If you think of an example of a totalitarian dystopia, you’ll likely picture the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell’s book is known worldwide, still serving as a stark literary warning 42 years after its setting and 77 years after its publication. The book has entered the popular lexicon and culture to such an extent that it is rarely banned, even in countries with totalitarian governments.

Yet in Western democracies, we suffer surveillance more severe than Orwell could have imagined. The construction of a commercial digital panopticon has fooled many into believing they are still free. But Big Tech is watching you.

Don’t take our word for it. Let’s examine the technology and surveillance methods mentioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and compare them to the world we live in today.

Note: This text contains spoilers for the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. But come on, surely you’ve read it!

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Parallels Between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Modern Surveillance Capitalism

Telescreens vs Cellphones
In Orwell’s Oceania, two-way monitors exist in every home. The screens broadcast propaganda while simultaneously watching and listening to residents.

"The instrument (called a telescreen) could be reduced, but there was no way of shutting it off completely... You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Today’s telescreens are not just in our apartments: they are in our pockets. We choose to carry them everywhere and never turn them off. Even when deactivated, they submit your location to companies that build detailed user profiles and keep all data on file, ready to hand to the government when requested.

Thought Police vs Data Mapping
The secret police, who monitor for "thoughtcrime", are one of the most terrifying presentations of total power in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Citizens have no private space, not even inside their own minds.

While the technology for this ultimate intrusion does not yet exist, extensive behavioral analysis from reams of data trails, metadata, and social graph mapping can sometimes reveal more about an individual’s beliefs and behavior than they themselves know. You don't need to speak out; your purchase history, location data, and search queries reveal your "deviance."

In cities like Xinjiang, algorithms analyze data (ethnicity, travel patterns, internet usage, purchasing habits) to flag individuals as "potential terrorists" or "separatists" before any crime is committed. Those flagged face intense surveillance, mandatory re-education, or detention.

Risk assessment tools such as Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) and Public Safety Assessment (PSA) are used in US courts to determine bail, sentencing, and parole. These algorithms assign a "risk score" predicting the likelihood of re-offending. A high score can lead to pre-trial detention (jail before trial) or longer sentences, effectively punishing the probability of future crime.

Police are dispatched to specific locations or to monitor specific individuals identified by the algorithm as "likely offenders." This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where increased police presence leads to more arrests in those areas, reinforcing the data.

In 2023, the Metropolitan Police (UK) established a specific unit focused on "pre-emptive" action against individuals deemed at risk of radicalization or serious violence. They use data to intervene before an attack occurs.

Thought crime and ‘malicious’ intention are already being treated as illegal.

Informants vs Cancel Culture
Informants in totalitarian states are those who see irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing against the State. Neighbors, colleagues, and even family members are incentivized or compelled to report ‘undesirable’ behavior.

In the Western world, our governments offer no incentives to flag undesirable behavior, yet we still see it. This phenomenon is the social currency of virtue signaling. Behavior that is considered undesirable but not illegal can still be severely punished through the loss of reputation. Publish an extreme opinion online, or say the wrong thing while being recorded, and you could find yourself out of a job, or being shunned by your nearest and dearest. Sometimes, this ‘societal moderation’ is warranted. It ensures that when no law has been broken, people are still held to account for their actions. But the incentives are skewed. Social media has led to such polarity that users gain a huge amount of praise, reputation, and social standing for calling out perceived wrongdoing. This means that comments on current events turn into a pile-on, and allegations can morph into accepted truths. With enough people thinking the worst without examining what was said or done, people can be ‘cancelled’ without justification.

Facecrime vs Facial Recognition
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother monitors citizens’ facial expressions for signs of dissent. While a frown during a political rally might not get you arrested yet, facial recognition is coming to a city near you. Storing biological data (e.g., fingerprints) is already normalized in many countries, and facial recognition is just the next step.

