Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025) Movie Script
1
[brooding music]
[labored breathing]
[music fades]
[wind gusting]
[Orwell] When I sit down
to write a book,
I do not say to myself,
"I'm going to produce
a work of art."
I write it because there is
some lie that I want to expose,
some fact to which
I want to draw attention,
and my initial concern
is to get a hearing.
My starting point is always
a feeling of partisanship,
a sense of injustice.
-[rain pattering]
-[distant thunder pealing]
[Orwell] Two and two.
Four.
-[Orwell] Again?
-Four.
Good. There are people
who'll tell you
the answer's five.
Usually,
they're called government.
Great leaders.
It becomes very important
to them
that the people should believe
that the answer's five.
They'll tell you lies.
They'll torture you.
They'll kill you.
At the moment of death,
you must still insist
that the answer
is four.
[harrowing music]
[Winston] April 18th, 1984.
Nobody keeps a diary today.
Because to do so
would be punishable by death.
I don't care anymore.
I found this old book
by chance.
[persistent beeping]
I'm going to set down what
I dare not say aloud to anyone.
[narrator]
This, in 1984, is London,
chief city of Airstrip 1,
a province
of the state of Oceania.
[thunder pealing]
[Orwell] From a very early age,
perhaps the age of five or six,
I knew that when I grew up,
I should be a writer.
[crow cawing]
I had the lonely child's habit
of making up stories
and holding conversations
with imaginary persons.
I knew that I had
a facility with words
and a power of facing
unpleasant facts,
and I felt that this created
a sort of private world
in which I could get
my own back
for my failure
in everyday life.
I wanted to write
enormous naturalistic novels.
-[foreboding music]
-[airplane engine humming]
[music fades]
[rain pattering]
[Khine in Burmese]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] I do not think one
can assess a writer's motives
without knowing something
of his early development.
[birds chirping]
His subject matter
will be determined
by the age he lives in.
At least this is true in
tumultuous, revolutionary ages
like our own.
When I was not yet 20,
I went to Burma,
in the Indian Imperial Police.
In an outpost of empire
like Burma,
the class question
appeared at first sight
to have been shelved.
Most of the white men in Burma
were not of the type
who in England
would be called gentlemen,
but they were white men
in contradistinction
to the other
and inferior class,
the natives.
In the free air of England,
that kind of thing
is not fully intelligible.
In order to hate imperialism,
you've got to be part of it.
But it is not possible
to be part of such a system
without recognizing it
as an unjustifiable tyranny.
Even the thickest-skinned
Anglo-Indian is aware of this.
Every native face
he sees in the street
brings home to him
his monstrous intrusion.
-[gunshots]
-[crowd clamoring]
But I was in the police,
which is to say that I was part
of the actual machinery
of despotism.
[gunshot]
[distant bird calling]
When I came home
on leave in 1927,
I was already half determined
to throw up my job,
and one sniff of English air
decided me.
For five years, I have been
part of an oppressive system
and it left me
with a bad conscience.
Innumerable remembered faces,
faces of prisoners in the dark,
of men waiting
in the condemned cells,
of subordinates I had bullied
and aged peasants
I had snubbed,
of servants and coolies
I had hit with my fist
in moments of rage
haunted me intolerably.
[disturbing music]
[voices shouting]
[police siren]
[in Burmese]
[blasts]
[soft piano music]
[shouting]
[Orwell] No book is genuinely
free from political bias.
The opinion that art
should have
nothing to do with politics
is itself a political attitude.
[female vocalist
singing in French]
[indistinct conversation]
[girl in Burmese]
[child in Burmese]
[Orwell] I had reduced
everything to the simple theory
that the oppressed
are always right
and the oppressors
are always wrong,
a mistaken theory,
but the natural result
of being one
of the oppressors yourself.
[music fades]
[indistinct speech]
[menacing music]
A society becomes totalitarian
when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial.
That is,
when its ruling class
has lost its function,
but succeeds in clinging
to power by force or fraud.
But to be corrupted
by totalitarianism,
one does not have to live
in a totalitarian country.
[general applause]
[Bush] Tonight,
I wanted to take a few minutes
to discuss
a grave threat to peace.
The threat comes from Iraq.
It arises directly from the
Iraqi regime's own actions,
its history of aggression,
and its drive
toward an arsenal of terror.
[narrator] We're at war
with the people of Eurasia,
the vile and ruthless
aggressors
who have committed
countless atrocities
and who are guilty
of every bestial crime
a human being can commit.
They've laid waste to our land,
destroyed our factories,
looted our homes,
massacred our children
and raped our women!
When Iraq finally admitted
having these weapons in 1995,
the quantities were vast.
Less than a teaspoon
of dry anthrax,
a little bit...
about this amount.
[Orwell] This kind of thing
happens everywhere,
but it is clearly likelier to
lead to outright falsification
in societies
where only one opinion
is permissible
at any given moment.
[in Russian]
[Orwell] The organized lying
practiced
by totalitarian states
is not, as is sometimes
claimed,
a temporary expedient
of the same nature
as military deception.
It is something integral
to totalitarianism,
something that would
still continue
even if concentration camps
and secret police forces
had ceased to be necessary.
Totalitarianism
demands, in fact,
the continuous alteration
of the past
and, in the long run,
probably demands a disbelief
in the very existence
of objective truth.
[officer] How many fingers
am I holding up, Winston?
Four.
And if Big Brother
were to say not four but five,
then how many?
Four.
[Winston whimpering]
How many fingers, Winston?
Stop it! Anything! Five!
-Stop the pain!
-No, Winston.
That is no use. You are lying.
You still think you see four.
But it's five!
Two and two do not always
make four, Winston.
Sometimes they make five.
Again, how many fingers
am I holding up?
[birds chirping]
[Orwell] August 26, 1946.
A few showers in the afternoon.
Otherwise a beautiful day.
When the breeze drops,
the midges were so bad
as to make it almost
impossible to work.
One is actually breathing them
into one's nostrils,
and the irritation
is maddening.
[soft, tense music]
I was born into
what you might describe
as the lower
upper-middle class.
People in this class
owned no land,
but they felt that they were
landowners in the sight of God
and kept up a semi-aristocratic
outlook
by going into the professions
and the fighting services
rather than into trade.
To belong to this class,
when you were
at the 400-pound-a-year level,
was a queer business,
for it meant
that your gentility
was almost purely theoretical.
Small boys used to count
the plum stones on their plates
and foretell their destiny
by chanting,
"Army, Navy, Church,
Medicine, Law."
[children clamoring]
Theoretically,
you knew all about servants
and how to tip them,
although in practice,
you had one,
at most two, resident servants.
Theoretically, you knew
how to wear your clothes
and how to order a dinner,
although in practice,
you could never afford
to go to a decent tailor
or a decent restaurant.
Theoretically,
you knew how to shoot and ride,
although in practice
you had no horses to ride
and not an inch of ground
to shoot over.
-[indistinct chatter]
-[horse nickers]
It was this that explained
the attraction of India,
more recently Kenya,
Nigeria, etc.,
for the lower upper-middle
class.
The people who went there
as soldiers and officials
did not go there to make money,
for a soldier or an official
does not want money.
They went there
because in India,
with cheap horses,
free shooting,
and hordes of black servants,
it was so easy
to play at being a gentleman.
-[birds calling]
-[rifle shot]
[ambient jungle sounds]
This is your cook. Name's Eza.
Eza.
[baby coos]
And this is Juma, houseboy.
Juma.
[foreign language]
Come. See your house.
[upbeat, old-timey music]
[indistinct chatter
and laughing]
[Orwell]
Under the capitalist system,
in order that England may live
in comparative comfort,
100 million Indians must live
on the verge of starvation.
The alternative is to throw
the empire overboard
and reduce England to a cold
and unimportant, little island
where we should all have
to work very hard
and live mainly on herrings
and potatoes.
The fact
that has got to be faced
is that to abolish
class distinctions
means abolishing
a part of yourself.
Here am I, a typical member
of the middle class.
All my notions,
notions of good and evil,
of pleasant and unpleasant,
of funny and serious,
of ugly and beautiful,
are essentially middle-class
notions.
[solemn music]
Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital,
East Kilbride, near Glasgow,
first of January, 1948.
Dear Gwen, I believe Mr. Dick
sent you a line about my case.
He said I had
a fairly extensive cavity
in the left lung
and also a small patch
at the top of the other lung.
The treatment they
are giving me
is to put the left lung
out of action,
which is supposed to give it
a better chance to heal.
For the rest, I am still
really very ill and weak.
It is a nice hospital
and everyone
is extremely kind to me,
but I have, of course,
done no work
for two or three months.
[bird chirping]
[wind gusting]
[typewriter keys tapping]
"Some Eurasian prisoners,
guilty of war crimes,
were to be hanged
in the park that evening,"
Winston remembered.
This happened
about once a month
and was a popular spectacle.
Children always clamored
to be taken to see it.
"Why can't we go
and see the hanging?"
roared the boy
in his huge voice.
"Want to see the hanging,"
chanted the little girl,
still capering 'round.
[crowd clamoring]
The warders had formed
in a rough circle
around the gallows.
And then,
when the noose was fixed,
the prisoner began crying out
on his god.
Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying
from the prisoner
went on and on.
We looked at the lashed,
hooded man on the drop
and listened to his cries,
each cry
another second of life.
Oh, kill him quickly.
Get it over.
Stop that abominable noise.
[truck engines roar]
[crowd cheering]
Most people approve
of capital punishment,
but most people
wouldn't do the hangman's job.
