going crazy from the heat…i’m on my way …

going crazy from the heat…i’m on my way down to All Saints Church in Sutton Courtenay for the #1984symposium and to pay homage to Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell. As I make the pilgrimage down to Sutton Courtenay, what I’m holding in my mind is this: Orwell didn’t predict the future. What he did do was give us names to patterns that recur whenever power seeks to dominate perception:

Telescreen
• Contemporary echo: smartphones, smart devices, CCTV, digital surveillance

Newspeak
• Contemporary echo: euphemism, jargon, slogan-thinking, language control

Doublethink
• Contemporary echo: ideological contradiction, tribal cognition

Memory hole
• Contemporary echo: deleted records, rewritten narratives, flooded archives

Two Minutes Hate
• Contemporary echo: outrage cycles, pile-ons, algorithmic fury

Big Brother
• Contemporary echo: personality cults, symbolic power, surveillance state

Thoughtcrime
• Contemporary echo: self-censorship, social policing, ideological conformity

Prolefeed
• Contemporary echo: infinite scroll, distraction media, low-grade content loops

Unperson
• Contemporary echo: deplatforming, erasure, algorithmic invisibility