly rejects the teachings of Jesus. Whatever it is that attracts people to MAGA its despite their religion not because of it.
I agree with what you're saying, but personally, I think this is what the corruption of the Christian faith community looks like. Church communities may not actually take Jesus's teachings all that seriously, but they have Christian broadcasting, schools, the historical view that America is a Christian nation, and a sense of crisis about certain progressive ideas like abortion and such. At this point, I think Trump comes across not so much as a messiah but more as a kind of "warrior" for them. He has moral flaws, but he fights against the forces that are attacking us. In other words, the role of group protector takes priority over personal piety.
Historically speaking, whether a form of religion survives isn't determined solely by how pure it is, is it? In the end, it comes down to what kind of explanation it offers for the anxieties of life. First of all, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely no intention of dismissing your Christian faith. I want to emphasize again that I agree with you that they are violating Christian values, and that devout believers like you are the ones suffering the consequences.
Every time real world communism fails, people say "that wasn't true communism." And every time Christian communities repeatedly support political forces that go against the teachings of Jesus, people say "it's not because of the religion." If we keep doing that, we end up arbitrarily severing the relationship between ideology and reality. Just as we call the state of the modern world the corruption of capitalism, I think the MAGA movement shows what happens when a Christian community follows the wrong shepherd.
First of all, I'm sorry if I unintentionally attacked your faith. But I also respect Jesus. He was a remarkable person. It's just that, as you know, I'm criticizing the act of leaving a stain on his name.
While ultimately Christianity is whatever its followers say it is, I think it's still worth calling attention to the clear contradictions. Not only out of acknowledgement/courtesy to those who really do try to follow the bible's teachings, but also on the off chance that it causes some MAGA supporter enough cognitive dissonance that they're forced to really think about what it is they've been supporting.
I see the same on HN when a topic about H1 B visas is posted. Going by comments on such posts Immigration seems to be fine as long as it is affecting blue collar work. The pitchforks are out when it concerns one's own job. Then they talk about quality of programmers, outsourcing companies, the process of H1B not being fair etc.
Makes me think that it's insecurity about finance and status, but not limited to a certain economic class.
> Populist parties frame migration as an economic and cultural threat. They blame migrants for problems ranging from crime to unemployment. And while social democratic parties are campaigning on ideological platforms, many voters still prioritise material security. Voting patterns suggest that class remains central.
This framing of the issue suggests that the issue is not real, while it could be a simple matter of people being worried about their financial well being and safety.
Consider the Pakistani Grooming gangs in UK with estimates suggesting up to 250,000 potential victims nationwide over several decades.
Many of the victims were young working class. Their plight was ignored so as not to antagonize a community. Dismissive attitudes towards victims: Many of the victims were working-class, vulnerable, or living in state care. Authorities often stigmatized them as "troubled" or "consenting," systematically ignoring their cries for help and failing to implement a child-centered approach.
As per BBC - Institutional paralysis: Police forces and local authorities lacked adequate training and suffered from severe bureaucratic dysfunction. In some instances, agencies viewed the gangs’ ethnic minority status and cultural backgrounds as "no-go" zones, allowing criminal networks to operate hidden behind the shield of "cultural sensitivities"
So to ensure that you are not being 'against migrants' created a situation that was hell for a lot of women.
We don't know if European Working class in other countries are seeing similar issues that happened in UK but were brushed under by the police and the British Media.
Let's not paint the working class as naive and just against migrants as 'seek inclusion through the exclusion of others."
The working class was not against migrants all along. If something changed, we should try to find out what the real issue is.