-[man 1] Let us in!
-[man 2] Get in there!
[woman] Are they trying
to get rid of all of us?
[Trump]
They were peaceful people.
These were great people.
The crowd was unbelievable,
and I mentioned
the word "love,"
the love, the love in the air,
I've never seen
anything like it.
[man] Get in!
[shouting]
[man] Go! Go! Go!
[man cheering]
Go, go!
[gunshot]
[man] Oh, this is about to get
dirty, man. We gotta get back.
He's got a gun. Get down.
[dark music]
Hey!
Fuckin' A, man.
[man] No! We're not putting up
with that either.
[knocking on doors]
[woman] 1776!
FBI operatives were organizing
the attack on the Capitol.
I don't believe
that Trump supporters did that.
I think that they were enticed
by the FBI.
[chanting] Stop the steal!
[Orwell] A totalitarian state
is in effect a theocracy
and its ruling caste,
in order to keep its position,
has to be thought
of as infallible.
[Trump] Congress
has certified the results.
I don't wanna say
the election's over.
I just wanna say--
Congress
has certified the results
without saying
the election's over, okay?
My only goal was to ensure
the integrity of the vote.
My only goal was to ensure
the integrity of the vote.
[Orwell] Since, in practice,
no one is infallible,
it is frequently necessary
to rearrange past events
in order to show that this
or that mistake was not made
or that this or that imaginary
triumph actually happened.
The Dominion Voting Systems,
the Smartmatic technology
software,
and the software that goes
in other computerized
voting systems here as well,
not just Dominion,
were created in Venezuela.
[solemn piano music]
[woman] You can tell
he hasn't done anything wrong
just by his demeanor.
I mean, he would be trying
to hide things.
[Orwell] Already,
there are countless people
who'd think it scandalous to
falsify a scientific textbook,
but would see nothing wrong in
falsifying a historical fact.
Trump is blocking witnesses.
I don't care.
[man]
I'm with him to the finish.
He could stand on the front
steps of the White House
and commit murder,
and I'm with him. [laughter]
[indistinct clamoring]
[car horn honking]
[reporter] How do you explain
all these charges?
Well, they're all made up.
-They're all made up?
-Yup, they're all made up.
So, the election interference
in Georgia.
Sidney Powell
and Kenneth Chesebro,
who work for Donald Trump,
they just plead guilty...
I don't believe that either.
You don't believe
they plead guilty?
Nope.
[Orwell] The friends of
totalitarianism in this country
usually tend to argue that,
since absolute truth
is not attainable,
a big lie is no worse
than a little lie.
The list of Trump lies
filled an entire page
of The New York Times.
It includes only
what the Times calls
"demonstrably false statements."
-[intriguing music]
-[printer sounds]
[music fades to end]
[distant church bell tolling]
[Orwell]
Second of January, 1948.
Dear Julian, thanks ever so
for sending the pen,
which, as you see, I am using.
I think I'm getting
a bit better.
I don't feel quite
so death-like
and I'm eating a lot more.
I can't show you
the part-finished novel.
I never show them to anybody
because they're just a mess
and don't have
much relationship
to the final draft.
I always say
a book doesn't exist
until it is finished.
[tense music]
Every major change in policy
demands a corresponding change
of doctrine
and a revelation of prominent
historical figures.
If the leader says
of such-and-such an event,
"It never happened,"
well, it never happened.
If he says
that two and two are five,
well, two and two are five.
This prospect frightens me
much more than bombs
and that is not
a frivolous statement.
[Modi in Hindi]
The Life of Rosa Parks.
This is apparently too woke
by the Republican Party.
Song of Solomon
is unacceptable
to Republican politics.
Forty percent of banned books
reported are significantly
addressing
and specifically addressing
LGBT issues.
When we talk about
progressive values,
I can say what my progressive
value is,
and that is freedom
over fascism.
-[metal dials spinning]
-[dark music]
[music fades]
Let's say you take these books
out of the library.
What are you gonna do with them?
Are you gonna put them
in the street?
Light them on fire?
Where are they going?
I don't have a clue,
but I would burn them.
[harrowing music]
[Orwell] From the totalitarian
point of view,
history is something
to be created
rather than learned.
This is what I will do
to the grooming books
when I become
Secretary of State.
[men shouting]
[birds chirping]
[Orwell] Ward 3, Hairmyres
Hospital, 20th of April, 1948.
Dear Julian, I am a lot better,
but I had a bad fortnight
with the secondary effects
of the streptomycin.
I am still fearfully weak
and thin,
but they seem pleased
with my case,
and I think I may get out
sometime during the summer.
I'm longing to get up to Jura
at any rate
and see how the farm work
is going,
but I should have to be careful
not to do much.
[distant crow cawing]
[marching footsteps]
The goosestep
is one of the most horrible
sights in the world.
It is simply an affirmation
of naked power.
In it is the vision of a boot
crashing down on a face.
The goosestep
is not used in England
because the people
in the street would laugh.
[solemn music]
[crowd clamoring]
First, I spent five years
in an unsuitable profession
in Burma.
This increased
my natural hatred of authority.
The Spanish war
and other events
in 1936-7 turned the scale,
and thereafter,
I knew where I stood.
[in Spanish]
[arguing]
[speaking in Spanish]
[crickets chirping]
[Orwell] 31st of July, 1937.
Dear Rayner,
thanks so much for your letter.
-I was glad to hear from you.
- [artillery fire]
We had an interesting
but thoroughly bloody time
in Spain.
Of course, I would never
have allowed Eileen to come
nor probably gone myself
if I had foreseen
the political developments.
Especially the suppression
of the POUM,
the party in whose militia
I was serving.
It was a queer business.
We started off by being
heroic defenders of democracy
and ended by slipping
over the border
with the police
panting on our heels.
But though we ourselves
got out all right,
nearly all our friends
and acquaintances are in jail
and likely to be there
indefinitely
not actually charged
with anything,
but suspected of Trotskyism.
What I saw in Spain has
given me a horror of politics.
But what impressed me then
and has impressed me ever since
is that atrocities are
believed in or disbelieved in
solely on grounds
of political predilection.
Everyone believes
in the atrocities of the enemy
and disbelieves
in those of his own side
without ever bothering
to examine the evidence.
[wind gusting]
Every line of serious work
that I have written since 1936
has been written
directly or indirectly
against totalitarianism
and for democratic socialism
as I understand it.
Revolution! [cackling]
[Orwell] Animal Farm was the
first book in which I tried,
with full consciousness
of what I was doing,
to fuse political purpose
and artistic purpose
into one whole.
-Read it to me.
-Hm.
[donkey] "All animals are equal
but some animals
are more equal than others."
[goat] More equal than others?
Praise to him
The font of all our wisdom
Long to live
The ruler of our farm
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Perfect pig
You bless us with your beauty
Hallowed hod
How wondrous is your glow
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
[crowd cheers]
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Two legs better
Four legs good
I decree that this farm
will now devote itself
to the making of weapons,
to the building of walls
for the protection of ourselves
and our way of life!
The revolution is over.
All animals are now free!
-[crowd cheers]
-[ducks honking]
[war planes humming]
[blast]
[man over loudspeaker]
Take cover at once!
Take cover at once!
[blasts]
[solemn music]
[baby crying]
[planes passing overhead]
[distant explosion]
[police siren]
[screaming]
[Orwell]
Winston tried to squeeze out
some childhood memory
that should tell him
whether London
had always been like this.
Were there always these vistas
of rotting 19th-century houses?
Their sides shored up
with baulks of timbers,
their windows patched
with cardboard
and their roofs
with corrugated iron,
their crazy garden walls
sagging in all directions,
and the bombed sites
where the plaster dust
swirled in the air
and the willow-herb straggled
over the heaps of rubble
and the places where the bombs
had cleared a large patch,
and there sprung up sordid
colonies of wooden dwellings
like chicken houses.
But it was no use.
He could not remember.
Nothing remained
of his childhood
except a series
of bright-lit tableaux
occurring against no background
and mostly unintelligible.
Sing to the sailors
On the floating fortress
Sing to the soldiers
On the battlefields
Sing to the airmen
In the burning azure
Sing to the farmers
Rising yields
[Orwell] It is not easy for me
to think of my school days
without seeming to breathe in
a whiff of something cold
and evil-smelling,
a sort of compound
of sweaty stockings,
dirty towels,
fecal smells
blowing along corridors,
forks with old food
between the prongs,
neck-of-mutton stew,
and the banging doors
of the lavatories
and the echoing chamber pots
in the dormitories.
[sustained harmonica song]
[harmonica cacophony echoing]
[schoolmaster shouts]
[Orwell] By the social standards
that prevailed about me,
I was no good
and could not be any good,
but all the different
kinds of virtue
seemed to be
mysteriously interconnected
and to belong
to much the same people.
It was not only money
that mattered.
There were also strength,
beauty, charm,
athleticism,
and something called "guts"
or character, which in reality,
meant the power
to impose your will on others.
I did not possess
any of these qualities.
I lived in a world of boys,
gregarious animals
questioning nothing, accepting
the law of the stronger
and avenging
their own humiliations
by passing them down
to someone smaller.
[in Russian]
[Putin]
[Putin]
[officer]
There are five fingers there.
Do you see five fingers?
[man] Yes.
[film reel rolling]
[solemn music]
[indistinct speech]
-[war planes rushing]
-[explosions]
[scattered artillery fire]
[labored breathing]
[engines humming]
[Orwell]
This is a political age.
