Why Orwell's "1984" is not the right book for understanding our times
Neil Postman saw the threat as coming from our own mental depletion due to our amusements and distractions
This is my fourth and final post on Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. The first post on why I’m re-reading it is here. The second, on how this book is the OG Red Pill, is here. My interview with Major Garrett of CBS News about the book is here.
In July, I went through Aurelian Craiutu’s Why Not Moderation?: Letters to Young Radicals
In June, I went through Yuval Levin's American Covenant
In May, I went through Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
“As [Huxley] saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think … Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance." - Neil Postman
Neil Postman's classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, makes the most compelling case I've ever seen for how too often we are "drowned in a sea of irrelevance."
To do so, Postman offers a clear contrast between our current world in which we don't even think about the dominance of images, and the world that existed before TV. This was a society centered around writing and reading, which created a "typographic mind" in the minds of most people.
Words reigned supreme in the world before TV. Now, images dominate. That is the key and core argument at the heart of Postman's book. Over the last 80 years or so, we have conducted an experiment in how we think, talk, spend our leisure time, that is different from hundreds of years before it. Whether it was an oral culture, before the advent of the printing press in 1400's, or the typographic culture in which reading became widespread after that, words had always been the dominant mode of communication.
In a few decades, all that has been unseated, and we have gone through a transformation into a world of images that reigned from the 1950's to 2000 or 2010. And over the last 20 years we have layered on top of that image-based world another level of atomization and distraction: the world of the internet and computers in our pockets.
Here's what Postman said about words: "Words cannot guarantee their truth content. Rather, they assemble a context in which the question, 'Is this true or false?' is relevant."
Today in 2024, some believe that censorship is one of the greatest threats we face. Postman might argue that our bigger problem is that our faculties for discerning what is true or false have eroded, declined, diminished. If true, it would be because of the disappearance of a typographic culture.
"To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another," (51) Postman wrote.
"Words have very little to recommend them except as carriers of meaning."
I have noticed in recent years that, increasingly, words have become weapons for many people in public life, rather than "carriers of meaning," or tools for moving toward meaning.
One of Postman's most incisive insights is that TV obliterates context. This is one of his sharpest arguments. Re-reading this book reminded me that this insight created the hunger in me for long-form storytelling: magazine stories, books, documentaries. This is why I've written two books.
"We are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the 'Now ... this' world of news — a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events — that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction," he wrote. "Contradiction requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears" (109).
This assumed incoherence levies a spiritual toll on us. It creates existential anguish, because we do not know who or where we are. This nihilistic atmosphere pushes some toward depression and others toward grasping for identity wherever they can find it.
In part because we have lost much of our skill for knowing true from false, Postman would argue that our biggest problem is not who controls information, but how capable we are of knowing good info from bad info. This is why he dismisses George Orwell's 1984 as far less relevant than Alduous Huxley's Brave New World.
Huxley "believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled," he wrote. "Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversion."
"There is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth as lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference" (110).
As Postman wrote in the foreword:
"In Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think ... What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."
Our brightest analysts of modern times have come to the very same conclusion. Zeynep Tufekci published a book a few years ago called Twitter and Tear Gas. She looked at how governments or political movements do not need to control the flow of information to control or dominate. Instead, they create a vacuum of authority by making all information and authority questionable, and then fill that vacuum with their own strong arm political tactics. If nothing can be known for sure, and disagreement cannot be solved through dialogue and negotiation, vis a vis politics, then might makes right.
It is almost as if Tufekci had just read Postman's foreword when she wrote this section of her book:
Surveillance and repression do not operate primarily in the way that our pre-digital worries might have forecast. This is not necessarily Orwell’s 1984. Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and the blocking of information, the newer methods include demonizing online media and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information overload, doubt, confusion, harasment, and distraction. This in turn makes it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked public sphere and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.1 Rather than acting directly on dissidents' political communications, many governments try to embarrass or harass activists by hacking and releasing their personal and private information. If anything, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appears more prescient than Orwell’s 1984, which imagined totalitarianism with centralized control of information—more applicable to the Soviet Union than to today’s networked public sphere.
Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people. The Internet’s relatively chaotic nature, with its surfeit of information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
This has been labeled "censorship by noise" by another brilliant analyst, Peter Pomerantsev.
"What if the powerful can now use 'information abundance' to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the meaning of freedom of speech on its head to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability," he wrote in his 2019 book This is Not Propaganda.
In a recent article, Peter said that some political movements “use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth."
So be wary of those who yell about free speech and censorship the loudest. There might be an ulterior motive, some fuzzy thinking, and sometimes some very bad faith behind all that noise.
That’s not to say there are not reasons for concern about control of speech. Yet in terms of those who do control information, it is far more the corporate sector than the government these days.
"In our era, the power of private entities has grown to rival that of nation-states," wrote Tim Wu, the author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, who worked in the Biden White House as an adviser on technology and competition policy. "Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoonlike encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous."
Does that mean that every time a social media or big tech platform takes content down or restricts its reach that this is a violation of our speech rights? Definitely not. Might it be something that is legally allowed yet still deeply concerning? Perhaps. But not necessarily all the time.
“Content moderation on social media platforms, a term that reactionaries have sought to make synonymous with ‘censorship,’ is a broad practice that covers everything from disrupting terrorists to dealing with trolls,” writes Renee Diresta. “It often involves making hard choices about online speech to shape platform norms and conduct that enable the platform to deliver a certain experience to users. It does at times veer into bad calls that stifle free expression—but the other side of the equation involves tackling actual crimes.”
Take Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, who was arrested last week in France. There has been a lot of concerned commentary about this story and what it means for freedom of speech. But Diresta cautions that "while the outraged defenders of Durov rush to cast him as a martyr for free speech, the facts suggest a darker reality—one where a tech platform’s negligence may have facilitated heinous crimes, and where accountability is now being reframed as censorship."
In closing, Postman's book raises an uncomfortable question: what should we actually do about the problems of our image-dominated, screen saturated and ever distracted age?
Postman flirts with despairing nihilism at one point in his book. "Not everyone believes a cure is needed, and ... there probably isn't any," he wrote.
But a few pages later, he concludes on a different note: "The solution must be found in how we watch ... It might be possible for Americans to begin talking back to their television sets .. for no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are."
"To ask is to break the spell."
The same is true of our phones and computers. So, yes, try to read more. Try to watch less TV. Go on more walks. Start a creative project. Spend more time in front of friends and less in front of screens.
But when we do watch, or scroll, don't always sit passively. Talk back to that screen. Ask questions. Interrogate what is happening to you and those around you. Break the spell.
The day this post was published, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging two Russian nationals with funneling millions of dollars to prominent social media influencers, who have millions of followers, to help them spread their political messages in what DOJ called a “covert campaign to interfere and influence the outcome of our country's elections."