‘Orwellian’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
The overuse of allusions to ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ is dulling our thinking about speech, technology, and politics.
IF GEORGE ORWELL WERE ON HIS FEET TODAY, he’d drop to his knees.
Please, he’d beg us.
For Pete’s sake, you idiots.
Stop using the term “Orwellian.”
Typically, “Orwellian” is shorthand for Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some things are indeed “Orwellian” in this sense (say, life in North Korea). And many things called “Orwellian” inaccurately, or with only limited precision, are nonetheless legitimate problems (Donald Trump in power springs to mind). At all events, like many other once-useful labels—“Communist,” “patriot”—“Orwellian” has been irredeemably corrupted. Slavishly repeated by unreflective hacks looking to score political points, it is now tired, broken, and unusable. (“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” That’s Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” to which we will return.)
A case in point is the rash of rightwing complaints about the “Orwellian” nature of “Big Tech censorship.” Twitter’s 2020 decision (briefly) to curtail the spread of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story? Orwellian. Twitter’s and Facebook’s decisions to ban Donald Trump after the January 6th riot? Orwellian. Apple’s and Google’s decisions not to carry Parler in their app stores? Orwellian. The Facebook Oversight Board’s decision to delay the reinstatement of Trump’s Facebook account? You get the idea.
Earlier this month, a federal district judge in Louisiana, Terry A. Doughty, took his turn in a ruling restricting the Biden administration’s ability to communicate with social media platforms. Discussing collaboration between federal officials and the platforms to combat misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, Judge Doughty declared that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Conservative outlets embraced and celebrated this line. They sang it. They gobbled it up.
This is not a well-crafted judicial opinion. Writing in the New York Times, law professor Kate Klonick observes that Judge Doughty used “cherry-picked legal analysis” to impose an “overbroad injunction” cabined (or not?) by “a baffling list of exceptions.” The bottom line was that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment, in the judge’s view, by frequently hectoring social media platforms about posts or accounts of which the government disapproved. “But what is unclear from Judge Doughty’s clunky opinion,” Klonick points out, is “how to distinguish permissible government pressure from impermissible government coercion.” On this crucial question, the judge “tells us nothing.” The Biden administration promptly appealed. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed the injunction and set an expedited hearing.
The lawsuit was brought by GOP attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. The founder of the far-right website Gateway Pundit is now a plaintiff. And much of Judge Doughty’s opinion reads more like a piece ripped from the Federalist or Breitbart than a court document. Beneath the partisan veneer, however, are serious First Amendment issues. “I agree with Judge Doughty,” Klonick writes, “that the apparent pressure that the Biden administration placed on the platforms is questionable.” Indeed it is. The “jawboning” by the government—attempts, in emails and meetings, to sway the platforms’ content-moderation decisions—was persistent and determined.
One of the strangest pieces of evidence is also one of the most damning. Irritated, it seems, not about COVID-19 or election misinformation, but about a bug reducing the reach of President Biden’s Facebook account, a White House official veered off on a power trip. “Are you guys fucking serious?” he huffed in an email. “I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.” Does it worry you that the state and the platforms had a (surreptitious!) relationship of this sort? Does it make you uncomfortable that a faceless government agent thought he could talk to any private media outlet this way? Because it should.
But how does Orwell enter the picture? Judge Doughty asked the government’s lawyers if they’ve read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Has he?
A BRIEF REFRESHER. Winston Smith is born into a world of poverty and chaos. (“He remembered . . . the piles of rubble everywhere, . . . the gangs of youths in shirts all the same color, . . . the intermittent machine-gun fire in the distance.”) His father disappears when he is very young. One day, he snatches a small chocolate ration from his starving baby sister. (“His sister, conscious of having been robbed of something, had set up a feeble wail. His mother drew her arm round the child and pressed its face against her breast. Something in the gesture told him that his sister was dying.”) He runs off for a few hours. When he returns, he finds that his mother and sister have been abducted. (“This was already becoming normal at that time.”)
By the fictitious 1984 in which the novel is set, the country in which Smith lives—once Britain, now “Airstrip One”—is under the totalitarian control of the Party and its leader, Big Brother. Surveillance of party members is ubiquitous. Even in their homes, the Thought Police watches them on telescreens. “You had to live . . . in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” The Thought Police punish thoughtcrime, that is, the mere thinking of bad thoughts. “It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety . . .”
Smith buys a diary. Hiding in a corner in his apartment, he scrawls “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER” in it. That hardly matters, since having a diary at all is punishable by death or forced labor. And anyway, the Party catches every thoughtcrime eventually, even those that never leave one’s mind. “Nobody ever escaped detection, and nobody ever failed to confess.”
And so it proves. Smith has an affair with a woman named Julia. They are both arrested. They are tortured and reeducated in the Ministry of Love. Facing the prospect of having his face eaten off by hungry rats, Smith betrays Julia. She betrays him too. They are released. During a chance encounter, they agree that they no longer care for each other. Smith accepts that the Party can force you to believe that 2 + 2 = 5. He is not allowed even to hate the Party before he dies. “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
It is true that a dystopian novel can serve as a warning rather than a prediction. Don’t start down this path. But Orwell’s goal, in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, was to disabuse the Western left of the “Soviet myth,” the better to clear the way for Orwell’s idea of proper socialism. Some perspective, in other words, is in order. Consider contemporary Russia, where, as Jonah Goldberg recently noted, Stalin remains widely admired, dissenters not-so-mysteriously fall out windows, news broadcasts are a farcical exercise in doublethink, and the average citizen has a fraction the wealth of an average resident of Mississippi (our poorest state). That’s the path Orwell warned against. To invoke the book when some tweets get taken down is to trivialize everything for which it stands.