War, fascism,
concentration camps,
rubber truncheons, atomic bombs
are what we daily think about
and therefore, to a great
extent, what we write about,
even when we do not
name them openly.
We cannot help this.
When you are on a sinking ship,
your thoughts
will be about sinking ships.
-[birds calling]
-[wind gusting]
Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
Argyllshire.
22nd of October, 1948.
Dear Fred,
I shall finish the book,
Deo Volente , early in November,
and I am rather flinching
from the job of typing it
because it is a very
awkward thing to do in bed
where I still have to spend
half the time.
I can't send it away
because it is an unbelievably
bad manuscript
and no one could make head or
tail of it without explanation.
I think it is a good idea,
but the execution
would have been better
if I had not written it under
the influence of tuberculosis.
I haven't definitely
fixed on the title,
but I am hesitating
between 1984
and The Last Man in Europe.
-[intriguing music]
-[crow cawing]
When I was 14 or 15,
I was an odious little snob,
but no worse than other boys
of my own age and class.
I was very young,
not much more than six,
when I first became aware
of class distinctions.
[man] Ah, I think
you look pretty smart.
You look like a gentleman.
[Orwell] I despised anyone
who was not describable
as a gentleman,
but I also hated
the hoggishly rich,
especially those who had grown
rich too recently.
I look down on him
because I am upper class.
I look up to him
because he is upper class,
but I look down on him
because he is lower class.
[audience laughter]
I am middle class.
I know my place.
[Orwell]
Hence, at the age of 17 or 18,
I was both a snob
and a revolutionary.
I was against all authority
and I loosely described myself
as a socialist,
but I had not much grasp
of what socialism meant
and no notion that the working
class were human beings.
We'll have no pissing
in the corners.
Not allowed. Frowned upon.
It's not very hygienic, is it?
[foreman] It's downright filthy.
-[man] May I ask a question?
-[foreman] Fire away.
What's your views
on the ozone layer?
[foreman]
I'll turn a blind eye to it
as long as it doesn't interfere
with the job.
[Orwell] I knew nothing
about working-class conditions.
I had read
the unemployment figures,
but I had no notion
of what they implied.
I'm a four-loom weaver
As many a one knows
I've not to eat
And I've worn out me clothes
[crowd clamoring]
Me clogs are both broken
[Orwell] Above all, I did not
know the essential fact
that respectable poverty
is always the worst.
The frightful doom
of a decent working man
suddenly thrown on the streets
after a lifetime
of steady work,
his agonized struggles
against economic laws
which he does not understand,
the disintegration of families,
the corroding sense of shame,
all this was outside the range
of my experience.
["Four Loom Weaver" continues]
When I thought of poverty,
I thought of it in terms
of brute starvation.
Therefore, my mind
turned immediately
towards the extreme cases,
the social outcasts,
tramps, beggars,
criminals, prostitutes.
These were the lowest
of the low
and these were the people
with whom I wanted
to get in contact.
[solemn piano music]
[distant dogs barking]
What I profoundly wanted
at that time
was to find some way
of getting out of the
respectable world altogether.
I meditated upon it
a great deal.
I even planned parts of it
in detail.
How one could sell everything,
give everything away,
change one's name,
and start out with no money
and nothing but the clothes
one stood up in.
But in real life, nobody
ever does that kind of thing.
[gruel squelching]
[spoon scraping pot bottom]
[ambient chatter]
As Syme had done earlier,
Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling
in the pale-colored gravy
that dribbled across the table,
drawing a long streak of it
out into a pattern.
He meditated resentfully
on the physical texture
of life.
-Mister.
-What is it, son?
Can you watch my seat and else
if I got my spoon?
I'll give you my spoon, son.
I'm finished.
[soft symphonic music]
-[worrisome music]
-[animals grunting]
[Orwell] You discover
what it is like to be hungry
with bread and margarine
in your belly.
You go out
and look into the shop windows.
Everywhere, there is
food insulting you
in huge, wasteful piles,
whole dead pigs,
baskets of hot loaves,
great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages...
-[marketplace chatter]
-...mountains of potatoes,
vast Gruyere cheese
like grindstones.
A sniveling self-pity
comes over you
at the sight of so much food.
You plan to grab a loaf
and run,
swallowing it
before they catch you
and you refrain from pure funk.
[classical music
over phone line]
-[music stops]
-[operator] We're sorry,
but all our
customer-service agents
are busy at the moment.
Please hold
and we will answer your call...
[classical music continues]
[man sighs]
[Orwell]
You discover the boredom
which is inseparable
from poverty,
the times
when you have nothing to do
and, being underfed, can
interest yourself in nothing.
For half a day at a time,
you lie on your bed,
feeling like
the jeune squelette
in Baudelaire's poem.
Only food could rouse you.
You discover that a man
who's gone even a week on bread
and margarine
is not a man any longer,
only a belly
with a few accessory organs.
[Michael Moore] The top 1%
that controlled
90% of the wealth
had two major political parties
doing their bidding for them,
and the other 99%
had no political party!
[crowd laughing]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] Beggars do not work,
it is said,
but then what is work?
A navvy works
by swinging a pick.
An accountant works
by adding up figures.
A beggar works
by standing out of doors
in all weathers
and getting varicose veins,
chronic bronchitis, etc.
It is a trade like any other,
quite useless, of course,
but then many reputable trades
are quite useless,
and as a social type,
a beggar compares well
with scores of others.
He is honest compared
with the sellers
of most patent medicines,
high-minded compared with
a Sunday-newspaper proprietor.
A beggar,
looked at realistically,
is simply a businessman
getting his living
like other businessmen
in the way that comes to hand.
He has not,
more than most modern people,
sold his honor.
He has merely made the mistake
of choosing a trade
at which
it is impossible to grow rich.
[digital trilling]
[music building]
[sultry techno music]
Three
Two, one
The underlying fact
was that the whole position
of the moneyed class
had long ceased
to be justifiable.
The existence of these people
was by any standard
unjustifiable.
They were simply parasites,
less useful to society
than his fleas are to a dog.
-[tense piano music]
-[excited clamoring]
Oh, that's great!
Can you move your head a little?
The British ruling class
could not admit to themselves
that their usefulness
was at an end.
It was not possible for them
to turn themselves
into mere bandits
like the American millionaires.
Clearly, there was only one
escape for them:
into stupidity.
[woman on radio] The Ministry
of Peace is happy to report
that thanks to the vigilance
of our gallant interceptors,
no Eurasian rocket bomb
was able to reach targets
of any importance.
We continue now
with our regular broadcast.
[sensor beeping]
[pinging]
There are parts in southern
China where smart cameras
placed around the intersection
will recognize who you are.
You could have your face covered
or you could be obscured.
These systems
are very, very smart.
They can recognize you by gait,
by posture,
by how you're walking,
and so if you've caused
an infraction,
your face gets thrown up
on a digital billboard
at that intersection
along with your name
and where you work,
and that information
is transmitted to your employers
and to your family members.
[Lin Junyue in Mandarin]
[classical music]
[music begins distorting]
[AI greeting customers
in different languages]
[Tufecki] Much of the technology
that threatens our freedom
and our dignity
in the near-term future
is being developed by companies
in the business of capturing
and selling our data
and our attention
to advertisers and others.
[woman's voice] Smith,
outer-party members
have to wear
their identification badges
in the evening.
Don't forget again!
If the people in power
are using these algorithms
to quietly watch us,
to judge us and to nudge us,
to predict and identify the
troublemakers and the rebels,
that authoritarianism will
envelop us like a spider's web,
and we may not even know
we're in it.
[propellers buzzing]
The surveillance capitalists
have tried to get us to believe
that their practices
are the inevitable outgrowth
of digital technologies.
So, that's why I believe
that the future is private.
This is the next chapter
for our services.
What do you prefer?
Being safer when you wake up
in the morning
and go to the street
or not being, you know,
analyzed by AI systems?
I wanna be safer.
What do you prefer?
[Etshtein] What do you prefer?
Safer when you stir?
[Etshtein] What do you prefer?
Or not be scared by AI?
-Tell me no lies
I wanna be safer
-[Etshtein] I wanna be safer.
- I wanna be safer
Safer. Safer. Safer.
I wanna be safer
[Trump] Surveillance
is okay if you don't mind.
I wanna be... I wanna surveil.
I want surveillance of these
people that are coming in.
The Trojan horse, I wanna know
who the hell they are.
[Snowden] You don't have
to have done anything wrong.
You simply have to eventually
fall under suspicion
from somebody,
even by a wrong call,
and then they can use the system
to go back in time
and scrutinize every decision
you've ever made,
every friend you've ever
discussed something with
and attack you on that basis
to sort of derive suspicion
from an innocent life
and paint anyone
in the context of a wrongdoer.
[sinister music]
It should be that when
we make things more productive,
when we greatly
increase productivity,
it helps everybody,
but there's the worry that
it might just help the rich.
[female voice] The new,
model-three generative android
from Funky is a fully
autonomous humanoid robot
with features never before seen
in the consumer market.
[Zuboff] We are increasingly
trapped in a world of no escape
and even if we want
to make a choice, we can't.
[upbeat, old-timey music]
[Orwell] It would probably not
be beyond human ingenuity
to write books by machinery,
but a sort of
mechanizing process
can already be seen at work
in the film and radio,
in publicity and propaganda,
and in the lower reaches
of journalism.
Even so, what they write is
merely a kind of raw material
to be chopped into shape
by producers and censors.
