Nineteen Eighty-Four

A classic! I’ve always liked Huxley’s Brave New World better, but on this reading, I think Nineteen eighty-four finally got through to me. It is engaging and terrifying.

The core theme of language and media control leading to thought control was especially provoking. In a sense, it did not feel believable, yet it is simultaneously hard to argue against it. The rewriting of history in the text is massively inefficient, but at the same time, some governments have spend massive resources on keeping favourable narratives going; digital technologies enable this in a whole other way still.