By Hugo Burel

In the midst of the emergency imposed by Covid-19, reading fiction was one of the ways to combat not only boredom and forced social isolation, but also the barrage of information that accompanied the pandemic. It was inevitable that we submit daily to the television news that turned the local and planetary scourge into a show with biblical resonances as the pandemic progressed. The same thing happened in the digital pages of newspapers and news portals. Reading literature helps mitigate the consequences of the informative embarrassment. It is not a matter of escaping, but of accessing discourses that go beyond the day to day and enrich the intellect. With the pandemic apparently subsiding, but with other scourges that are shaking the world -such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine- literature continues to be a refuge but also a mirror of what we live through.

One of the novels that the times we live in has relaunched is 1984 , by George Orwell. I read it thirty years ago and I was dazzled by the mastery with which Orwell builds that consistent dystopia that is 1984 . The idea of Big Brother that characterizes its plot has been reduced to a comic strip by postmodernity, which recycled it into a famous worldwide television commodity that has just been re-launched in Argentina. The name was used to designate a reality show that lays bare the intimacy and miseries of a random group of people. Of course, the only link it has with the novel is the title of the program that in the book designates the totalitarian leader who governs that society. The reality show is a crude parody of the surveillance of citizens exercised by the dictatorial government of the novel.

As the 21st century progressed, the meaning of 1984 became more and more current. Those references in the novel that was published on June 8, 1949 -it would be the last that Orwell published before he died in the early 1950s- alluded to the totalitarianism of Europe in the 30s and 40s -Nazism and Communism- but with the passing of the years and especially in these last years of the 21st century, they were resignified and acquired new validity.

Like a kind of literary miracle, 1984 finds new readers because its content accompanies and symbolizes what is happening today. Rereading it in the time of pandemic and mandatory seclusion gave me the amazing experience of discovering how much Orwell had anticipated the times we live in today. He was so successful and envisioned that the novel has become, tens of years after it was published, a capital text of our present.

His criticism of the totalitarianism of his time, which, in an intelligent and perfect narrative resource, places it in the year 1984 -he inverted the figures of the year in which he wrote the novel-, is transferred to the current world in another key. The future imagined by Orwell is in many ways our present. Today’s technology is of course superior to what Orwell describes, but its influence on people is the same.

The absolute power that subjugated society in 1984 , today in many countries is reproduced in minute detail. The deterioration of the language that translates into the «newspeak» of the regime imposed by Big Brother, today is the impoverished and cryptic jargon that dominates the networks and the choppy discourse of the tweets. The fear, isolation and loneliness that the Orwellian society of 1984 reflects is the same today expressed in other codes: the virtual contact between people, the absence of real links that are replaced by distance chat, the lack of communication that is installed in a society that never had so many means of communication.

One of the most notable advances in the novel is the presence of television in society. When Orwell writes 1984 , television had been around for years. By 1937 regular TV broadcasts were already operating in France and the UK. The communicational advance of television and its installation in homes was a very tangible reality at the end of the 1940s, initially limited to a few users due to the cost of a television set and the limited range of the broadcast signal. Despite this, Orwell understood that in the society he imagined in 1984 , television technology was decisive for Big Brother to enter homes, not only with his ideological preaching and his messages of social control, but also with his permanent panoptic surveillance electronic.

Today, everything that Orwell anticipated exists and, without the need for television to watch us, we are equally watched at every step we take. Street cameras allow us to attend robberies and takeovers live. The networks expose and undress the intimacy of people. Algorithms drive our preferences and opinions. The cell phone programs that allow you to discover if your partner is unfaithful to you. The tricks of online commercial proposals hook you to access your most personal data. The selfie fever establishes the time, the place where you were photographed and with whom.

For the end I cannot resist quoting a shocking passage from this formidable novel: “The telescreen received and transmitted at the same time. (…) Of course, it was impossible to tell if you were being watched or not at any given moment. (…) It was even conceivable that they watched everyone at the same time. But in any case they could connect with you whenever they wanted. You had to live—and custom eventually made it an instinct—assuming that they listened to every sound you made and that, except in the dark, they watched your every move.”

Orwell’s world is a daily nightmare inserted into existence. The difference with the novel is that millions enthusiastically and meekly accept being scrutinized and watched without being aware that this is happening. Big Brother watches you, conditions you, manipulates you, and uses you every time you use your credit card or “like” your cell phone. Welcome to 1984.