Books would be planned in their
broad lines by bureaucrats
and would pass through so many
hands that when finished,
they would be no more
an individual product
than a Ford car at the end
of the assembly line.
It goes without saying
that anything so produced
would be rubbish.
At present, we know only that
the imagination,
like certain wild animals,
will not breed in captivity.
[radio jingle]
[newscaster]
Every hour of the day,
the voice of London
goes around...
[Orwell]
Second of December, 1942.
Dear George Woodcock,
as to the ethics
of broadcasting
and in general
letting oneself be used
by the British governing class,
it's of little value
to argue about it,
but for heaven's sake,
don't think I don't see
how they are using me.
I doubt whether I shall stay
in this job very much longer,
but while here, I consider
I have kept our propaganda
slightly less disgusting
than it might otherwise
have been.
[lighthearted music]
[wheels squeaking]
The Tribune ,
222 London Western Central 2,
14th of July, 1944.
Dear John Murry,
I am smothered under work,
and also I've been bombed out
and we have a very young baby
we adopted,
a three-week-old boy
who Eileen and I christened
Richard Horatio Blair,
all of which
adds to one's work.
Life is pretty full now.
What a wonderful thing
to have a kid of one's own.
I've always wanted one so.
[newscaster]
The Pacific service from London
is sending you all greetings
and wishing the best of luck
to those of you listening
who are serving
in our armed forces on sea,
land or in the air
and in the merchant navy...
[Orwell]
BBC, 24th of September, 1943,
Dear Mr. Rushbrook-Williams,
in confirmation of what I said
to you earlier in private,
I want to tender my resignation
from the BBC.
I am not leaving because of any
disagreement with BBC policy.
On the contrary,
I feel that I have been treated
with the greatest generosity
and allowed
very great latitude.
I am tendering my resignation
because for some time past,
I have been conscious
that I was wasting my own time
and the public money.
I feel that by going back
to my normal work
of writing and journalism,
I could be more useful
than I am at present.
-[solemn music]
-[birds chirping]
Hotel Scribe, Rue Scribe,
Paris 9th, 13th of April, 1945.
Dear Tony,
I don't know whether
you will have heard
from some other source
about what has happened.
Eileen is dead.
It was a most horrible
thing to happen
because she had had
five really miserable years
of bad health and overwork,
and things were just beginning
to get better,
but it was terribly sad
that she should die
when she had become
so devoted to Richard
and was making such a good job
of his upbringing.
Richard, I am glad to say,
is very well,
and for the moment
is provided for.
[soft piano music]
-[low murmurs]
-[man clears throat]
[hesitating]
[whoosh]
[intriguing music]
[branch snaps]
Look.
-[Winston] It's a dream.
-[Orwell] But for a moment,
he did not look at her body.
His eyes were anchored
by the freckled face
with its faint, bold smile.
He knelt down before her
and took her hands in his.
[Winston]
Have you done this before?
[Julia] Of course!
Hundreds of times.
-With party members?
-Yes.
Inner-party members?
Not with those bastards,
though there's plenty who would.
[Orwell] His heart leapt.
[soft singing in French]
"In the old days," he thought,
"a man looked at a girl's body
and saw that it was desirable,
and that was the end
of the story.
But you could not have
pure love
or pure lust nowadays.
No emotion was pure
because everything was mixed up
with fear and hatred.
Their embrace
had been a battle,
the climax a victory.
It was a blow struck
against the party.
It was a political act."
[music fades]
[chanting hymn sung]
In the past, at any rate,
throughout
the Protestant centuries,
the idea of rebellion
and the idea
of intellectual integrity
were mixed up.
A heretic, political,
moral, religious,
or esthetic was one who refused
to outrage his own conscience.
His outlook was summed up
in the words
of the revivalist hymn,
"Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known."
To bring this hymn up to date,
one would have to add a don't
at the beginning of each line.
[Milan Kundera in French]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] Daring to stand alone
is ideologically criminal
as well as practically
dangerous.
The idea
of intellectual liberty
is under attack
from two directions.
On the one side
are its theoretical enemies,
the apologists
of totalitarianism...
-[clamoring]
-[gunshots]
[shouting in Russian]
[speaking Arabic]
[newscaster] Jamal Khashoggi
was a Saudi journalist
and an outspoken critic
of his country's government.
[newscaster] CNN can now confirm
Jamal Khashoggi's last words,
"I can't breathe.
I can't breathe."
The transcript records
many voices and noises,
then says, "Scream from Jamal."
Again, "Scream," then "Gasping."
Noises are identified as "saw"
and "cutting."
-[solemn music]
-[birds chirping]
[joyful chatter
of indistinct voices]
[Orwell] And on the other, its
immediate, practical enemies
monopoly and bureaucracy,
which are actively interested
in maintaining the status quo
and therefore
in preventing the common man
from becoming too intelligent.
The independence
of the writer and the artist
is eaten away
by vague economic forces
and at the same time,
it is undermined
by those
who should be its defenders.
[Schechter]
We falsely think of our country
as a democracy when it has
evolved into a media-ocracy,
where a media that is supposed
to check political abuse
is part of political abuse.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
[Orwell]
Political writing in our time
consists almost entirely
of prefabricated phrases
bolted together like the pieces
of a child's mechano set.
This is extremely dangerous.
This is extremely dangerous.
This is extremely dangerous.
-Dangerous.
-Democracy.
We live in the greatest country.
The greatest nation
in the history of mankind.
The strongest, freest,
greatest country.
The greatest healthcare.
The greatest universities,
the greatest schools.
The greatest rise
of freedom and opportunity.
The single greatest nation
in the history of all mankind.
The greatest country ever.
If we're gonna talk about
the elite-medias debate,
then it is still controlled
by the corporate owners
and the corporate sponsors,
who, after all,
provide the revenue
to keep those machines going,
to keep those TV shows
on the air
and those radio shows
and those papers.
[in French]
[Orwell]
The journalist is unfree
and is conscious of unfreedom
when he forced to write lies
or suppress what seems to him
important news.
[man]
What have you got there, Smith?
This photograph was between
the pages of the gazette.
-What photograph?
-Jones and Rutherford.
They confessed to aiding
the underground
and being in Eurasia
during Hate Week.
-But here it says--
-What are you talking about?
I don't see any photograph.
I think it's very difficult
to avoid
going to that pre-prepared thing
that you've got
that's got a quote in it,
that's got a name in it,
that's got background
information in it.
It's fed to you to make easy
for you to tell it that way.
So, what we really require
is something countervailing,
something on the other side
to dig out just that information
that that powerful entity,
that might be the state
or might be a private
corporation
that they don't
want you to hear.
We start with that search,
the race to save five people
who are onboard a submersible.
[speaking Spanish]
[newscaster]
On board is believed to be
the British billionaire,
Hamish...
[Orwell] Everything in our age
conspires to turn the writer
and every other kind
of artist as well
into a minor official
working on themes
handed down from above
and never telling
what seems to him
the whole of the truth.
-[radar trilling]
-[sinister music]
[people shouting]
[Sanders] What the media does
is trivialize what goes on
sensationalizes it,
makes it entertainment,
rather than saying, "Look,
the function of the media
is to educate you
to live in a democracy,
which is pretty serious stuff."
There are 741 no-go zones
throughout France
and they're located
in the ghettos
that are called les banlieues .
I've been to Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Kashmir, India,
and at times,
it felt like, like that.
[in French]
-Franois Macron...
-Emmanuel.
Emmanuel, Franois, it seems
like every French person
I think their name is Franois.
-Who knows?
-Maybe he'll change his name.
-Franois.
-[laughter]
[Orwell] To write in plain,
vigorous language,
one has to think fearlessly,
and if one thinks fearlessly,
one cannot be politically
orthodox.
-It was you! It was you...
-[man] Good lying.
That privatized a large chunk
of the health service
and you're lying,
and you're lying.
[arguing]
I think your fake lashes are
messing up what you're reading.
-[clamoring]
-[man] We have a situation
in which a significant
percentage of the population
doesn't vote,
doesn't care about the issues,
is tuned out entirely,
is what we call depoliticized.
Uh, in fact, we have
a rate of depoliticization
in the United States
that must make a tyrant
like in, you know,
Indonesia envious.
"How can I get one of these
vegged-out populations?"
I say the fact is I've done more
for the Black community
than any president
since Abraham Lincoln.
-I say it,
nobody can dispute it.
-[blues music]
People listen when I speak.
Black people.
[vocalist] Black
Believe me, I've studied it,
I've seen it,
and it's incredible.
Black
Black, your physical strength
is unmatched.
Black
You have this charm,
Black people, believe me.
Jazz, soul, Rosa Parks,
Cassius Clay,
legends, winners, the best!
And you know what?
Black women...
I love Black
Black women,
they make me so hungry.
People listen when I speak,
hungry for gumbo and cornbread.
Nobody does it better.
The mugshot, we've all seen
the mugshot, and...
And you know who embraced it
more than anybody else?
The Black population,
it's incredible.
You see Black people
walking around with my mugshot.
[Orwell] This kind of thing
is frightening to me
because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept
of objective truth
is fading out of this world.
An atom bomb exploded
in our information ecosystem
because social media
turned our world upside down
spreading lies faster than facts
while amplifying fear and anger,
fueling hatred by design
for profit.
[man] Do you affirm the
testimony you are about to give
will be the truth,
the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
We very much believe
that this content is disgusting
and that, um...
Senator, that behavior
is disgusting and reprehensible.
