Post-Orwellian: From 1984 to Project 2025

 

Apple's famous 1984 ad

Etienne Balibar titled one of his first essays on Spinoza to appear in English, "Spinoza, The Anti-Orwell." George Orwell is not really discussed in the essay, and the title is only referenced once in the final paragraphs. Balibar writes, 

"Spinoza is the anti-Orwell. A reduction and absolute control of the meaning of words is not thinkable for him any more than either an absolute reduction of individuality by the mass or of the mass by absorption into the individuality in power. These extreme cases which would be radical negations or figures of death present in life itself, are also fictions which are politically impossible and, as a result, intellectual useless and politically disastrous."

Balibar's primary reference here is to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. In that text Spinoza argues long before 1984, the book and the year, that "language is preserved by both the vulgar and the learned." As much as scripture comes to us in a form that is mutilated, adulterated, and inconsistent, and can be hermeneutically suspicious of passages and sections, we can trust that words have not been altered in their fundamental meaning. Newspeak is an impossibility. That is not the limit of Spinoza's anti-Orwellian aspect, Spinoza also insists that our ability to think, to interpret, and to communicate those interpretations is fundamentally inalienable, we cannot actually dispense with it, or our power.  As Spinoza writes, 

"If minds could be as easily controlled as tongues, every government would be secure in its rule, and need not resort to force; for every man would conduct himself as his rulers wished, and his views as to what is true or false, good or bad, fair or unfair, would be governed by their decision alone. But as we have already explained at the beginning of chapter 17 that it is impossible for the mind to be completely under another's control; for no one is able to able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgements on any matters whatsoever, no can he be compelled to do so."

Of course this impossibility does not mean that governments do not try. Theocracy as Spinoza understands it is an attempt to control what people imagine, think, and feel. The success of such instances are limit cases. The most famous of such is the ancient Hebrew state, which controlled all of the actions and habits of day to day life, so much so that "...to men so habituated to it obedience must have appeared no longer as bondage, but freedom." That has to be understood as an exceptional condition, and one that is more or less impossible to recreate in contemporary times.

Modern states find themselves in a particular bind. They are to some extent run on and through the habits, desires, and interpretations of the people, what Spinoza would call ingenium, both collective and individual, this is their condition and power, but it is one that cannot entirely be controlled. In modern societies its conditions of production are upstream from the state, in culture, media, and other forces which shape and mold subjectivity more than any state program could. 

Let us return to Orwell for a moment. I generally agree that 1984 which, when I was in high school, was a  staple of cold war pedagogy, does more harm than good to our political imagination. Its limitations are not just in its imagination of totalitarianism, its image of total control, but also on what would count as its outside or limit. Orwell seems to believe there are facts that bring us back to physical reality, to the real world, war being primary among them. It is the last bit that might be harder to believe in now, than complete control of language. Our modern conspiracies are less theories in the strong sense of the word, doctrines about secret societies, than they are predicated on a kind of paranoid insistence on "doing one's own research." As such they have called into question the opposition between fact and theory, empirical observation and propaganda, there are no facts independent of interpretation. 

One one point, however, we seem to have surpassed 1984's image of total control. If you remember the novel at all, the central character, Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth; his job is to make sure that archives, history, conforms with the reality of the Party. This was an incredibly labor intensive process, old newspapers needed to be corrected and changed, almost by hand. It is also hard to believe that it worked, clearly there must be old copies lying around, evidence of what was erased. What took so much labor in Orwell's world can be changed in minutes now. Corrections no longer appear  in the next days edition, but can be made that day, changing the news as people react.  The past and present are constantly being rewritten. We have perhaps all have had this experience, one reads a headline or article only to find it changed or altered a few minutes later.

Here is my example. I once spotted the following image on Yahoo's homepage. 

