Orwell's Revenge Read Free

own cannibalized essays and books scattered around his desk.
    Happily, however, Orwell’s cut-and-pasting worked far better than the book-writing machines mentioned in 1984. Scissors or no scissors, 1984 is a magnificently original creation. Even today, almost half a century after the book’s publication, a decade after the year itself, the mind-numbing, soul-sapping atmosphere of 1984 still seems grippingly real. You can almost feel Big Brother’s electronic eye as it monitors every stroke of the pen in your diary, as it watches every slight twitch of facecrime in your living room, as it pursues thoughtcrime into the deepest recesses of your brain. 1984 makes technoparanoia seem completely rational. It makes telephobia respectable.
    But—as I have said— 1984 is wrong. Not just wrong as prophecy, but wrong in its architecture, wrong in its mechanics, wrong in its central vision. Exploring why is not just an idle exercise in literary history In working out just how and why Orwell was so fundamentally mistaken, we learn a great deal about our own present, and perhaps our own future too.
V
    I could have worked it out the old-fashioned way, I suppose, but that would hardly have done Orwell justice. Orwell, after all, expected books in our day to be written “by machinery,” with “prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces ofa child’s Meccano set.” Our books, he promised, would be passed “through so many hands that when finished they [would] be no more an individual product than a Ford car atthe end of the assembly line.” By now, Orwell predicted, “thesurviving literature of the past” would have to be “suppressed orat least elaborately rewritten.” Orwell predicted it. I simply delivered.
    My crime began with the physical destruction of a book— 1984 itself. I tore off the cover and cut the 314 pages from the spine. I then fed them into my optical scanner, 30 or so at a time, and transferred them by wire into my computer. 1984 lives there to this day, 590,463 bytes of ASCII text. For good measure, I scanned in the rest of Orwell’s books, essays, letters, and BBC broadcasts too. 1 To locate biographical details of Orwell’s life, I scanned in MichaelShelden’s excellent Orwell: The Authorized Biography. Altogether, these writings now reside in 9,546,486 bytes, which is to say a hundred million slivers of magnetized ferric dust glued to the surface of a spinning platter called a hard drive.
    Then I set to work. Real names and faces rose up before me from the digitized mists of Orwell’s writings and life—Orwell himself most of all, in his several incarnations. Orwell the real-life Winston Smith, the man who ended his broadcasting career at the BBC feeling “like a sucked orange,” the man who lived most of his modest life all but unrecognized under his real name, Eric Blair. Orwell again, the man who imagined the hyper-tech Ministry of Love, armed with the technology by which Big Brother is always watching you. And Orwell a third time—Orwell the tinkerer, the lover of gadgets, the man who, by his own account, was “perpetually seeing, as it were, the ghosts of possible machines that might save me the trouble ofusing my brain or muscles.”
    Around Orwell, Orwell, and Orwell, there congregated real people from Orwell’s own lives. Brendan Bracken—“B.B.”—who headed Britain’s Ministry of Information during Orwell’stenure at the BBC, renamed O’Brien by Orwell in 1984. Duff Cooper—the man Bracken replaced as head ofthe Ministry of Information. Vaughan Wilkes—the sadistic headmaster who tormented and caned young Orwell during his miserable schooldays at Crossgates. J. D. Bernal—signed up by Orwell to give BBC talks on “the future of science and the position of the scientific worker underCapitalism, Fascism and Socialism.” Cyril