1984 Was Published 70 Years Ago

If you work in any aspect of tech, one book that you have to have read is George Orwell's 1984. Aspects of the impact of technology on life are always being compared to things in the book. For example, Big Brother watches everyone through TV screens, but it turns out that the closest thing we have to Big Brother is that we voluntarily carry around TV screens, cameras, and location devices in our pockets. I guess Orwell wasn't dystopian enough!

1984 was published on June 8, 1949, 70 years ago tomorrow. George Orwell would die from tuberculosis just a few months later in January 1950. The title of the book was picked since Orwell was writing in 1948 and simply reversed the last two digits to end up with a year that was almost unimaginably far into the future.

Many schoolchildren are forced to read Animal Farm, but I think it is a lot less interesting than some of his other books. His first book was Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. He worked in jobs like dishwasher in both Paris and London. In fact, the working title was A Scullion's Diary. I haven't read it since I was an undergraduate. Orwell's real name was Eric Blair, but he didn't want to embarrass his family by being known as a hobo as a result of the book, so he picked the pseudonym George Orwell as a good English-sounding name.

Probably his most well-known early book is The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, about social conditions in the north of England, and especially miners and the coal mines. That part forms the first half of the book, and the second half is about Orwell's development of his social conscience. And then there is Animal Farm, which, of course, is an allegory about the USSR.

When Orwell wrote 1984, he was already suffering from tuberculosis, and for health reasons, he moved to the Isle of Jura (off the coast of Scotland) to an isolated house called Barnhill. So an isolated house on an isolated island, which is only accessible by the much larger Islay, famous to whisky lovers all over the world for its peaty whiskies like Lagavulin and Laphroaig. I've actually been there. It is on the footpath from the end of the road (there's pretty much only one road on Jura) to the headland that overlooks Corryvreckan. Under certain tidal conditions, Corryvreckan is a huge whirlpool with 30-foot waves making enough noise to be heard 10 miles away. It is the third largest whirlpool in the world (the first two are in Norway). When I was there, though, it was flat as a millpond. If you live in the Bay Area and have ever visited the legendary surf spot Maverick's by Half Moon Bay, you may have had the same experience, finding it hard to imagine that sometimes there are some of the biggest waves in the world there.

Hollywood got its hands on 1984 in 1956. The whole point of the book is that Winston Smith and Julia, the protagonists, are totally crushed by the system and become loyal followers. But Hollywood didn't like that ending, so the 1956 version gave it a different ending with Winston and Julia defiant to the end. However, I just looked on imdb and it says that the UK ending (which I saw) and the US ending (which I never have) are different. Hollywood did a remake of 1984 in, of course, 1984. I've not seen that one, but I presume it stuck close to the book. However, I think the best version of 1984's world-view is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which conveys the "Orwellian" atmosphere brilliantly.

The other "Orwellian" novel from the first half of the 20th century is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932. Like 1984, I think everyone in tech should read it.  In that book, much of the population is pacified with a drug called soma, which has at various stages been compared to rock and roll, television, video games, and our current bogeyman, either smartphones in general or social media.

If you do any writing as part of your job, I recommend reading Orwell's essay, Politics and the English Language. It is online and can be read at that link. It is about 5,000 words long so it is not a major investment of time. It is both wonderful advice, and a wonderful example of taking his own advice. It also has some hilarious examples of bad writing.

His condensed rules in the middle, which you've probably seen before, since they have been quoted so much, are:                           

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

A sentence from the final paragraph:

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.

That's something I aim for every day here on Breakfast Bytes.

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