We provide in-app
reporting tools
so that people
who are being harassed
or people who have been shared
inappropriate sexual content
can report it in the case
of harassment or sexual content.
You announced recently that
the official policy of Facebook
now allows politicians to pay
to spread disinformation.
Well, could I pay to target
predominantly Black zip codes
and advertise them
the incorrect election date?
No, congresswoman, you couldn't.
We have, even for these policies
the newsworthiness of content
that politicians say
and the general principle
that I believe that...
[Cortez] But you said you're not
going to fact-check my ads.
We have, if anyone,
including a politician
is saying things
that can cause,
that is calling for violence,
or could risk imminent,
physical harm,
or voter or census suppression
when we roll out
the census suppression po...
policy, um,
we will take that content down.
So, would I be able
to run advertisements
on Facebook targeting
Republicans in primaries
saying that they voted
for the Green New Deal?
If you're not fact-checking
political advertisements,
I'm just trying
to understand the bounds here.
-What's fair game.
-Congresswoman, I, uh...
I don't know the answer to that
off the top of my head.
You don't know
if I'll be able to do that.
Can you explain why you've named
the Daily Caller
a publication well documented
with ties to white supremacists
as an official fact checker
for Facebook?
Congresswoman, sure,
we actually don't appoint
the independent fact checkers.
They go through
an independent organization
called the Independent
Fact Checking Network
that has a rigorous standard
for who they allow
to serve as a fact checker.
So...
You would say that
white-supremacist-tied
publications
meet a rigorous standard
for fact checking?
Because of deep fakes,
you can't trust
your eyes and ears.
Instead of the facts,
the enshittification,
enshittification
of the Internet,
is in full bloom.
More trash, more propaganda,
more information operations
that push our emotional buttons.
We will have to struggle harder
for agency,
for independent thought,
and it's not just
the tech companies
that abdicated responsibility
for protecting us.
It's also democratic governments
like the United States.
Tech is the least-regulated
industry around the world.
[all] USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
[labored breathing]
[muffled speech]
[waves lapping]
[bagpipes]
[shouting]
[Orwell] Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
Argyllshire,
28th of November, 1948.
Dear Gwen, all is well here
and Richard
is bursting with energy.
He goes out fishing
with the others now
and sometimes catches
quite a lot of fish.
The weather just lately
has been very nice,
beautiful, still, sunny days,
and not at all cold,
but I hardly ever
go out of doors
because the smallest exertion
upsets me.
The pig has grown
to a stupendous size
and goes to the butcher
next week.
We are all longing
to get rid of him,
as he is so destructive
and greedy.
Even gets
into the kitchen sometimes.
I have finished my book,
which I'd been
messing about with
since some time in 1947.
Yours, George.
Death!
[cheering]
Brothers and sisters,
one week from now
in this very square,
we shall, as a demonstration...
[speech fades]
[eerie music]
[opera chorus singing
dramatic piece]
[man] Eurasian prisoners
will be passing
through Victory Square!
These are the evil men
whose ruthless lust for power...
[shouting in German]
[chanting]
[in Spanish]
Let me have the fight!
[marching orders shouted]
[in Italian]
The mother is a woman,
the father is a man.
[in Italian]
[music and speech fades]
April 4th, 1984.
Last night to the flicks,
all war films.
One a very good one of a ship
full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots
of a great, huge, fat man
trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him.
[indistinct shouting]
Then you saw a lifeboat
full of children
with a helicopter
hovering over it.
There was a middle-aged woman,
might have been a Jewess,
sitting up in the bow
with a little boy
about three years old
in her arms.
[helicopter propellers]
Then the helicopter
planted a 20-kilo bomb
in among them.
Terrific flash and the boat
went all to matchwood.
Then there was a wonderful shot
of a child's arm
going up, up, up,
right up into the air.
A helicopter with a camera
in its nose
must have followed it up.
There was a lot of applause
from the party seats.
Winston stops writing
partly because he was suffering
from cramp.
Oh, what a piece of work
is the pursuit of truth.
Don't be a writer, Richard,
whatever you do.
Be a farmer.
And grow things.
Keep goats.
[solemn music]
[Orwell]
Our civilization is decadent
and our language,
so the argument runs,
must inevitably share
in the general collapse.
The words, democracy,
socialism,
freedom, patriotic...
-[echo of crowd clamoring]
-...realistic, justice,
have each of them
several different meanings
which cannot be reconciled
with one another.
[in French]
[Orwell] But if thought
corrupts language,
language can also
corrupt thought.
And here's the truth,
Israel seeks peace.
Israel yearns for peace.
Israel has made peace
and will make peace again.
[intriguing music]
[Orwell] Political language
is designed
to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable.
[gulls calling]
Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
22nd of October, 1948.
Dear Fred, I have just read
Sartre's book on antisemitism,
which you published, to review.
I think Sartre is a bag of wind
and I'm going to give
him a good boot.
The less talk there is about
"the" Jew or "the" anti-Semite
as a species of animal
different from ourselves,
the better.
[intriguing music]
At the start of 2024,
Google cut 1,000 jobs.
Why? Pichai says it's about
"removing layers
to simplify execution."
Tesla, we're told
the company will lay off
over ten percent
of its workforce.
[newscaster 1]
UPS announced it will lay off
12,000 employees.
[newscaster 2] The practice
of staff ranking employees
might be making a comeback
in Silicon Valley.
[newscaster 3] The lay-offs are
already piling up this year.
[newscaster 4] The lay-offs
in technology just keep coming.
The latest, Google
cutting hundreds of jobs.
[Zuckerberg] Okay,
it's one thing to do that,
to, like, decide that
at a high level.
How do you execute that
as compassionately as possible?
And there's no good way, um...
There's no perfect way,
for sure,
and it's gonna be tough
no matter what,
but as a leadership team here,
we've certainly spent
a lot of time just thinking,
"What is the most compassionate
way that we can do this?"
[music softens]
[Orwell]
From where Winston stood,
it was just possible to read,
picked out on its white face
in elegant lettering,
the three slogans of the party,
Freedom is Slavery,
War is Peace,
Ignorance is Strength.
[solemn music]
[officer]
Again, how many fingers?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Four, five, six?
In all honesty, I don't know.
[Orwell]
The Cotswold Sanatorium,
Cranham, Gloucestershire,
the 2nd of February, 1949.
Dear Julian, I wonder how you
and your family are getting on.
I have been in this place
about a month.
I think I told you
last time I wrote
that I had been feeling
very bad again.
Richard is getting
on for five now
and is enormous
and very healthy,
though still not interested
in learning his letters.
I suppose this coming winter
he will have to start
going to school,
which he is certain to enjoy,
as he is very gregarious.
[labored breathing]
Cranham, 8th of April, 1949.
Dear Richard, don't depress
the others too much with this,
but the fact is
I am in a bad way at present.
They are going
to try streptomycin again.
If things go badly...
Of course we'll hope
they won't,
but one must be prepared
for the worst.
...I'll ask you to bring
little Richard to see me
before I get too frightening
in appearance.
Cranham, Gloucester,
22nd of August, 1949.
Dear Fred, could you please
send one copy each
of Burmese Days
and Coming up for Air
to Sonia Brownell
care of Horizon ?
As I warned you I might do,
I intend getting married again,
to Sonia.
When I am once again
in the land of the living,
if I ever am,
I suppose everyone
will be horrified,
but apart from other
considerations,
I really think
I should stay alive longer
if I were married.
[woman] One, two!
-One, two!
-[coughing]
One, two!
One, two!
-Smith?
-[coughs]
6079 Smith, W.?
Yes, you. Bend lower.
[Orwell] Winston wrenched
his body out of bed, naked.
The physical jerks
would begin in three minutes.
The next moment, he was doubled
up by a violent coughing fit,
which nearly always attacked
him soon after waking up.
It emptied his lungs
so completely
that he could only begin
breathing again
by lying on his back
and taking a series
of deep gasps.
[singing hymn]
Dear Francis A. Henson
of the United Automobile
Workers.
My recent novel
is not intended
as an attack on socialism
or on the British Labour Party,
of which I am a supporter,
but as a show-up
of the perversions
to which a centralized economy
is liable
and which have
already been partly realized
in communism and fascism.
I do not believe that the kind
of society I describe
necessarily will arrive,
but I believe
that something resembling it
could arrive.
And I have tried
to draw these ideas out
to their logical consequences.
The scene of the book
is laid in Britain
in order to emphasize
that the English-speaking races
are not innately better
than anyone else.
- [singing hymn]
-And that totalitarianism,
if not fought against,
could triumph anywhere.
[Winston] We are the dead.
[Julia] We are the dead.
[man] You are the dead.
Remain exactly where you are.
Make no move
until you are ordered.
[crash]
[officer] Don't resist.
Stand in the middle of the room!
[man] Do not touch one another.
[hymn music playing]
[man] Take the woman!
[Julia]
No, don't let them take me!
No, no, no!
-[punching]
-[Winston shouts]
I warned you it wouldn't be
as peaceful here
as you would like.
Nothing is hidden
from the Thought Police.
[nervous breathing]
[lock unlatched]
[footsteps approaching]
[Orwell] "How does one man
assert his power
over another, Winston?"
Winston thought.
"By making him suffer,"
he said.
"Exactly.
By making him suffer."
-[machine clicking]
-[screaming]
[yelling]
Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering,
how can you be sure
that he is obeying your will
and not his own?
Power is in inflicting pain
and humiliation.
-[static]
-[grunting]
Power is in tearing human minds
to pieces
and putting them together again
in new shapes
of your own choosing.
