Nineteen Eighty-Four
From RationalWiki
Nineteen Eighty-Four, also written 1984, is a dystopian novel by George Orwell. It tells the tale of a nightmarish future totalitarian state through one helpless man's struggle to hold on to his humanity. It is set in a world where, at least as far as anyone knows, three warring, apparently totalitarian superstates based on the United States, Soviet Union, and China or Japan dominate more than 75% of the Earth's surface and fight an ongoing and inconclusive three-way war with constantly shifting alliances and the old colonial lands of Africa and South Asia largely ignored except as meaningless territorial gains. It follows the story of a minor London bureaucrat named Winston Smith as he attempts to make a change, however small, in the opaque and brutal government of "Big Brother", following him from a breakup with his largely apathetic wife and concluding in his betrayal and murder by a Party double agent.
Written in 1948, largely as a critique of the Stalinist U.S.S.R. (1984's Ingsoc was imagined as a technologically advanced development of Stalinism), it led to many people years later (in, uh, 1984) exclaiming "whew, we managed not to end up like Orwell's book!". Others did not agree with this sense of relief.[1] While widely read in high school literature classes, it is not without its critics; SF author Isaac Asimov [2] wrote a particularly scathing attack on the book for being uncreative and overly focused on communism while failing to criticize other forms of totalitarianism.
Several phrases coined in the book have entered common use, most notably "Big Brother (is watching you)", and, to a lesser extent, "Newspeak". While Big Brother is a watchword for privacy rights on both sides of the political aisle, and 1984 is particularly beloved by conservatives because of its supposed applicability to the issue of political correctness, Orwell himself was a strong leftist, his opinions on the extreme form of leftism known as communism being formed by his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a foreign irregular.
The adjective "Orwellian" refers to the nature of government(s) depicted in this book.
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[edit] Popular culture
Nineteen Eighty-Four is also the title of a song by David Bowie.
[edit] Apple commercial
Apple Computer launched their Macintosh computer in one of the most famous and enduringly popular television advertisements of all time, titled "1984". The Ridley Scott ad featured a grey Orwellian world in which thousands of uniform drones listen to a Big Brother type on a screen extolling the virtues of dull, character-based, command line computers.
In a flash of color, a young woman in a white top and red shorts lopes into the auditorium and slings a sledge hammer into the screen, shattering it and the hold it has on the drones, now smiling and welcoming in the new era.
The ad ran only once during the Super Bowl, but left an enduring impression with audiences everywhere.
