Sales of George Orwell’s ’1984′ up 69 percent on Amazon

Thing is, in the 1920s and 1930s fascism did not carry a strong negative connotation. Mussolini's regime was mostly viewed in a positive light by democracies until the invasion of Ethiopia and adoption of racial laws. This was social context when Brave New World was written (note the "Benito Hoover" character).

I'd suggest reading these pieces:

1) "UR-fascism" by Umberto Eco http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html -- attempts to define salient features of fascism across the different regimes.

2) "Three New Deals", http://www.amazon.com/Three-New-Deals-Reflections-Roosevelts... -- title speaks for itself

GWB is a kind of touchstone for the modern generation, helpless while events swirl around him, grasping for a measure of control at all costs. And what costs they were: torture, surveillance, war, a Manichaean division of the world into heroes and villains.

Instead of intentions of powerful men, you have the psychoses of bureaucracies created by individuals for all the right reasons, full of unintended effects, ultimately achieving the opposite of their stated goals.

In 1984, there is a malevolence at the back of Big Brother. In 2013, there need not be anything but a decentralized system, harnessing the latest technologies, manipulated by the knowledgeable, but ultimately storyless, aimless, and inhuman.

Their symbolism and many aspects of their modus operandi were very similar to each other. A "holy book" a founding figure, paternalism, revolutionism, populism, ideology, enemies, uniforms, monologues, youth groups. By 1948, Hitler in 1938 looked like a caricature of a dictator. Orwell was incredibly sharp in seeing the commonalities between that generation of dictators and seeing it as early as he did. The relationships between the ideology and control, the axis of cultural control. I think starting with a literal parody was useful approach. But, in 1948 he was describing something that had happened and had largely already (though he didn't know it then) reached its peak. Even though he was clearly skeptical, critical and wary of authoritarianism going back to his days in the Spanish civil war a decade earlier, he didn't have that sharp, simp effective vocabulary that exposes and characterizes the thing until it had passed its peak.

The authoritarian states that did survive were/are tended to be descendants of those 1920s-1940s systems, often in cultural backwaters. Orwell's terms hold up pretty well for describing North Korea, Baathist Iraq/Syria, Nasarist Egypt, Maoist China, Central Asain Former Soviet Countries or Ghadafi. Remarkably well.

My point (poorly made) is that whatever authoritarianism is/will rise out of this data gathering, corporate-government surveillance euthorotarianism model is only now taking shape. It hasn't peaked yet. It isn't fully formed. We don't yet know what its central themes are or how it works. We don't know how it maintains power or dampens opposition. It may never even come. I hope it won't.

We won't have the right vocabulary until its too late. The Romans were on the lookout for potential Kings. They didn't know to watch out for Caesars.

I can make some guesses but I really don't know what the symbols of this new tyranny are. I don't know how to parody it.

20 word summary:

Carefully study incentives throughout every part of the system, and it becomes clear why individuals do what they do.

So - it's not that we have a small or even large number of individuals doing bad things. It's that we have thousands of incentives, some obvious, some not, that collectively produce systemic behavior whose end result is in many cases not desirable.

If your choice is between doing something that plagues your conscience a bit, or getting fired, which do you choose?

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

And why arguments like "I have nothing to hide" are harder to dismiss than "jews control the world".

Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.

In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite".

The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice".

The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%.

This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes."

I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up).

The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.

Now it says 2 hours. I'm a third of the way done.

Thank you.

I want full control over my hardware, my software and the like. The fact this happened gives in my opinion, more ammunition to the side claiming piracy is equal to actually owning your content, drm free.

Also, if you'd like to read Homage to Catalonia:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Homage_to_Catalonia/index.html

I highly recommend it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_an_Elephant

http://www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm

Edit: assuming he runs for office...I guess I'm jumping the gun a bit