View from the Side: Big Brother is Watching You

As I mentioned in my previous blog that I started reading one of the books in My List, Nineteen Eighty-four (1984) by George Orwell, one of my friends emailed me an important information regarding the book.  

Written by the then ailing Author, Eric Blair (popularly known as George Orwell), the book which was published in 1949 and his last novel, brought him lasting fame and continues to haunt readers of the  dystopian future he described in the book.  The year 1984 has come and gone, but Orwell’s prophecy of a frightening world is still timely and true to some extent (I’ll be writing a review of the book once I finish re-reading it, since I already read it when I was in high school).
As a complement to the novel, a visual interpretation entitled “Haunting Illustrations for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Introduced by the Courageous Journalist Who Broke the Edward Snowden Story” was sourced from https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/19/folio-society-george-orwell-1984/:
In the introduction, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger — who broke the Edward Snowden story in a masterwork of journalism and stood up to real-life Big Brother by refusing to hand over Snowden’s data to the government — explores the parallels, contrasts, and essential civic discourse springing from the difference between the two camps:

As the full impact of the Snowden revelations sank in, many people made the same connection, and Amazon announced a dramatic rise in sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four. To some, the young NSA analyst had revealed a world which was near-Orwellian; others thought that he had described a state of affairs that Orwell could barely have imagined. Just before Christmas 2013 a US District Judge, Richard Leon, pronounced the NSA’s surveillance capabilities to be “almost Orwellian.” Orwellian, beyond Orwellian, not-quite Orwellian. As the debate ricocheted around the world there soon developed the counter-school: not at all Orwellian. Or even, “Orwell got it wrong,” ignoring Thomas Pynchon’s caution about Nineteen Eighty-Four that “prophecy and prediction are not quite the same.” The not-Orwellians found it offensive that a book describing a totalitarian dystopia should be confused with the efforts of one of the most open, liberal democracies in the world to defend itself. And so the debate about the “Orwellian” nature of what the NSA was up to became a proxy for discussion of the issue itself.

But the book’s most important legacy, as Rusbridger suggests, lives in precisely that limbo between what Orwell got right and what he got wrong — a testament to “the unknowable question of what future purpose technology might be put to,” the darker answers to which we must at the very least acknowledge, even as we strive to offer ennobling ones.

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