Was 1984 a Disclosure?

Was 1984 a disclosure?

In a book club discussion last year, one of our group who happened to be in D.C. and at the time it seemed was quite oblivious to the undercurrents, wondered aloud why the ending, where the protagonist Winston Smith is stripped of his human soul, seemed to lack hope.

My reading didn't see 1984 as completely lacking in that department. After all, in the early chapters it is stated that the hope was in the proles. In the people.

But thinking again, I do wonder now if 1984 presented itself as a kind of disclosure to events we are seeing now. The enemy has only half-succeeded in their plans and the people have sniffed out their intentions and launched a counter offensive. In other words, the people have understood the warning of 1984 and disregarded its conclusion. We are anything but doomed.

Because it isn't true that there is no way out, even if you find yourself a good person in a bad system, or even deeply involved with the enemy, as Winston was, daily responsible for memory-holing information so that the leaders wouldn't be embarrassed. For instance, look at all the Project Veritas whistleblowers. From Facebook, from Google, from Fox, from CBS, from the Department of Homeland Security, from Pfizer. There is a way to get out and help the public understand what is happening on the inside.

In Zach Vorhies's Google Leaks, he and cowriter Kent Heckenlively describe how the company is altering reality, through machine learning training on content ranging from the Las Vegas shooting to cancer treatments to violence against Trump supporters. In Google's internal internet, he found blacklists for search terms. Later, he was dumbfounded when news reports on the YouTube shooter spoke of a woman when, as he'd come across the dead person, he was sure he'd seen a man.

Vorhies recalls reading Brave New World and 1984 and seeing that his company's response to Trump's election felt in tune with those fictions. And since he was one of many, he claims, that were not naturally inclined to tow the company's tyrannical line (after all, they are engineers and inventors and innovators that are drawn to these companies), he decided to do something about it, eventually publishing 900 pages of internal documentation with the help of Project Veritas.

Let's be thankful he did.