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The article asks "What accounts for its staying power?" but misses what I think is the main reason for its staying power - it has something of relevance for each era in which it is read. In the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of The Cold War, people primarily saw it as a critique of totalitarianism. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the context of increasing use of CCTV, people primarily saw it as a critique of the surveillance society. And nowadays, in the context of "fake news" and "alternative facts", people primarily see it in terms of the malleability of "truth". Interestingly, one of the main themes that hasn't been the focus for any past generation, is how controlling language can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

Anyway, given it was set 35 years after it was published, and it is now 35 years after it was set, we've reached a turning point - the title year will be closer to the author than to us.

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>...controlling language can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

Over the last couple of years, I've been collecting passages that touch on this point. I'm always surprised when I come across them. Two of my favorites that I've randomly come across (and from non-political books):

>It would be in the interest of kings, czars, nobles, and so forth that the masses be educated in a way that renders them slavelike in mentality. The language of wrongness, should, and have to is perfectly suited for this purpose: the more people are trained to think in terms of moralistic judgments that imply wrongness and badness, the more they are being trained to look outside themselves—to outside authorities—for the definition of what constitutes right, wrong, good, and bad. When we are in contact with our feelings and needs, we humans no longer make good slaves and underlings. [0]

>...the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements — all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics — to make it easy from him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think. [1]

[0] "Nonviolent Communication" by Marshall B. Rosenberg

[1] "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer J. Adler

Reminds me of a quote from Schopenhauer:

"When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid."

It is funny how people who read a lot say the same thing about people who watch a lot of movies/series or play a lot of [video] games.

I suppose Usenet was the first public massively available cesspit to read and write. You could regard it as a practice ground for either.

With regards to creating content, it requires life experience in general as inspiration. You could obtain such life experience by doing things such as climbing or hiking or traveling or reading or watching TV or playing video games or interacting with random people on the Internet or going out every Friday night to the pub. Who's to say which of these are effective, or not? Why even make such a bifurcation in the first place?

For creating content in a particular media, if your life experience is mostly built from that particular media, all you would product will be derivative of that particular media.

> In the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of The Cold War, people primarily saw it as a critique of totalitarianism. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the context of increasing use of CCTV, people primarily saw it as a critique of the surveillance society. And nowadays, in the context of "fake news" and "alternative facts", people primarily see it in terms of the malleability of "truth"

I'm curious why you see these as distinct phenomena!

Anyway, the obvious cure is simply to read "Manufacturing Consent" (literally any part will do good) and to act against these forces.

Lets take totalitarianism and the surveillance society. It's easy to see how totalitarians want a surveillance society, but it's also clear that even liberal democracies contain forces that are trying to create surveillance states, so clearly they are distinct.

Similarly fake news became a meme in the free west and is a quite different concept from propaganda, for example it is created differently and propagates differently as a bottom up phenomenon rather than top down.

I think part of the problem here is that 1984 has so utterly permeated our cultural milieu that it's hard to even conceptually surveillance independently of totalitarianism. The book instantly inextricably links them in our minds.

created differently and propagates differently as a bottom up phenomenon rather than top down.

Some does. Fake news produced by groups like the IRA (Russia edition) is absolutely top down. Fake news produced on the chans is neither bottom up nor top down, it's incubated and filtered and disseminated with strategic intent from start to finish and could be considered as top-down propaganda produced by non-state actors aiming to slice off a little state (qua establishment) power for themselves. This sort of multifaceted and highly asymmetrical political conflict is sometimes referred to as 4th generation warfare or 4GW for short.

>Interestingly, one of the main themes that hasn't been the >focus for any past generation, is how controlling language >can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

Isn't that what political correctness is all about?

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

- Theodore Dalrymple

Good quote, until the last sentence as I don't see political correctness being based on lies, obvious or not.

Political correctness is sometimes modern doublespeak. Not always but a large percentage of the diction.

It's certainly the focus of whatever machinery gifted you this definition of "political correctness".

While control of language is not in the public's attention, it has been used quite knowingly for decades.[1]

More recently though, rather than too much propaganda on a savvier public, the more modern addition is to convince a public that ultimate truth is unknowable. Often just by validating conspiracy theories just enough to the rival of real news.

For example: the Russian news for the MH17 shoot down was not a consistent particular story but a wide variety of extremely wild stories on different outlets.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_(1...

Really most conspiracies come out of official stories that are incomplete. People want to complete them and tie together all the loose ends. Sometimes it is just fluxes and highly unlikely events. Sometimes it is because part of the true story is classified and can't be widely discussed. Very rarely is it where the conspiracy goes. Which often rely on large and exceptionally organized groups/individuals that keep a story together (which in reality never happens, because there are leaks everywhere). And frequently those colluding individuals are all morally corrupt. Which I find interesting too, because even corrupt people have morals (which is why we have whistleblowers).

What I do find interesting is Flat Earth Theory. Because it is the only conspiracy theory I'm aware of that there isn't clearly someone gaining power. Like sure, they claim NASA is winning, but it isn't clear what they are gaining from it.

The Flat Earth movement is simply about trolling.

That's a dangerous mistake to make. Some of them clearly are trolling, but there are people who genuinely believe the Earth is flat.

There is no such notion in this world that you wouldn't find some people who genuinely believe it :) I specifically said "the movement", my point being it's not the "true believers" who built and lead the movement. Every trolling platform will attract some people who aren't really in on it. That's one of the core elements of trolling.

Yes, but like many other kinds of jackassery trolling can go really bad. Look at the qanon conspiracy; there have been several suicides already and there's a lot of people emotionally involved to an unhealthy degree. The things that make conspiracies engaging are very similar to those of cults, and what starts out as an ironic joke can devolve. Scientology is an example of something that started as an ironic grift and is now regarded as a rather skeevy cult. The extreme case is something like Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo.

Sure, I'm not saying it can't be harmful. My point is just that I see it as something more akin to the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" than "AIDS was created in government labs".

I definitely believe it started that way, and that is why I suspect it has different features to it, but I do not believe it is purely trolling now. I think idiots found themselves in "good company".

It seems like flooding the zone with false stories might be a way of making the truth actually quite difficult to figure out?

In response, understanding that you are confused might be the best way to start getting a grip on the situation.

Absolutely, it's a basic technique of information warfare. One variation on this is to undermine a political consensus by creating false support for it that appears enthusiastic but depends partially on fallacies.

For example, suppose you run a baseball team engaged in psychological warfare with another baseball team. You are so evenly matched that it is impossible for either of you to win other than by having the loudest cheering fans. Sadly, neither side can gain an advantage through cooler uniforms or better walk-on music, so you are forced to use more clandestine methods.

You dress up as a fan of the opposing team and mingle with their fans. 'I sure love X team, we are so much better than Y team,' you say over and over, and soon you have penetrated to the core of their seating section. Now you strike. 'I sure love X team, we're so much better since we got Babe Ruth on the roster,' you say to anyone who will listen. Of course, Babe Ruth is not on the roster because he is dead these many years. And that realization and subsequent confusion causes a few fans to cheer less while they try to figure out your strange remark. If you can cause sufficient confusion before your tactic is recognized and deployed against your own side, it may be enough to tip the game.

The relevant thing about 1984 is not the time by which this is "supposed to happen".

The important give-away from the book is that when we (ppl of earth) allow our governments and the industry (in whatever form) to take that amount of control over our lives (it also doesn't matter what technical devices exactly are used etc.) we'll be screwed, similarly.

What we face now is the point of no return in this development - that's why it's relevant now but probably won't be for some future (?) generations.

Look around you how many use stuff like Alexa and how they use computers, their phones and what they think about their data. Already a big part of our society has lost the fear of someone taking away the freedom from them that we were used to when we grew up.

The "language can control thought" idea is called linguistic determinism, and has been considered bogus by linguists for a while now, at least the strong form of it.

I agree that "language can control thought" in the sense of parent post and in the sense of the idea of Newspeak wouldn't work. In a free society, the language should naturally evolve to be able to express every important social concept, similar to how creoles form.

On the other hand, that is not to say that an authority can't use language (in the sense of diction) and linguistic censorship as a powerful vehicle to shape thought. Many examples of this exist. Here are some real-world examples

* Modern Hebrew to foster an Israeli identity.

* Sanskritization of Hindustani into an Hindu-Urdu distinction of identity.

* Heavy and active Internet censorship of diction in China to reinforce what topics are taboo for social discussion or treasonous, and remind that Big Brother is watching.

Could you point me towards some linguists who think this idea is bogus?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12165254_Language_s...

This study found that a child's language production abilities predicts performance on a reorientation task: simply - young humans tend to perform like rats until they learn to use prepositional phrases.

OP is referencing the Whorf hyopthesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I was under the impression that Linguistic Relativity (or Sapir-Whorf) as in "the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition." was well recognized. I would think programmers would be particularly fond of this idea, because I for one tend to go about problems differently when I write in different languages (also a technique I use when I'm stuck on a problem).

It seems self-evident to me that if you present humans with a set of novel stimuli, giving them a 'vocabulary' for the configuration of the stimuli would help them remember the configuration more durably.

