1984 is seemingly the only book everyone has read.
It is really frustrating to see people simplify all economics, (evidence-based) social psychology and proper appraisal of philosophy applied to historical perspectives only to reduce our future to these bizarre extremes.
The only reason people even give 1984 its credibility post Cold-War is that its two chief components, the television and surveillance camera became a reality. This is not to trivialise the presence of surveillance, but honestly, I'm amazed anyone can read it past the hysterical Room 101 bit.
BWN is basically just 1984 told from the bourgeoisie perspective, the specifics are different but both themes are two sides of the same coin.
tl;dr 1984 is the print version of those crackpot websites that are all made in Frontpage, where every other word is formatted differently and there's a maddening tree of stream of consciousness ramblings, some of which lead to nowhere. The whole hoary debate can be summarised as basically one legible paragraph of that.
It is really frustrating to see people simplify all economics, (evidence-based) social psychology and proper appraisal of philosophy applied to historical perspectives only to reduce our future to these bizarre extremes. The only reason people even give 1984 its credibility post Cold-War is that its two chief components, the television and surveillance camera became a reality. This is not to trivialise the presence of surveillance, but honestly, I'm amazed anyone can read it past the hysterical Room 101 bit. BWN is basically just 1984 told from the bourgeoisie perspective, the specifics are different but both themes are two sides of the same coin.
tl;dr 1984 is the print version of those crackpot websites that are all made in Frontpage, where every other word is formatted differently and there's a maddening tree of stream of consciousness ramblings, some of which lead to nowhere. The whole hoary debate can be summarised as basically one legible paragraph of that.