This article has been published to coincide with Episode Six of Mashable's new podcast,Taming The Younger Sister-in-Law Origin [Uncut] Fiction Predictions. Listenhere.
George Orwell's 1984 turns 70 this June, yet it feels more prophetic than ever. Its tale of a future in which a totalitarian regime has assumed full control over an individual's body and mind strikes a nerve in a world where privacy and truth seem constantly under threat.
SEE ALSO: This 18th century prison design predicted the rise of our surveillance society1984 is, in many ways, a handbook for future generations. A warning about the power of surveillance to mould a docile society (the book saw a massive spike in sales back in 2013 following Snowden's revelations about America's National Security Agency's spying program).
It's also a forecast on how attempts to erode public trust in facts and historical records can destabilise democracy (1984 shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list in 2017 in an apparent response to President Trump's blatant disregard for the truth).
George Orwell mural picture Southwold, Suffolk, , UK. Credit: UIG via Getty Images More and more, the term 'Orwellian' is applied to anything and everything – from China's surveillance state apparatus to Russia's attempts at information warfare. But when everything can be seen to seemingly fit into the grotesque 1984 scenario, the comparisons start to become banal and unoriginal.
So, for the 70th anniversary of the book, we used our Fiction Predictions podcast to dive into its pages looking for answers to a central question – Are we living in 1984?
To help guide us in our journey, we talked to Professor Jean Seaton, Director of the Orwell Foundation and Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster.
The short answer, according to Seaton, is "No, we are not living in 1984." Despite the rise of social media as the ultimate telescreen (everything we do online is collected, down to the smallest details) and propaganda machine (just think of the rise of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, incels, far-right movements to name but a few), we need to use our words sparingly.
A demonstrator holds up George Orwell's book '1984' during a rally in Bangkok on February 14, 2015. Credit: AFP/Getty Images The future tyranny that Orwell feared, rooted in his witnessing of the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s and 40s, did not succeed in its total domination. After all, 1984 ends on a note of hope in its final chapter, a chapter "no one bothers to read because it is quite boring," Seaton says. But a chapter, nonetheless, that hints at a future in which Winston Smith's diary, the ultimate transgression, is preserved; a future in which Big Brother is no longer.
It's that sense of hope, mimicked in some ways by the spectacular, yet absolutely unsurprising, fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, that is often overlooked when it comes to 1984'sprescience. But it's that detail that should be seen as the most important and lasting legacy of 1984 when it comes to its foreshadowing of the future. "It reframes everything you’ve read before into something that’s survived, not something that’s disappeared," Seaton says.
Instead of reading 1984with fear and looking at the contemporary world through an Orwellian lens, the book encourages us to not simply sit idly by. Ultimately, it's a guide and warning about how to preserve and protect those things that matter most – truth and history.
The Orwell Foundation stage the UK's first ever live cover-to-cover reading of 1984back in 2017. We encourage you to have a watch:
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