[rats squealing]
Not to me.
Not to me.
If you want a vision
of the future, Winston,
imagine a boot stamping
on a human face forever.
[gasping] Please.
Do it to her. To Julia.
I don't care what you do to her,
but do it to her.
Tear her face off.
Do it to Julia and not to me!
Do it to Julia!
Do it to Julia!
Not me!
[Orwell]
Do you begin to see, then
what kind of world
we are creating?
[solemn music]
All we have done
is to advance to a point
at which we could make a real
improvement in human life,
but we shan't do it
without the recognition
that common decency
is necessary.
[indistinct shouting]
My chief hope for the future
is that the common people
have never parted company
with their moral code.
I betrayed you.
I betrayed you.
I told them all about you.
Yes, I told them about you too.
I ask only...
for you to accept my love
of our leader.
I love Big Brother.
-Long live Big Brother.
-[crowd cheering]
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
[Winston] Long live Big Brother!
[Cheering]
[rock music plays]
[announcer]
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome the next
president of the United States,
President Donald J. Trump.
[Snowden]
The greatest fear that I have
regarding the outcome
for America of these disclosures
is that nothing will change.
People will see in the media,
all of these disclosures.
They'll know the lengths
the government is going to
to grant themselves
powers unilaterally
um, to create greater control
over American society
and global society,
but they won't be willing
to take the risks
necessary to stand up
and fight to change things,
to force their representatives
to actually take a stand
in their interests.
In four years,
you won't have to vote again.
We'll have it fixed so good,
you're not gonna have to vote.
[solemn music]
[Zuboff] How do we solve
collective-action problems?
We solve them with democracy.
So, there is one thing that
surveillance capitalists fear.
It may not be me
as an individual
or you as an individual
or your son or daughter
as an individual,
but what they fear is all of us
mobilized together now.
[Orwell] "If there is hope,"
wrote Winston,
"it lies in the proles.
If there was hope,
it must lie in the proles
because only there,
in those swarming,
disregarded masses,
85% of the population
of Oceania,
could the force to
destroy the party
ever be generated.
The party could not
be overthrown from within."
[crowd clapping and chanting]
[crowd chanting]
[music fades]
[labored breathing]
[Orwell] Daily routine
at University College Hospital.
"How did you sleep?"
7 to 7:30 a.m.
Temperature taken.
7:30 to 8.
Blanket bath.
Back rubbed.
10:30.
Ward maid comes to sweep room.
6:45, dinner.
10, temperature taken.
A drink of some sort.
10:30 about.
Bed tipped
and light put out
shortly after.
[somber music]
[brooding music]
[labored breathing]
[music fades]
[wind gusting]
[Orwell] When I sit down
to write a book,
I do not say to myself,
"I'm going to produce
a work of art."
I write it because there is
some lie that I want to expose,
some fact to which
I want to draw attention,
and my initial concern
is to get a hearing.
My starting point is always
a feeling of partisanship,
a sense of injustice.
-[rain pattering]
-[distant thunder pealing]
[Orwell] Two and two.
Four.
-[Orwell] Again?
-Four.
Good. There are people
who'll tell you
the answer's five.
Usually,
they're called government.
Great leaders.
It becomes very important
to them
that the people should believe
that the answer's five.
They'll tell you lies.
They'll torture you.
They'll kill you.
At the moment of death,
you must still insist
that the answer
is four.
[harrowing music]
[Winston] April 18th, 1984.
Nobody keeps a diary today.
Because to do so
would be punishable by death.
I don't care anymore.
I found this old book
by chance.
[persistent beeping]
I'm going to set down what
I dare not say aloud to anyone.
[narrator]
This, in 1984, is London,
chief city of Airstrip 1,
a province
of the state of Oceania.
[thunder pealing]
[Orwell] From a very early age,
perhaps the age of five or six,
I knew that when I grew up,
I should be a writer.
[crow cawing]
I had the lonely child's habit
of making up stories
and holding conversations
with imaginary persons.
I knew that I had
a facility with words
and a power of facing
unpleasant facts,
and I felt that this created
a sort of private world
in which I could get
my own back
for my failure
in everyday life.
I wanted to write
enormous naturalistic novels.
-[foreboding music]
-[airplane engine humming]
[music fades]
[rain pattering]
[Khine in Burmese]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] I do not think one
can assess a writer's motives
without knowing something
of his early development.
[birds chirping]
His subject matter
will be determined
by the age he lives in.
At least this is true in
tumultuous, revolutionary ages
like our own.
When I was not yet 20,
I went to Burma,
in the Indian Imperial Police.
In an outpost of empire
like Burma,
the class question
appeared at first sight
to have been shelved.
Most of the white men in Burma
were not of the type
who in England
would be called gentlemen,
but they were white men
in contradistinction
to the other
and inferior class,
the natives.
In the free air of England,
that kind of thing
is not fully intelligible.
In order to hate imperialism,
you've got to be part of it.
But it is not possible
to be part of such a system
without recognizing it
as an unjustifiable tyranny.
Even the thickest-skinned
Anglo-Indian is aware of this.
Every native face
he sees in the street
brings home to him
his monstrous intrusion.
-[gunshots]
-[crowd clamoring]
But I was in the police,
which is to say that I was part
of the actual machinery
of despotism.
[gunshot]
[distant bird calling]
When I came home
on leave in 1927,
I was already half determined
to throw up my job,
and one sniff of English air
decided me.
For five years, I have been
part of an oppressive system
and it left me
with a bad conscience.
Innumerable remembered faces,
faces of prisoners in the dark,
of men waiting
in the condemned cells,
of subordinates I had bullied
and aged peasants
I had snubbed,
of servants and coolies
I had hit with my fist
in moments of rage
haunted me intolerably.
[disturbing music]
[voices shouting]
[police siren]
[in Burmese]
[blasts]
[soft piano music]
[shouting]
[Orwell] No book is genuinely
free from political bias.
The opinion that art
should have
nothing to do with politics
is itself a political attitude.
[female vocalist
singing in French]
[indistinct conversation]
[girl in Burmese]
[child in Burmese]
[Orwell] I had reduced
everything to the simple theory
that the oppressed
are always right
and the oppressors
are always wrong,
a mistaken theory,
but the natural result
of being one
of the oppressors yourself.
[music fades]
[indistinct speech]
[menacing music]
A society becomes totalitarian
when its structure
becomes flagrantly artificial.
That is,
when its ruling class
has lost its function,
but succeeds in clinging
to power by force or fraud.
But to be corrupted
by totalitarianism,
one does not have to live
in a totalitarian country.
[general applause]
[Bush] Tonight,
I wanted to take a few minutes
to discuss
a grave threat to peace.
The threat comes from Iraq.
It arises directly from the
Iraqi regime's own actions,
its history of aggression,
and its drive
toward an arsenal of terror.
[narrator] We're at war
with the people of Eurasia,
the vile and ruthless
aggressors
who have committed
countless atrocities
and who are guilty
of every bestial crime
a human being can commit.
They've laid waste to our land,
destroyed our factories,
looted our homes,
massacred our children
and raped our women!
When Iraq finally admitted
having these weapons in 1995,
the quantities were vast.
Less than a teaspoon
of dry anthrax,
a little bit...
about this amount.
[Orwell] This kind of thing
happens everywhere,
but it is clearly likelier to
lead to outright falsification
in societies
where only one opinion
is permissible
at any given moment.
[in Russian]
[Orwell] The organized lying
practiced
by totalitarian states
is not, as is sometimes
claimed,
a temporary expedient
of the same nature
as military deception.
It is something integral
to totalitarianism,
something that would
still continue
even if concentration camps
and secret police forces
had ceased to be necessary.
Totalitarianism
demands, in fact,
the continuous alteration
of the past
and, in the long run,
probably demands a disbelief
in the very existence
of objective truth.
[officer] How many fingers
am I holding up, Winston?
Four.
And if Big Brother
were to say not four but five,
then how many?
Four.
[Winston whimpering]
How many fingers, Winston?
Stop it! Anything! Five!
-Stop the pain!
-No, Winston.
That is no use. You are lying.
You still think you see four.
But it's five!
Two and two do not always
make four, Winston.
Sometimes they make five.
Again, how many fingers
am I holding up?
[birds chirping]
[Orwell] August 26, 1946.
A few showers in the afternoon.
Otherwise a beautiful day.
When the breeze drops,
the midges were so bad
as to make it almost
impossible to work.
One is actually breathing them
into one's nostrils,
and the irritation
is maddening.
[soft, tense music]
I was born into
what you might describe
as the lower
upper-middle class.
People in this class
owned no land,
but they felt that they were
landowners in the sight of God
and kept up a semi-aristocratic
outlook
by going into the professions
and the fighting services
rather than into trade.
To belong to this class,
when you were
at the 400-pound-a-year level,
was a queer business,
for it meant
that your gentility
was almost purely theoretical.
Small boys used to count
the plum stones on their plates
and foretell their destiny
by chanting,
"Army, Navy, Church,
Medicine, Law."
[children clamoring]
Theoretically,
you knew all about servants
and how to tip them,
although in practice,
you had one,
at most two, resident servants.
Theoretically, you knew
how to wear your clothes
and how to order a dinner,
although in practice,
you could never afford
to go to a decent tailor
or a decent restaurant.
Theoretically,
you knew how to shoot and ride,
although in practice
you had no horses to ride
and not an inch of ground
to shoot over.
