Yes. It is a different world than ours obviously, but it warned of a myriad of horrors, most of which have already been exceeded in my view. That's my genuine viewpoint.
For example, one of the most chilling aspects was the telescreen to me. The horror of telescreens was that someone could maybe be watching, even in your own home. Quote: "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment". Now this has been exceeded by technological mass surveillance - basically we ARE being watched nonstop. A panopticon effect is replaced by a robot sitting and staring 24/7. Everything I say is stored forever; further, machine learning can effectively filter through all of our civilisation's data and, even far in the future when attitudes change, red flag anything I say which is deemed unacceptable. Pegasus malware can turn my smartphone into a listening and viewing device at any time. I can barely even use cash in my country anymore, so this is extending to all purchases. This is BEYOND what Orwell could envision. It is shocking that people have somehow come to accept and normalise this feeling of being watched.
I could go on and refer to hundreds of similar aspects.
I have read 1984 twice. Once in 1999 and once in 2021.
The effect of the telescreen was so different from what I remember in 1999. It seemed trite in 2021.
Many aspects of 1984 would be an improvement over what we have now. I also imagine that however bad we think surveillance is now it is much more than what we believe it to be. It would hardly be shocking if voice activation is storing keywords from nearly all in person conversations.
The lack of the several minute rage, and complete lack of ministry of love and truth being named as such does not change the fact that all you need to do is look hard enough, and the level of duplicity in saying one thing but doing another, and disguising it through legalistic doublespeak is rampant.
For someone who was around before all of this connectivity became possible, the speed with which the primitives to realize so many of these authorial worst case scenarios possible are being converged upon by a society already explicitly aware of what to look out for is frankly horrifying.
> The lack of the several minute rage, and complete lack of ministry of love and truth being named as such does not change the fact that all you need to do is look hard enough, and the level of duplicity in saying one thing but doing another, and disguising it through legalistic doublespeak is rampant.
That's all of human history, not some new development, and hardly the core of 1984. There is no state control of speech and thought, no enforced caste system, no eternal war, no thought police.
This sort of histrionic posting is why "literally 1984" has become a meme mocking the people who say it.
