Mark Zuckerberg's ‘A Year of Books’ Selection George Orwell’s bleak visions of the future, one in which citizens are monitored through telescreens by an insidious Big Brother, has haunted our imagination long after the publication of 1984 . Orwell’s dystopian image of the telescreen as a repressive instrument of state power has profoundly affected our view of technology, posing a stark confrontational question: Who will be master, human or machine? Experience has shown, however, that Orwell’s vision of the future was profoundly and significantly wrong: The conjunction of the new communications technologies has not produced a master-slave relation between person and computer, but rather exciting possibilities for partnership. In an extraordinary demonstration of the emerging supermedium's potential to engender new forms of creativity, Huber’s book boldly reimagines 1984 from the computer's point of view. After first scanning all of Orwell’s writings into his personal computer, Huber used the machine to rewrite the book completely, for the most part using Orwell’s own language. Alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, Huber advances Orwell’s plot to a surprising new conclusion while seamlessly interpolating his own explanations and arguments. The result is a fascinating utopian work which envisions a world at our fingertips of ever-increasing information, equal opportunity, and freedom of choice. Peter Huber, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is the author of Galileo’s Revenge. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. He is also a graduate of the Harvard Law School and was a clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court. Orwell’s Revenge PREFACE April 4, 1984 . . . To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—Greetings! George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) The date was wrong; the words were in fact written on April 4, 1948, or thereabouts. They were composed by a lonely iconoclastic genius of English letters, aged forty-four, who was dying of tuberculosis. His book would be published in June 1949, just six months before his death. He chose as a title the year in which the book had been written, with the last two digits interchanged. The writer was George Orwell. The book was 1984. It was an immediate, huge success. By July 1949, 1984 had received sixty reviews in American publications. As the New York Times reported, 90 percent were “overwhelmingly admiring, with cries of terror rising above the applause.” In the New Yorker, Lionel Trilling described the book as “profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating.” The Evening Standard of London called it “the most important book published since the war.” Forty years have passed; 1984 is still the most important book published since the war. Orwell’s grimly technotic vision still casts a dark shadow over every advance in telegraphy, telemetry, telephony, and television—which is to say, every facet of teletechnology, every yard of the information superhighway, that is transforming our lives today. No one who has actually read Orwell can go a week without remembering him in one context or another. At any moment, some scene or neologism, which comes from this one short book, is liable to drop into your mind. Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. Reality Control. These were all created by Orwell in 1984.1984 is not so much a book, it is a world. Even people who affect to disagree with Orwell quote him unconsciously. Through 1984, Orwell did what very few other writers ever have done: he added not only phrases but his own name to the English language. There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one’s mind and alter one’s whole attitude to life. 1984 is one of them. Whether you approve of him or not, Orwell is there, like the Washington Monument. And the only trouble with that is that Orwell was wrong. Not wrong in the details—Orwell was in fact remarkably right about the little things in 1984. But he was wrong in his fundamental logic, wrong in his grand vision, wrong in his whole chain of reasoning. Wrong not because he lacked conviction, or industry, or moral integrity—Orwell brought more of those talents to his craft than any other person of his own time, or ours. Wrong, nonetheless, because Orwell built the essential struts and columns, the entire support structure of his magnificent edifice, on a gadget that he did not understand. The gargoyles in 1984 are magnificent. But the architecture beneath is rotten. I Begin, as Orwell does in 1984, with Victory Gin, the opiate of all Oceania that sinks you into stupor every night and floats your mind out of bed every morning. Winston Smith, th