-[indistinct chatter]
-[horse nickers]
It was this that explained
the attraction of India,
more recently Kenya,
Nigeria, etc.,
for the lower upper-middle
class.
The people who went there
as soldiers and officials
did not go there to make money,
for a soldier or an official
does not want money.
They went there
because in India,
with cheap horses,
free shooting,
and hordes of black servants,
it was so easy
to play at being a gentleman.
-[birds calling]
-[rifle shot]
[ambient jungle sounds]
This is your cook. Name's Eza.
Eza.
[baby coos]
And this is Juma, houseboy.
Juma.
[foreign language]
Come. See your house.
[upbeat, old-timey music]
[indistinct chatter
and laughing]
[Orwell]
Under the capitalist system,
in order that England may live
in comparative comfort,
100 million Indians must live
on the verge of starvation.
The alternative is to throw
the empire overboard
and reduce England to a cold
and unimportant, little island
where we should all have
to work very hard
and live mainly on herrings
and potatoes.
The fact
that has got to be faced
is that to abolish
class distinctions
means abolishing
a part of yourself.
Here am I, a typical member
of the middle class.
All my notions,
notions of good and evil,
of pleasant and unpleasant,
of funny and serious,
of ugly and beautiful,
are essentially middle-class
notions.
[solemn music]
Ward 3, Hairmyres Hospital,
East Kilbride, near Glasgow,
first of January, 1948.
Dear Gwen, I believe Mr. Dick
sent you a line about my case.
He said I had
a fairly extensive cavity
in the left lung
and also a small patch
at the top of the other lung.
The treatment they
are giving me
is to put the left lung
out of action,
which is supposed to give it
a better chance to heal.
For the rest, I am still
really very ill and weak.
It is a nice hospital
and everyone
is extremely kind to me,
but I have, of course,
done no work
for two or three months.
[bird chirping]
[wind gusting]
[typewriter keys tapping]
"Some Eurasian prisoners,
guilty of war crimes,
were to be hanged
in the park that evening,"
Winston remembered.
This happened
about once a month
and was a popular spectacle.
Children always clamored
to be taken to see it.
"Why can't we go
and see the hanging?"
roared the boy
in his huge voice.
"Want to see the hanging,"
chanted the little girl,
still capering 'round.
[crowd clamoring]
The warders had formed
in a rough circle
around the gallows.
And then,
when the noose was fixed,
the prisoner began crying out
on his god.
Minutes seemed to pass.
The steady, muffled crying
from the prisoner
went on and on.
We looked at the lashed,
hooded man on the drop
and listened to his cries,
each cry
another second of life.
Oh, kill him quickly.
Get it over.
Stop that abominable noise.
[truck engines roar]
[crowd cheering]
Most people approve
of capital punishment,
but most people
wouldn't do the hangman's job.
-[man 1] Let us in!
-[man 2] Get in there!
[woman] Are they trying
to get rid of all of us?
[Trump]
They were peaceful people.
These were great people.
The crowd was unbelievable,
and I mentioned
the word "love,"
the love, the love in the air,
I've never seen
anything like it.
[man] Get in!
[shouting]
[man] Go! Go! Go!
[man cheering]
Go, go!
[gunshot]
[man] Oh, this is about to get
dirty, man. We gotta get back.
He's got a gun. Get down.
[dark music]
Hey!
Fuckin' A, man.
[man] No! We're not putting up
with that either.
[knocking on doors]
[woman] 1776!
FBI operatives were organizing
the attack on the Capitol.
I don't believe
that Trump supporters did that.
I think that they were enticed
by the FBI.
[chanting] Stop the steal!
[Orwell] A totalitarian state
is in effect a theocracy
and its ruling caste,
in order to keep its position,
has to be thought
of as infallible.
[Trump] Congress
has certified the results.
I don't wanna say
the election's over.
I just wanna say--
Congress
has certified the results
without saying
the election's over, okay?
My only goal was to ensure
the integrity of the vote.
My only goal was to ensure
the integrity of the vote.
[Orwell] Since, in practice,
no one is infallible,
it is frequently necessary
to rearrange past events
in order to show that this
or that mistake was not made
or that this or that imaginary
triumph actually happened.
The Dominion Voting Systems,
the Smartmatic technology
software,
and the software that goes
in other computerized
voting systems here as well,
not just Dominion,
were created in Venezuela.
[solemn piano music]
[woman] You can tell
he hasn't done anything wrong
just by his demeanor.
I mean, he would be trying
to hide things.
[Orwell] Already,
there are countless people
who'd think it scandalous to
falsify a scientific textbook,
but would see nothing wrong in
falsifying a historical fact.
Trump is blocking witnesses.
I don't care.
[man]
I'm with him to the finish.
He could stand on the front
steps of the White House
and commit murder,
and I'm with him. [laughter]
[indistinct clamoring]
[car horn honking]
[reporter] How do you explain
all these charges?
Well, they're all made up.
-They're all made up?
-Yup, they're all made up.
So, the election interference
in Georgia.
Sidney Powell
and Kenneth Chesebro,
who work for Donald Trump,
they just plead guilty...
I don't believe that either.
You don't believe
they plead guilty?
Nope.
[Orwell] The friends of
totalitarianism in this country
usually tend to argue that,
since absolute truth
is not attainable,
a big lie is no worse
than a little lie.
The list of Trump lies
filled an entire page
of The New York Times.
It includes only
what the Times calls
"demonstrably false statements."
-[intriguing music]
-[printer sounds]
[music fades to end]
[distant church bell tolling]
[Orwell]
Second of January, 1948.
Dear Julian, thanks ever so
for sending the pen,
which, as you see, I am using.
I think I'm getting
a bit better.
I don't feel quite
so death-like
and I'm eating a lot more.
I can't show you
the part-finished novel.
I never show them to anybody
because they're just a mess
and don't have
much relationship
to the final draft.
I always say
a book doesn't exist
until it is finished.
[tense music]
Every major change in policy
demands a corresponding change
of doctrine
and a revelation of prominent
historical figures.
If the leader says
of such-and-such an event,
"It never happened,"
well, it never happened.
If he says
that two and two are five,
well, two and two are five.
This prospect frightens me
much more than bombs
and that is not
a frivolous statement.
[Modi in Hindi]
The Life of Rosa Parks.
This is apparently too woke
by the Republican Party.
Song of Solomon
is unacceptable
to Republican politics.
Forty percent of banned books
reported are significantly
addressing
and specifically addressing
LGBT issues.
When we talk about
progressive values,
I can say what my progressive
value is,
and that is freedom
over fascism.
-[metal dials spinning]
-[dark music]
[music fades]
Let's say you take these books
out of the library.
What are you gonna do with them?
Are you gonna put them
in the street?
Light them on fire?
Where are they going?
I don't have a clue,
but I would burn them.
[harrowing music]
[Orwell] From the totalitarian
point of view,
history is something
to be created
rather than learned.
This is what I will do
to the grooming books
when I become
Secretary of State.
[men shouting]
[birds chirping]
[Orwell] Ward 3, Hairmyres
Hospital, 20th of April, 1948.
Dear Julian, I am a lot better,
but I had a bad fortnight
with the secondary effects
of the streptomycin.
I am still fearfully weak
and thin,
but they seem pleased
with my case,
and I think I may get out
sometime during the summer.
I'm longing to get up to Jura
at any rate
and see how the farm work
is going,
but I should have to be careful
not to do much.
[distant crow cawing]
[marching footsteps]
The goosestep
is one of the most horrible
sights in the world.
It is simply an affirmation
of naked power.
In it is the vision of a boot
crashing down on a face.
The goosestep
is not used in England
because the people
in the street would laugh.
[solemn music]
[crowd clamoring]
First, I spent five years
in an unsuitable profession
in Burma.
This increased
my natural hatred of authority.
The Spanish war
and other events
in 1936-7 turned the scale,
and thereafter,
I knew where I stood.
[in Spanish]
[arguing]
[speaking in Spanish]
[crickets chirping]
[Orwell] 31st of July, 1937.
Dear Rayner,
thanks so much for your letter.
-I was glad to hear from you.
- [artillery fire]
We had an interesting
but thoroughly bloody time
in Spain.
Of course, I would never
have allowed Eileen to come
nor probably gone myself
if I had foreseen
the political developments.
Especially the suppression
of the POUM,
the party in whose militia
I was serving.
It was a queer business.
We started off by being
heroic defenders of democracy
and ended by slipping
over the border
with the police
panting on our heels.
But though we ourselves
got out all right,
nearly all our friends
and acquaintances are in jail
and likely to be there
indefinitely
not actually charged
with anything,
but suspected of Trotskyism.
What I saw in Spain has
given me a horror of politics.
But what impressed me then
and has impressed me ever since
is that atrocities are
believed in or disbelieved in
solely on grounds
of political predilection.
Everyone believes
in the atrocities of the enemy
and disbelieves
in those of his own side
without ever bothering
to examine the evidence.
[wind gusting]
Every line of serious work
that I have written since 1936
has been written
directly or indirectly
against totalitarianism
and for democratic socialism
as I understand it.
Revolution! [cackling]
[Orwell] Animal Farm was the
first book in which I tried,
with full consciousness
of what I was doing,
to fuse political purpose
and artistic purpose
into one whole.
-Read it to me.
-Hm.
[donkey] "All animals are equal
but some animals
are more equal than others."
[goat] More equal than others?