The Safe City initiative in Moscow involves thousands of cameras with facial recognition and license plate readers. The system is used to identify individuals who attended protests or are associated with opposition groups. These individuals are then flagged for "preventative" visits by police or administrative harassment.

Soon, algorithms will be able to analyze movement patterns to detect "suspicious behavior" (e.g., lingering in certain areas), leading to police intervention before any illegal act is observed.

Vaporization vs Permanent Digital Footprint
Orwell imagined a world where all records of a human life could be wiped out instantly by the State. With total control over paper records, a government can do this, but in the digital world, it’s impossible to know if you hold all the copies of a file. In 2026, vaporization is impossible.

On the one hand, this preserves difficult truths that reflect badly on the powers that be. For example, did you know that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself?

On the other hand, permanent records and infinite reproducibility mean that anything published by or about private citizens remains forever. For some people, this can be as bad as not existing at all.

Newspeak vs AI Filters and Deplatforming
Limiting the building blocks of communication controls not only what is said, but what is thought. The controlled destruction of language is one of the most visceral presentations of control in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought... In the end, we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

In the digitized 21st century, Newspeak is impossible to enforce. While the richness of language is waning with thousands of languages dying out, we can still use creative approaches (misspellings, imagery, emojis) to skirt around the AI filters and blacklisted words that seek to throttle our voice or deplatform us.

The Ministry of Truth vs Post Truth
In Winston Smith’s Oceania, past records are rewritten to match the current Party narrative. History is entirely malleable.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

With the onset of infinite digital publishing, we face a cacophony of conflicting narratives in our ‘post-truth’ world. Humans, not capable of parsing and processing the quantity of data that machines can, abdicate responsibility for present narratives to internet algorithms. As computers serve us more of whatever ‘truth’ we pay attention to, our beliefs become ossified, and our ability to think critically evaporates. Algorithms curate our reality to confirm our existing biases. We don't necessarily believe "2+2=5"; we just stop seeing evidence that contradicts our worldview. And as for the past, we shirk responsibility to fact-check that too. Until the right incentives for honest and open keeping of public records are found, we will struggle to verify and preserve our past. Our messy, unfiltered version of The Ministry of Truth makes history just as malleable as in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Room 101 vs Echo Chambers
Room 101 is a personalized torture chamber. The culmination of Winston Smith’s time at the Ministry of Love sees him endure the ultimate psychological pressure until he can endure it no more.

In our world, we also exist within the walls of our own hyper-personalized reality constructions. Due to social media algorithms, polarized media, and the degradation of rational debate in favor of monetized outrage, echo chambers abound. Instead of all our worst fears and enemies being locked into a room with us, we keep them outside. Yet, this traps us, keeps us in a state of constant weakness and fear. The fears you cannot face win by continuing to threaten.

Social Isolation vs Oversharing and Real-World Loneliness;Preventing private relationships that could harbor dissent was a key tactic used by the authoritarian government of Oceania to control the population. Winston Smith cuts a lonely figure as he desperately searches for a partner, but unsanctioned relationships are outlawed, and he must turn on Julia, the woman he loves. After his brutal torture, he professes love for Big Brother and feels nothing for Julia when they meet again.

Cut to Earth, 2026. Many of us share our carefully curated realities with all of our contacts. Photos of dinner out, status updates about parties, and celebrations of every ‘little’ moment drive dopamine hits and perceived value on social media. We are encouraged to share everything, turning our lives into data points. Yet these presentations exclude the fact that, in the West, we have more single people than ever before, a plummeting birth rate, social anxiety among our youth, and a loneliness epidemic among our elderly. Connection via our online avatars means that we are never truly alone, but our relationships have been commodified. Our intimacy is sold to the highest bidder.

