Isaac Asimov's Review of 1984 (1980) | Hacker News Reader

Isaac Asimov's Review of 1984 (1980)

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37 pointsbookofjoe6 comments

Sigh. Isaac Asimov was willing to write about anything at all, whether he understood it or not.

As a teen I read Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare, Asimov's Guide to Humor, and a good fraction of the other 200 books he had published up to then. He more than doubled that number before he died. He was careful about his facts, though he had a policy not to look anything up anywhere but his own bookshelf. He also would not use vehicles: if he couldn't walk there, he wouldn't go. That was possible in New York.

His obituary said that he never suffered from writer's block, and I could believe it. I read an autobiography that took about 600 pages to get him to age 40. (But note that I read it--he was very readable.)

Asimov says "Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis)".

The Nazis made extensive use of IBM proto-computers (card sorters) for tracking and processing their victims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

In a lot of ways Asimov's critique has sense. Orwell was clearly making an analogy for Stalinism, and the people trying to claim that it was just talking about tyranny in general don't really know why or when Orwell wrote the book. At the same time, Asimov has a point that Orwell wasn't really concerned about Fascism, and as (at least ethnically if not religiously) a Jew, Asimov was quite aware that Stalinism wasn't the only kind of tyranny.

Orwell was writing about authoritarianism in general, no matter which vestments it chooses to cloak itself in. Nineteen Eighty-Four was inspired primarily by stalinism, but also nazism, dealing with nationalism, antisemitism, surveillance and censorship as its topics, which were widely used by both regimes (and many others).

He saw himself as a democratic socialist, and the horrors of stalinism didn't make him give up socialism, it affirmed his belief that democratic socialism was the way to go, in contrast to the tyranny of the USSR.

> Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. Computers and tyranny do not necessarily go hand in hand. Tyrannies have worked very well without computers (consider the Nazis) and the most computerised nations in today's world are also the least tyrannical

I bet they must be shocked to learn how we are living in their nightmares where big brother government continues to grow with all the help from Computer, AI, Virus ....

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