In 1980, Isaac Asimov published a negative review of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the New Yorker. His central complaint was that Orwell didn't understand technology. The telescreens that Big Brother uses to monitor citizens struck Asimov as crude and unimaginative, the work of someone who "didn't know any science," as reported by Open Culture.
Asimov also argued that Orwell could only imagine surveillance technology in the hands of tyrants and never considered that citizens might use the same tools against the state. Technology, Asimov insisted, is politically neutral — it empowers whoever gets hold of it. He also thought the totalitarian economy described in the novel was financially impossible. The perpetual wars, the enormous surveillance bureaucracy, the constant state repression — he didn't think any country could afford it.
His preferred dystopia was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which envisions control through pleasure rather than pain. People wouldn't need to be watched, Asimov reasoned, if they were too satisfied to resist.
History has been mixed about who was right. Smartphones did give citizens powerful tools to document police violence and organize protests — Asimov's point exactly. But governments from China to the U.S. have also deployed facial recognition, phone tracking, and AI-driven surveillance on scales that make Orwell's telescreens look quaint by comparison. Asimov was writing four years before the actual year 1984. He was sure Orwell had gotten it wrong. Forty-six years later, it reads more like they were both right about different parts.
Previously:
