Orwellian wrote:
To me, 1984 represents a call to arms against totalitarian communism and fascism, all forms of totalitarianism. He took the idea of a strong central government and extrapolated it to the extreme point where the State controls thought and even history.
I was thinking about this the other day, and it seems we may well get to the point where technology would allow the State to control history and wipe people away or "vanish" them as occurred in the book. After all, a sufficiently good spider with face recognition, etc., could scour the web in seconds and eliminate a person. With the wave of the future being terminals accessing "clouds" like iCloud, the idea of a person having an "offline" computer is going to become obsolete in not too many years. Once that occurs, for all intents and purposes, everyone's informational lives will be within the reach of the Ministry of Information of 1984.
I wonder if Orwell's dystopian imaginings will eventually prove prescient?
I don't think we'll see this kind of situation in the world again. With the easy exchange of information accross borders that the Internet has enabled, I don't think it would be possible to unperson a person. Certainly not on anything more than a very small scale... something which probably happens occasionally anyway, but that's probably nothing new.
Nowadays, many corporations are more powerful than most governments, but even they don't have the international reach required to take the kind of control required to make life histories disappear on a large scale.
There are just too many observers to make it happen.
1984 wasn't even fantasy really. Orwell was writing about what was actually happening in communist dictatorships at the time, albeit in an exaggerated way. Doublethink is real, 2 minute hate is real. These sorts of things were actually happening at the time, Orwell just developed them and gave them a name.
See his avatar....