MOST PEOPLE WHO CITE NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR these days are thinking of one theme in particular—how the Party manipulates public opinion. Newspeak. The Two Minutes Hate. Perpetual war. Memory holes. These are the elements of the book that the critics of “Big Tech censorship” have in mind. Judge Doughty didn’t equate the federal government with the Party; he equated it with the Ministry of Truth.
But this doesn’t improve matters. The Ministry of Truth is the master of all human knowledge. It “continuous[ly] alter[s] . . . newspapers, . . . books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs.” Every record is falsified, every picture repainted, every statue renamed. As a result, the Party is never wrong. “A number of ‘The Times’ which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it.” Under the Party’s rule, “all history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
Without evincing any sense of irony, Judge Terry A. Doughty, a life-tenured member of the independent judiciary, announces that we’re falling under the sway of a “Ministry of Truth.” The assertion is self-refuting. Similarly, if the government’s conduct were truly “straight out of Orwell,” as Matt Taibbi proposes, we wouldn’t hear him say so. Any “Ministry of Truth” worth its salt would stamp out all this judicial and journalistic dissent. Again, this is not to endorse the government’s behavior toward social media platforms. Call it a pressure campaign. Call it a spin machine. Call it overreach. But don’t call it “Orwellian.” Don’t cheapen the message of Orwell’s book. Don’t be ridiculous.
If they’d stop and think, those uttering “social media” and “Orwellian” in the same breath might realize that the dynamic at play here is quite contrary to what’s depicted in their favorite story. Smith’s world is one of information scarcity. What the Party says goes. Our world, by contrast, is one of information abundance. We’re living, in fact, through an information explosion. With so many sources of information available to us, we don’t have to place our trust in any one authority. We don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything—and, increasingly, we don’t.
“Facts were once dear; now they are cheap.” So wrote James Gleick in his 2011 book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. Gleick acknowledged the possibility that a “soulless Internet” would usher in “a world of information glut and gluttony; of bent mirrors and counterfeit texts; scurrilous blogs, anonymous bigotry, banal messaging. Incessant chatter. The false driving out the true.” But he nursed his optimism. That, Gleick said a dozen years ago, is not our fate. More recent commentators aren’t so sure. The familiar refrain today is that information drives disintegration.
We’re entitled to our own opinions, we’re often told, but not to our own facts. Except that now we can pick and choose the facts that suit us. And so we descend into what internet researcher Renée DiResta calls “bespoke pseudo-realities.” “Readers today,” she explains, are “contending with a deluge of hyperpartisan content, tailored precisely to preexisting beliefs.” Orwell’s Ministry of Truth continuously “rectifies” a unified social narrative. “Our information ecosystem,” says DiResta, “no longer assists us in reaching consensus. In fact, it structurally discourages it.” As the sole organ of truth, the Party controls reality itself. Conversely, claims DiResta, “we have a proliferation of irreconcilable understandings of the world and no way of bridging them.” (Incidentally, DiResta appears in Judge Doughty’s opinion—and is grossly misquoted.)
Has the Biden administration been striving to keep the nation anchored to a common conception of reality? That is one way of looking at its campaign against online misinformation. Put to one side how far the government may go, under our Constitution, in that regard. The more important point, for present purposes, is that the government can’t pull off the stunt. It can’t uproot “bespoke pseudo-realities” by browbeating Twitter and Facebook. Look no further than the divergent reactions to Judge Doughty’s opinion. It’s as if people were reading completely different texts. And in a sense they are. That’s what inhabiting “bespoke pseudo-realities” means.
DiResta talks about “persecution profiteers”—online influencers (such as Taibbi) with everything to gain from pretending to battle Big Brother:
In a world where attention is scarce, the political media-of-one entrepreneurs, in particular, are incentivized to filter what they cover and to present their thoughts in a way that galvanizes the support of those who will boost them—humans and algorithms alike. They are incentivized to divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims.
In other words, they are incentivized to become propagandists.
These “new propagandists” benefit from “perpetuat[ing] the crisis of trust” and the “fracturing of the public.” They therefore depict themselves as “independent free-thinkers” fighting a “‘mainstream’ media” that’s “in cahoots with the government and Big Tech to silence the people.” Many of their readers think that they’ve broken free of the Orwellian grip; that they’ve “escaped propaganda.” In truth, DiResta sighs, “they are simply marinating in a different flavor.”
ALRIGHT, WE CAN’T KNOW FOR SURE that Orwell would hate the term “Orwellian.” Generally speaking, it’s foolish to guess at what long-dead figures would make of modern trends. As these things go, however, this one’s open and shut. It’s all right there in “Politics and the English Language.”
The debasement of words opens the way, Orwell believed, to the debasement of politics. Those who use “stale images,” “exhausted idioms,” “worn-out metaphors,” and “prefabricated phrases” aren’t interested in what they’re saying. Careless language leads to careless thought, careless thought to careless policy. One of Orwell’s examples: “People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”
“If one jeers loudly enough,” Orwell concluded, one can from time to time “send some worn-out and useless phrase . . . into the dustbin where it belongs.” Writing in 1946, Orwell was already consigning “fascism” (an epithet that “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”) to the scrapheap. Today, it is safe to assume, he’d dump the likes of “woke,” “deep state,” and “fake news.” And perhaps “misinformation” as well. “Orwellian” could hardly fail to go.
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