Litsketch 8. “Big Brother, Big Boss, and the Bigger Joke We’re Living” — Orwell’s 1984 Wasn’t a Warning. It Was a Manual.

In the grand year of 1948, a man named George Orwell sat down to write a book not because he was paranoid, but because the world wasn’t paranoid enough. He switched the last two digits of the year and gifted the future its most terrifying bedtime story: 1984.

And what a story. It doesn’t begin with once upon a time—it begins with “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”

And then it never looks away.

The novel gave us totalitarianism not as a distant nightmare, but as a claustrophobic Tuesday afternoon where your thoughts aren’t your own, your face betrays you, and your television might be watching back.

Fast-forward to now: Orwell’s world is not a dystopia. It’s a setup manual for your smart speaker.

From Fascism to Face Scans: Why Orwell Wrote This

Let’s not forget, Orwell was not inventing dystopia out of thin air. He had lived through World War II, Hitler, Stalin, and British colonial hypocrisy, all while nursing tuberculosis and righteous rage.

He had already skewered propaganda in Animal Farm, but 1984 wasn’t satire. It was prophecy wrapped in fiction. It was Orwell holding up a funhouse mirror to fascism, only to discover the reflection was terrifyingly accurate.

The world he drew was built on:

• Surveillance (Telescreens in your home. Sound familiar?)

• Propaganda (Ministry of Truth: rewriting facts since before Twitter rebranded.)

• Language Control (Newspeak: the only language that gets smaller with every edition.)

• Thoughtcrime (Illegal to think. Optional, if you’re already on the internet.)

Meet Winston: The Most Doomed Man in Literature

Enter our tragic tour guide, Winston Smith, who works at the Ministry of Truth, a place where truth is manufactured, not found. His job? Rewrite the past. Edit old newspapers so that history always agrees with the present.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

Winston’s fatal flaw? He thinks. And worse, he feels. In a world where even your facial twitch can betray treason, Winston dares to love, to question, and to write in a diary—a literal crime against the Party.

It’s not bravery. It’s beautifully written suicide.

He falls in love with Julia, another rebel with bad timing. Together, they rent a room. No telescreens. No eyes. No ears.

Just the ceiling. And, well… spoiler alert: even the ceiling is a snitch.

Big Brother: The Face of Everything and the Man Behind Nothing

Let’s talk about the man of the hour: Big Brother.

He is everywhere. Posters. Screens. Currency. Walls. He might be real. He might be a myth. He’s the government’s mascot, dictator, life coach, and wallpaper.

“BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.”

Now, of course, the modern world interpreted this as branding inspiration. Hence, Big Brother (the reality show) and Bigg Boss (the Indian remix). People now volunteer to be watched 24/7, for ratings and snacks.

Orwell didn’t predict that. He thought we’d rebel. Instead, we streamed it.

The Ministry of Truth, Sponsored by Algorithm

In Orwell’s world, truth is fluid. If something contradicts the Party, it never happened. If someone rebels, they become an “unperson.” History is a spreadsheet edited daily.

Today, we don’t need Ministries. We have feeds, filters, and revisionist hashtags.

Yesterday’s villain is today’s meme. Today’s scandal is tomorrow’s limited edition T-shirt.

And Newspeak? Oh, it’s real. It just wears cuter fonts now.

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

And somewhere, someone’s writing a campaign slogan based on it.

Room 101: Where You Meet Your Personal Nightmare

When Winston is finally caught (because in Orwell’s world, you are always caught), he is taken to Room 101—the last stop in the self-destruction express.

Room 101 doesn’t torture you with generic pain. It customizes it.

For Winston? It’s rats. For you? It might be your search history projected on a classroom wall. For ABS, the literary scholar, it would probably be a thousand people misquoting Shakespeare in Comic Sans.

And then comes the heartbreak: he betrays Julia. She betrays him. Love fails. Truth fails. Resistance fails.

The novel ends not with revolution, but with a brainwashed whisper:

“He loved Big Brother.”

So, Was Orwell Right?

Let’s see:

• Cameras? Check.

• Screens watching us back? Check.

• Language diluted until it’s meaningless? Check.

• Fake news? More flavors than Baskin Robbins.

• Thoughtcrime? Ask anyone who dared post an opinion last week.

• Governments twisting narratives while smiling? Please.

Yes. Orwell was right. Not entirely, but terrifyingly close.

Only difference? We monetized it.

We laugh at dystopia now. We binge-watch it. We retweet it. We vote for it. We wear “Big Brother” on hoodies and sign consent forms to be tracked, recorded, and profiled.

And somewhere, in a quiet library that no one visits, ABS, the Literary Scholar, quietly underlines the last line of 1984, closes the book, and mutters, “It didn’t come true—it came trending.”

We were warned. But we were too busy updating our status.

Signed,
ABS
The Literary Scholar
(Who’s still using typewriters in protest)
(Who has renamed their Wi-Fi “Room 101”)
(And who definitely believes that Orwell isn’t just rolling in his grave—he’s rewriting the obituary)

Ah, yes—Newspeak: the linguistic lobotomy of Orwell’s world. A language so stripped of nuance, poetry, and rebellion that it makes bureaucratic emails look like Shakespearean sonnets.

In 1984, Newspeak wasn’t just vocabulary—it was ideological erasure through grammar. Its goal? To reduce thought. To make dissent literally unthinkable. Why? Because if you don’t have a word for “freedom,” you can’t demand it. And if “bad” becomes “ungood,” and “very bad” becomes “doubleplusungood,” then your protest begins to sound like you’re ordering from a malfunctioning chatbot.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Winston is told.
“In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

It’s chilling. It’s clever. And it’s eerily familiar.

Because today’s version of Newspeak isn’t about invented grammar—it’s about algorithm-approved vocabulary. Sanitized. Shrunk. Stripped of complication. We speak in hashtags, acronyms, emoji hieroglyphs, and one-syllable reactions.

Nuance? That’s a luxury. Outrage is faster. And trending wins over truth.

So yes—Newspeak lives on. It just wears a dopamine-drip filter and calls itself “engagement.”

And somewhere, ABS, The Literary Scholar, watches as “doublepluslike” gets 10k retweets and silently weeps in full, eloquent, grammatically complete sentences.