Ex. sets of 3 blocks of various colors are presented to subjects. Either the experimenter gives a 'control lecture' showing possible upcoming sets and they just list the colors, or they teach the subject a name for each of the possible sets - gibberish like 'flurback' and 'orshwalg'. Present a list of sets, spending the same amount of time 'discussing' each set with each set - either with or without using names.

I would predict the 'names' group would significantly outperform in long-term memory formation of which sets were shown in which order.

Another good example I heard is with colors. Different languages have different words for colors, blue being a specifically unmentioned one in Greek. So if you're calling the sea "wine-red" and the sky white, it just makes sense that you would compare other similar colors with the limited set of categories you have. I mean it seems easy to simulate. You set up a classifier to classify colors but leave out blue. Sure, it is going to poorly predict blues and misclassify them as things like reds, whites, or greens, but isn't that what SW predicts?

I believe that applies to languages in their entirety (eg having no words for numbers). I believe this maybe an important difference.

Changing the emotional context of a small number of words; moving a concept from a socially unacceptable word into a socially acceptable one, seems fairly different. So I think we're talking about two different things here.

So while Orwell's "new speak" seems clearly to embody linguistic determinism, using "collateral damage" for "civilian deaths" inside a larger language may not be.

Considered bogus by many but I don’t think it’s fair to say the door is shut on linguistic determinism.

The word "gay" today conjures a completely different image than it did 100 years ago. Culture controls language.

For a little while it was taking on a new meaning too. Same with another similar word. Hell, there was a South Park episode about the latter.

> Interestingly, one of the main themes that hasn't been the focus for any past generation, is how controlling language can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

To pick an obvious example, the Department of War was renamed to the Department of Defense just 2 years after this book. I better the current funding would look very different had the change not been made.

Language is controlled via wrongthink, aka political correctness in the initial "adherence to soviet policy" definition, this affected a generation of communists and socialist including Orwell himself. There are also modern version of wrongthink, opinions you can't share publicly for fear of reprisal for better or worse.

Control of language seems to be intertwined with controlling history too, being openly racist is now wrongthink, so history gets rewritten into things like "the civil war was about states rights".

Like the other aspects, it's there just not as draconian as Orwell predicted.

You can't disconnect that bit of Newspeak from what really happened, a hostile takeover of the Navy Department by the Army and Air Force that previously comprised the War Department (all this a couple of year before publication). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals for just one bit of fallout from this.

That isn't an issue of language but social pressure and ideas of acceptability and normalization. There will always be ideas which fall into Wrongthink even if what is acceptable varies drastically. Language is the carrier but not the end idea in itself.

So yes you might get different approval ratings depending on how you say it but ideas are a limitation as well.

It isn't like people are appalled by saying "we should kill the Jews" because they said "Jews" instead of "Jewish people" or because they said "kill" instead of "liquidate" or "euthanize". The whole idea is an abhorrent attempt to repeat dark history which gets people to stop while they are a head in the same way a president trying to make an appearance in an open topped vehicle would be vetoed by the Secret Service.

As any Yankee would tell you the fact it was once a slur of their foes doesn't matter.

The problem of rebranding that distorts perceptions of you nature in your initial favor is that unless you change to match the new name, you fail at your new mission/brand.

Having been renamed from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, many years later after the failure to "defend" America well on 9/11 (due to incompetence? or the nature of the Posse Comiatatus Act? or military industrial complex momentum?), the department decided to support creating a new department of defense, Department of Homeland Security, lest anyone get confused about the DoD's true mission and modus operandi (which is more along the lines of "the best defense is a good offense").

That was apparently preferrable to tackling the full mission of "Defense".

Calling anti-authoritarian laissez-faire libertarians "nazis" and "fascists" seems like a modern attempt at repurposing language. Or the term "abortion," a pretty effective euphemism (I'm pro-choice, but it's textbook Orwellian language manipulation). Redefining "racism" to mean "prejudice + power" so that it can only be applied unidirectionally against a single group. This is not "something still to come."

> Or about the term "abortion," a pretty effective euphemism (I'm pro-choice, but it's textbook Orwellian language manipulation).

Abortion is the medical term used for the early termination of any pregnancy. Most commonly, miscarriage. It was used long before the medical procedure we commonly call “an abortion” came into existence.

I agree the terminology makes the politics trickier because it’s easier fan the flames but it certainly wasn’t “textbook Orwellian language manipulation.”

>Interestingly, one of the main themes that hasn't been the focus for any past generation, is how controlling language can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

Considering the daily bickering over preferred pronouns and whether a term is racist you see on most online platforms I think that time is on the horizon.