Two Minutes Hate vs 60-second Vertical Video;The daily ritual of screaming obscenities at Emmanuel Goldstein (the supposed leader of the Brotherhood and enemy of the people) serves several purposes: Channeling citizens’ emotions toward a designated scapegoat, unifying through negative emotions, social conditioning, and surveillance (the broadcast screens are two-way TVs).
Our growing addiction to 60-second ‘reels’ hijacks our biological triggers to offer ‘entertainment’ with no control or choice. Suspense, outrage, and shock are heavily used to game the algorithm and deliver economic benefit to producers. The endless scroll is not mandated by the government; it doesn’t need to be. We are united in ambivalence, distracted from our real enemies, conditioned to comply, and surveilled through our viewing habits. With such shattered attention spans, we have no ability to rebel.

Party Loyalty Tests vs Terms and Conditions
In Orwell’s totalitarian vision, regular demonstrations of allegiance are required. In our world, we must pledge blind allegiance to Big Tech. We must accept T&Cs to continue or face being ostracized as a non-user of their incompatible walled platforms.

Party loyalty tests can be changed; so can privacy policies. Party loyalty tests can go on for as long as necessary to guarantee compliance; 68-page T&Cs are impossible to read because we are unable to spend enough time understanding them.

And if you think Terms & Conditions are truly optional, just wait until you are forced into Digital ID schemes, universal basic income payments, or CBDCs (central bank digital currencies). Pledge your allegiance or starve.

Psychological Profiling vs Big Data
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, citizens’ behavioral and movement patterns are tracked. If there is any deviation, they incur penalties or adverse consequences.

We suffer this every day. Our data from purchases, transport, websites, email, and chat is all fed into big data models. The consequence? Intrusive advertising and constant commercial targeting. Improved privacy fixes this.

Self-Surveillance vs Self-Censorship;Finally, the citizens of Oceania have been trained to monitor their own thoughts and correct them before acting. This is the ultimate form of control, allowing the State to reduce actual surveillance costs. It’s similar to the baby elephant that is chained to a stake in the ground, restricting its movement. After a time, the elephant is big enough to pull up the stake and escape, but it has self-corrected that thought after several failed attempts. Eventually, the chain is removed, and the elephant remains in place, trapped within invisible parameters.

All of our failed attempts to exercise our freedoms have led us to self-correct our thoughts in the same way as Winston Smith’s peers did. We are the baby elephants, now fully grown but unable to travel more than a few feet from the stake in the ground.

We live in fear of the powers that be seeing our digital records. We self-censor to avoid real censorship and punishment.

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So do we live in a dark dystopia? Is our world worse than Nineteen Eighty-Four?

Not exactly. We have certainly lost many of the freedoms George Orwell and people of his generation took for granted. But our subjugation comes at the hands of multinational corporations rather than totalitarian governments.

This article compares 1984 and 2026 simply to highlight the freedoms we have lost. There are many other ways to frame our truth.

The important thing is that we maintain the ability to distinguish narrative from fact, and the ability to pay attention to the most relevant stories. That way, we avoid a totalitarian truth that ends in the same way as the book did.

Will We Suffer the Same Fate as Winston Smith?

In the novel's closing moments, Winston sits alone in the Chestnut Tree Café, drinking gin. He hears news of a military victory for Oceania, and for the first time, feels genuine emotion—not anger or fear, but love:

"He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

Winston survives physically, but his humanity has been erased. His captor explains they shall meet “in the place where there is no darkness," meaning the Party will come to control every space he inhabits, even his mind.

The one thing that Winston lacked was the tool to maintain the sovereignty of his private thoughts. We have the tools to protect ourselves from Big Brother and Big Tech. If we don’t use them, we will survive, but our humanity won’t.

One place impossible for Big Brother and Big Tech to invade is White Noise. You control exactly who has access and what happens there. With this protocol in place, you can maintain sovereignty over your identity, your communication, your data, and your thoughts.

Freedom is the ability to say that two plus two make four. If that is encrypted and shared, all else follows.

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Article by: @totallyhumanwriter

Philip Charter is a totally human author, editor, and writer for leaders and companies in the freedom tech space. He successfully escaped the dystopian British weather and now lives in Gran Canaria, Spain.