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Big Brother In The Twenty-First Century

Why I Am Proud To Be A Prole

By Phillip MerrillPublished 4 years ago 16 min read
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Big Brother in the Twenty-First Century

-Or-

Why I Am Proud to Be a Prole

Seventy years ago on June 8, 1949 what would become George Orwell’s last book Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. An instant success, it has continued in its popularity and terms such as “Orwellian” and “Big Brother” have become part of the standard dystopian lexicon. Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, a man at odds with a political system that seeks to maintain absolute power and control over its citizens’ actions and thoughts. In many ways, Orwell’s work has proved prophetic. We are living in a society where nothing we do is private. Our thoughts - and in turn our reality - are being continuously monitored and controlled. While Orwell’s book deals with a strictly political antagonist, the forces at work in our society are not as easily identifiable. This paper will discuss the main images of Nineteen Eighty-Four and compare them to their contemporary counterparts. While this may seem a bleak topic, rest assured that along with his dire predictions, Orwell also indicated a method of fighting back against the oppressiveness of the system.

In the story’s opening scene, Orwell writes, “The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” Big Brother is the figurehead of the political machine that runs Oceania - a nation comprising “the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa”. It isn’t clear if Big Brother ever existed as a real person or if he was simply created to be the ideal leader of what the party members were taught was the most powerful, wealthy, and productive nation on the face of the planet. Big brother is at the same time feared and revered by party members and is given a mythic status. Big Brother’s will is exercised and enforced by the Thought Police. The Thought Police are tasked with tracking down any party member suspected of acting at cross purposes to Big Brother. They, of course rely heavily on accusations from fellow party members to track down perpetrators of thought crime. Their main weapon against thought crime, however is the telescreen. Orwell describes the telescreen in the same opening scene: “Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” In this opening scene, Orwell succeeds in creating a dystopian world which his publisher called, “the most terrifying I have ever read”. (McCrum) Many have compared Big Brother with both current and past government regimes and while it is true that the government does subject its citizens to a seemingly constant stream of propaganda while possessing the means and power to “eavesdrop” on our correspondences and conversations, there is another group more powerful and insidious in their practices - Big Business is our Big Brother.

When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the television was starting to gain popularity and there is no mistaking the similarities between it and the telescreens of Oceania. Telescreens are described as nearly omniscient, but are limited in that they are stationary and must be mounted to a solid vertical surface. Orwell also describes listening devices called mikes that are secreted in places where telescreens cannot be used. Listening devices are also limited in that they are stationary and they can only collect information - not disseminate propaganda. Television are also limited, but today’s smartphones have no limitations - they go wherever we go. They are the perfect device for Big Business to disseminate its propaganda and collect information. It has become a reflex for smartphone users to fill any downtime by turning on their devices and unquestioningly consuming whatever they are fed. If Big Business is our Big Brother, then advertisers are our thought police. As technology has advanced, so has the ability to track not only our purchases; but our habits, our interests, our beliefs, and even our location at any given time. Take Google, for instance. In a story by Ben Popken for NBC News he wrote, “Whether it’s Gmail, the Android smartphone operating system, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Maps, and, of course, Google Search — the company is collecting gigabytes of data about you. Google offers free access to these tools and in return shows you super-targeted advertising, which is how it made $31.2 billion in revenue in just the first three months of 2018. The company’s data collection practices also include scanning your email to extract keyword data for use in other Google products and services and to improve its machine learning capabilities.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston is passed a note surreptitiously by his soon-to-be love interest, Julia. Of the exchange, Winston says, “As for sending a letter through the mails, it was out of the question. By a routine that was not even secret, all letters were opened in transit.” Today we have seen the realization of this prediction by Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother uses propaganda and information gathering to strengthen and maintain the party’s absolute power over its citizens. Big business uses advertising and data collection, not for political power; but to strengthen the culture of consumerism.

When Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, the industrial revolution was in full swing and the production of goods was increasing rapidly thanks to more efficient production practices. In an article for the Pacific Ecologist, Sharon Beder wrote, “The growth in production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries required growing markets. This meant expanding the consuming class beyond the middle and upper classes to include the working classes. Production between 1860 and 1920 increased by 12 to 14 times in the US while the population only increased three times. Supply outstripped demand and problems of scarcity were replaced by problems of how to create more demand. By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation, "over-production" and lack of consumer demand were blamed for recession. More goods were being produced than a population with "set habits and means" could consume. There were two schools of thought about how this problem should be solved. One was that work hours should be decreased and the economy stabilised so production met current needs and work was shared around. This view was held by intellectuals, labour leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America and in Europe, it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could be reached and production beyond those limits would result in increased leisure time for all. The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was over-production could and should be solved by increasing consumption so economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually expand production so as to increase their profits.” Consumerism, unlike the doctrine of the party which is concerned with maintaining power through its control of the thoughts and actions of the party members, is only concerned with keeping the working class working so they can spend their money on products they don’t need so the factories can continue producing and Big Business can maintain control of the wealth of the world. Beder continues by relating “the parable of the democracy of goods". She writes, ”although there was a social hierarchy with wealth concentrated at the top, ordinary people could enjoy the same products and goods that the people at the top did. Joe Blo could drink the same brand of coffee as the wealthiest capitalist. Mary Jane could buy the same soap as the lady with the maid in waiting. The most humble of citizens (although not the poor who were not the targets of these advertisements) could afford to purchase the same quality products as a millionaire. The social message of the parable of the Democracy of Goods was clear. Antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary. The best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices. Incessantly and enticingly repeated, advertising visions of fellowship in a Democracy of Goods encouraged Americans to look to similarities in consumption styles rather than to political power or control of wealth for evidence of significant equality.” The working class were told that even though they were working six days a week in substandard conditions for criminally low wages, life was good as long as they used their wages to purchase name-brand products - and they embraced it. The similarity between the culture of consumerism and the propaganda of the party is chilling. Orwell writes, “He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes.” While Winston “meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life”, the telescreen spewed its propaganda. “The phrase ‘our new happy life’ recurred several times. The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies - more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. Was it possible that they could swallow that? Yes, they swallowed it.” And so are we bombarded with advertising that - thanks to data collectors like Google and their ilk - is specifically targeted to our habits, interests, and beliefs and we are promised that “our new, happy life” is just a click (and several easy payments) away.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the party is not satisfied with controlling its members actions with propaganda, the party’s ultimate goal is to control its members actions by controlling their thoughts. The most important tool to make this goal reality is the Ministry of Truth, where Winston and other party members work tirelessly to rewrite the news to support the claims of the party. Throughout the story, Winston performs his job without fail, but is unable to accept the lies as truths. After Winston’s re-education, Orwell writes, “He accepted everything. The past was alterable. The past had never been altered. Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. ‘If I wished,’ O’Brien had said, ‘I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.’ Winston worked it out. ‘If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.’” Thanks to the internet and all of the digital information that bombards us daily - often with no clear source, we have had to invent the term “fake news” to help keep people from accepting everything that they see as truth. For example, if someone online claims that the Earth is flat and their followers believe that the Earth is flat - for them it becomes truth and all evidence to the contrary becomes false. Big Business is not averse to using deception to get people to buy in to the culture of consumerism. In an article for WIRED, Louise Matsakis wrote, “algorithms are already generating “fake” data for other algorithms to train on. So-called deepfake technology allows propagandists and hoaxers to leverage social media photos to make videos depicting events that never happened. AI can now create millions of synthetic faces that don’t belong to anyone, altering the meaning of stolen identity. This fraudulent data could further distort social media and other parts of the internet.” It could be said that the internet is our Ministry of Truth.

It is important to note that the social hierarchy in Nineteen Eighty-Four and the culture of consumerism are identical. At the top are the inner party and the wealthy. beneath them are the party and the working class. It is to these that propaganda and advertising are targeted. At the bottom are the proletariat, or proles and the poor. This lowest strata of society was deemed worthless by both the party and the wealthy, but Orwell states several times throughout the story that, “If there is hope, it lies with the proles.” What is so enviable about the proles? Winston saw a freedom in not being targeted by the propaganda of the party. “They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.” As a party member, “Always the eyes [were] watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed - no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” What Winston found, however, was that even the thoughts of a party member were vulnerable. The proles were not subject to the propaganda of the party and this is the light that Orwell shined into the dark of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was impossible for a party member to defect to the proletariat and in the early twentieth century when the culture of consumerism was beginning to be preached throughout the industrialized world it would have seemed suicidal to step down from the working class to the poor. Today we can choose not to subject ourselves to the machinations of Big Business. Winston’s first rebellion against the Party was to “open a diary” - to collect his thoughts in a place free from the propaganda of the party. Anything that is written in a digital format is subject to data collection by Big Business, but to write thoughts longhand, with pen and paper is a completely independent and liberating act. For Winston, the act of writing his thoughts in a diary was an act that could be, “punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.” What excuse have we not to take advantage of our freedom to record our thoughts, not only for ourselves; but for future generations. Orwell writes, “‘Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects where the past is still happening?’

‘No.’

‘Then where does the past exist, if at all?’

‘In records. It is written down.’”

If we want our posterity to know what really happened, we need to write it down to ensure that the correct version of history lives on. Writing is important - real writing, not texting or blogging or snapping or tweeting - but what should we write? Orwell: “He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.” Dr. John Schwiebert, professor of Creative Writing and proponent of diary-keeping has said that “first thoughts” or thoughts as they exist before they can be censored for the benefit of any audience are the most important things to write. “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same. Where there is equality there can be sanity.” Winston never had a chance to commit this “first thought” to paper, but how important it is - not just for his world, but for ours as well. Also from Winston, “He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less and intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.” Another “first thought” that not only tells an important truth about love, but also preserves an important memory of a mother by her son.

Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four from a place of darkness. His wife had recently died from complications during a routine surgery. Writing had passed from passion to drudgery as he worked to provide some security for his son. He contracted tuberculosis while writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and died only six months after it was published. That darkness is translated very literally to the story and it is easy to make comparisons between Oceania and our society. There are countless messages that warn of the consequences of relinquishing freedom for security, but the most important message in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that recording our “first thoughts” by writing them down on paper serves not only us, but future generations as well.

Works Cited

Beder, Sharon. “Consumerism: An Historical Perspective.” Pacific Ecologist 01 April. 2004. <http://www.pacificecologist.org/archive/consumerhistory.html>

Matsakis, Louise. “The WIRED Guide to Your Personal Data (and Who Is Using It).” WIRED 15 Feb. 2019. <https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-personal-data- collection>.

McCrum, Robert. “The Masterpiece that Killed George Orwell.” The Guardian 9 May. 2009. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell>.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Great Britain, 1949.

Popken, Ben. “Google Sells the Future, Powered by Your Personal Data.” NBC News 10 May. 2018.<https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future- powered-your-personal-data-n870501>

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