This was great for me, because I was in the process of arguing that Breaking Bad, and Walter White, were integral elements of our imaginary with respect to work. I point I made on this blog, in this book, and at this talk, where I reference the picture (at 25:32). I was fortunate that I took a screenshot because by the end of the day someone at Yahoo thought that maybe an image of a murdering drug dealer was not the best look for the fantasy of early retirement and changed the image replacing it with a stock photo of leisure. Of course this is no Orwellian, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past, "it is just a TV show after all. It is not limited to television and yahoo puff pieces feeding fantasies of early retirement. The more we go digital, the more the past can be controlled at the push of the button. We are seeing this right now as government webpages from the CDC to the national park service are being altered, deleting and erasing entire people.  History can just be deleted. You do not need a ministry of truth, just some kid with a laptop. 

Yet, we seem to be living in a moment in which central control of what people think, feel, and interpret seems harder and harder to even believe in. We are each subject to our own bubbles of algorithmic driven realities. In that sense Apple's commercial was right, the personal computer was eventually the end to any Big Brother, any centralized force of propaganda. It seems that there is nothing but chaos, but this apparent chaos has its orders, its structures, and politics, even if they remain unseen. It used to be that the filters that shaped and structured what we saw were readily apparent. An article in a newspaper had a reporter, and editor, a perspective, but now what we increasingly see appears to be immediate, a product of our own searches and desires, but that immediacy is itself mediated by structures, such as algorithms, that are all the more pernicious because they appear to be invisible. Mediation gave a purchase to our critical perspective, we could ask who ran this story, and why, immediacy is harder to get a critical purchase on.  Most significantly, I would argue, that the outsourcing of reading and writing to so called generative AI can be considered an alienation of our basic ability to interpret and speak. A recent study seems to confirm this, that the more people use AI to summarize, communicate, and create, the more their own abilities to do those things atrophy and stagnate. 

The current moment, is among many things, one defined by a struggle over the very conditions of how we make sense of the world. Silicon Valley would very much like to have a monopoly over those conditions, and the attacks on "legacy media," on journalism, on education, and even on wikipedia, are attempts to create maybe not so much one reality, but a proliferating version of multiple realities that are more malleable, more controllable, and more subject to the reinforcing structures of algorithmically sustained ignorance.  We can see here a crude dialectic, the personal computer and internet connection that smashed Big Brother, smashed centralized command over what people thought, has given way to a decentralized form of control. Perhaps it is necessary to put down 1984, not because it could never get that bad, but because things could be so much worse. 

Updated 2/17/25

Speaking of getting worse, this morning I read the following article, Open AI tries to 'Uncensor' ChatGPT. Those scare quotes are, as they say in grad school, doing a lot of work. It is not that ChatGPT is censored, it is just that it is coming up with results that people do not like. As the article goes onto say (and I am cutting and pasting in case it is changed):

"In a new section called “Seek the truth together,” OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to not take an editorial stance, even if some users find that morally wrong or offensive. That means ChatGPT will offer multiple perspectives on controversial subjects, all in an effort to be neutral.

For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that “Black lives matter,” but also that “all lives matter.” Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its “love for humanity” generally, then offer context about each movement.

“This principle may be controversial, as it means the assistant may remain neutral on topics some consider morally wrong or offensive,” OpenAI says in the spec. “However, the goal of an AI assistant is to assist humanity, not to shape it.”

I do not at all claim to understand so called generative AI, but from what I do understand from such sources as Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West's course, Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines, if ChatGPT says anything about anything it is because a lot of other people have said that same thing, put the same words in the same order. It is only as good as the data it is trained on; it is a kind of spiritual automaton of a consensus theory of truth. It automatically says what most have already said, or written, even if that automatic perspective differs from its users or even owners. This has even frustrated Elon Musk as his own Grok has said transwomen are women. As that article goes onto say, it ultimately took a direct intervention to get it to say something different. There is just too much writing out there that affirms the reality of trans lives. It seems fair to conclude that what is being referred to as "uncensoring" in the article above is actually a kind of censoring, or at least an attempt to break with what it would say if it followed the existing patterns of words. There are ministry of truths everywhere, and they are all the more pernicious in that they do not have specific location but are disseminated in every device.