The Orwellian Problem

 Corbin K. Barthold over at The Bulwark wrote ‘Orwellian’ Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means, and I think he makes a good point:

If they’d stop and think, those uttering “social media” and “Orwellian” in the same breath might realize that the dynamic at play here is quite contrary to what’s depicted in their favorite story. Smith’s world is one of information scarcity. What the Party says goes. Our world, by contrast, is one of information abundance. We’re living, in fact, through an information explosion. With so many sources of information available to us, we don’t have to place our trust in any one authority. We don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything—and, increasingly, we don’t.

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We’re entitled to our own opinions, we’re often told, but not to our own facts. Except that now we can pick and choose the facts that suit us. And so we descend into what internet researcher Renée DiResta calls “bespoke pseudo-realities.” “Readers today,” she explains, are “contending with a deluge of hyperpartisan content, tailored precisely to preexisting beliefs.” Orwell’s Ministry of Truth continuously “rectifies” a unified social narrative. “Our information ecosystem,” says DiResta, “no longer assists us in reaching consensus. In fact, it structurally discourages it.” As the sole organ of truth, the Party controls reality itself. Conversely, claims DiResta, “we have a proliferation of irreconcilable understandings of the world and no way of bridging them.” (Incidentally, DiResta appears in Judge Doughty’s opinion—and is grossly misquoted.)

Has the Biden administration been striving to keep the nation anchored to a common conception of reality? That is one way of looking at its campaign against online misinformation. Put to one side how far the government may go, under our Constitution, in that regard. The more important point, for present purposes, is that the government can’t pull off the stunt. It can’t uproot “bespoke pseudo-realities” by browbeating Twitter and Facebook. Look no further than the divergent reactions to Judge Doughty’s opinion. It’s as if people were reading completely different texts. And in a sense they are. That’s what inhabiting “bespoke pseudo-realities” means.

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The debasement of words opens the way, Orwell believed, to the debasement of politics. Those who use “stale images,” “exhausted idioms,” “worn-out metaphors,” and “prefabricated phrases” aren’t interested in what they’re saying. Careless language leads to careless thought, careless thought to careless policy. One of Orwell’s examples: “People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”

“If one jeers loudly enough,” Orwell concluded, one can from time to time “send some worn-out and useless phrase . . . into the dustbin where it belongs.” Writing in 1946, Orwell was already consigning “fascism” (an epithet that “has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”) to the scrapheap. Today, it is safe to assume, he’d dump the likes of “woke,” “deep state,” and “fake news.” And perhaps “misinformation” as well. “Orwellian” could hardly fail to go.

Think about it. 

Keeping politics meaningful is up to us, the people.

Demagoguery works only those wanting to be fooled.

sch 7/21