Praise to him
The font of all our wisdom
Long to live
The ruler of our farm
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Perfect pig
You bless us with your beauty
Hallowed hod
How wondrous is your glow
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
Napoleon, mighty leader
Mighty leader
Watching over us
[crowd cheers]
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Snout, snout, pink and proud
Shout, shout, shout out loud
Two legs better
Four legs good
I decree that this farm
will now devote itself
to the making of weapons,
to the building of walls
for the protection of ourselves
and our way of life!
The revolution is over.
All animals are now free!
-[crowd cheers]
-[ducks honking]
[war planes humming]
[blast]
[man over loudspeaker]
Take cover at once!
Take cover at once!
[blasts]
[solemn music]
[baby crying]
[planes passing overhead]
[distant explosion]
[police siren]
[screaming]
[Orwell]
Winston tried to squeeze out
some childhood memory
that should tell him
whether London
had always been like this.
Were there always these vistas
of rotting 19th-century houses?
Their sides shored up
with baulks of timbers,
their windows patched
with cardboard
and their roofs
with corrugated iron,
their crazy garden walls
sagging in all directions,
and the bombed sites
where the plaster dust
swirled in the air
and the willow-herb straggled
over the heaps of rubble
and the places where the bombs
had cleared a large patch,
and there sprung up sordid
colonies of wooden dwellings
like chicken houses.
But it was no use.
He could not remember.
Nothing remained
of his childhood
except a series
of bright-lit tableaux
occurring against no background
and mostly unintelligible.
Sing to the sailors
On the floating fortress
Sing to the soldiers
On the battlefields
Sing to the airmen
In the burning azure
Sing to the farmers
Rising yields
[Orwell] It is not easy for me
to think of my school days
without seeming to breathe in
a whiff of something cold
and evil-smelling,
a sort of compound
of sweaty stockings,
dirty towels,
fecal smells
blowing along corridors,
forks with old food
between the prongs,
neck-of-mutton stew,
and the banging doors
of the lavatories
and the echoing chamber pots
in the dormitories.
[sustained harmonica song]
[harmonica cacophony echoing]
[schoolmaster shouts]
[Orwell] By the social standards
that prevailed about me,
I was no good
and could not be any good,
but all the different
kinds of virtue
seemed to be
mysteriously interconnected
and to belong
to much the same people.
It was not only money
that mattered.
There were also strength,
beauty, charm,
athleticism,
and something called "guts"
or character, which in reality,
meant the power
to impose your will on others.
I did not possess
any of these qualities.
I lived in a world of boys,
gregarious animals
questioning nothing, accepting
the law of the stronger
and avenging
their own humiliations
by passing them down
to someone smaller.
[in Russian]
[Putin]
[Putin]
[officer]
There are five fingers there.
Do you see five fingers?
[man] Yes.
[film reel rolling]
[solemn music]
[indistinct speech]
-[war planes rushing]
-[explosions]
[scattered artillery fire]
[labored breathing]
[engines humming]
[Orwell]
This is a political age.
War, fascism,
concentration camps,
rubber truncheons, atomic bombs
are what we daily think about
and therefore, to a great
extent, what we write about,
even when we do not
name them openly.
We cannot help this.
When you are on a sinking ship,
your thoughts
will be about sinking ships.
-[birds calling]
-[wind gusting]
Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
Argyllshire.
22nd of October, 1948.
Dear Fred,
I shall finish the book,
Deo Volente , early in November,
and I am rather flinching
from the job of typing it
because it is a very
awkward thing to do in bed
where I still have to spend
half the time.
I can't send it away
because it is an unbelievably
bad manuscript
and no one could make head or
tail of it without explanation.
I think it is a good idea,
but the execution
would have been better
if I had not written it under
the influence of tuberculosis.
I haven't definitely
fixed on the title,
but I am hesitating
between 1984
and The Last Man in Europe.
-[intriguing music]
-[crow cawing]
When I was 14 or 15,
I was an odious little snob,
but no worse than other boys
of my own age and class.
I was very young,
not much more than six,
when I first became aware
of class distinctions.
[man] Ah, I think
you look pretty smart.
You look like a gentleman.
[Orwell] I despised anyone
who was not describable
as a gentleman,
but I also hated
the hoggishly rich,
especially those who had grown
rich too recently.
I look down on him
because I am upper class.
I look up to him
because he is upper class,
but I look down on him
because he is lower class.
[audience laughter]
I am middle class.
I know my place.
[Orwell]
Hence, at the age of 17 or 18,
I was both a snob
and a revolutionary.
I was against all authority
and I loosely described myself
as a socialist,
but I had not much grasp
of what socialism meant
and no notion that the working
class were human beings.
We'll have no pissing
in the corners.
Not allowed. Frowned upon.
It's not very hygienic, is it?
[foreman] It's downright filthy.
-[man] May I ask a question?
-[foreman] Fire away.
What's your views
on the ozone layer?
[foreman]
I'll turn a blind eye to it
as long as it doesn't interfere
with the job.
[Orwell] I knew nothing
about working-class conditions.
I had read
the unemployment figures,
but I had no notion
of what they implied.
I'm a four-loom weaver
As many a one knows
I've not to eat
And I've worn out me clothes
[crowd clamoring]
Me clogs are both broken
[Orwell] Above all, I did not
know the essential fact
that respectable poverty
is always the worst.
The frightful doom
of a decent working man
suddenly thrown on the streets
after a lifetime
of steady work,
his agonized struggles
against economic laws
which he does not understand,
the disintegration of families,
the corroding sense of shame,
all this was outside the range
of my experience.
["Four Loom Weaver" continues]
When I thought of poverty,
I thought of it in terms
of brute starvation.
Therefore, my mind
turned immediately
towards the extreme cases,
the social outcasts,
tramps, beggars,
criminals, prostitutes.
These were the lowest
of the low
and these were the people
with whom I wanted
to get in contact.
[solemn piano music]
[distant dogs barking]
What I profoundly wanted
at that time
was to find some way
of getting out of the
respectable world altogether.
I meditated upon it
a great deal.
I even planned parts of it
in detail.
How one could sell everything,
give everything away,
change one's name,
and start out with no money
and nothing but the clothes
one stood up in.
But in real life, nobody
ever does that kind of thing.
[gruel squelching]
[spoon scraping pot bottom]
[ambient chatter]
As Syme had done earlier,
Winston had taken up his spoon
and was dabbling
in the pale-colored gravy
that dribbled across the table,
drawing a long streak of it
out into a pattern.
He meditated resentfully
on the physical texture
of life.
-Mister.
-What is it, son?
Can you watch my seat and else
if I got my spoon?
I'll give you my spoon, son.
I'm finished.
[soft symphonic music]
-[worrisome music]
-[animals grunting]
[Orwell] You discover
what it is like to be hungry
with bread and margarine
in your belly.
You go out
and look into the shop windows.
Everywhere, there is
food insulting you
in huge, wasteful piles,
whole dead pigs,
baskets of hot loaves,
great yellow blocks of butter,
strings of sausages...
-[marketplace chatter]
-...mountains of potatoes,
vast Gruyere cheese
like grindstones.
A sniveling self-pity
comes over you
at the sight of so much food.
You plan to grab a loaf
and run,
swallowing it
before they catch you
and you refrain from pure funk.
[classical music
over phone line]
-[music stops]
-[operator] We're sorry,
but all our
customer-service agents
are busy at the moment.
Please hold
and we will answer your call...
[classical music continues]
[man sighs]
[Orwell]
You discover the boredom
which is inseparable
from poverty,
the times
when you have nothing to do
and, being underfed, can
interest yourself in nothing.
For half a day at a time,
you lie on your bed,
feeling like
the jeune squelette
in Baudelaire's poem.
Only food could rouse you.
You discover that a man
who's gone even a week on bread
and margarine
is not a man any longer,
only a belly
with a few accessory organs.
[Michael Moore] The top 1%
that controlled
90% of the wealth
had two major political parties
doing their bidding for them,
and the other 99%
had no political party!
[crowd laughing]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] Beggars do not work,
it is said,
but then what is work?
A navvy works
by swinging a pick.
An accountant works
by adding up figures.
A beggar works
by standing out of doors
in all weathers
and getting varicose veins,
chronic bronchitis, etc.
It is a trade like any other,
quite useless, of course,
but then many reputable trades
are quite useless,
and as a social type,
a beggar compares well
with scores of others.
He is honest compared
with the sellers
of most patent medicines,
high-minded compared with
a Sunday-newspaper proprietor.
A beggar,
looked at realistically,
is simply a businessman
getting his living
like other businessmen
in the way that comes to hand.
He has not,
more than most modern people,
sold his honor.
He has merely made the mistake
of choosing a trade
at which
it is impossible to grow rich.
[digital trilling]
[music building]
[sultry techno music]
Three
Two, one
The underlying fact
was that the whole position
of the moneyed class
had long ceased
to be justifiable.
The existence of these people
was by any standard
unjustifiable.
They were simply parasites,
less useful to society
than his fleas are to a dog.
-[tense piano music]
-[excited clamoring]
Oh, that's great!
Can you move your head a little?
The British ruling class
could not admit to themselves
that their usefulness
was at an end.
It was not possible for them
to turn themselves
into mere bandits
like the American millionaires.
Clearly, there was only one
escape for them:
into stupidity.
[woman on radio] The Ministry
of Peace is happy to report
that thanks to the vigilance
of our gallant interceptors,
no Eurasian rocket bomb
was able to reach targets
of any importance.
We continue now
with our regular broadcast.
[sensor beeping]
[pinging]
There are parts in southern
China where smart cameras
placed around the intersection
will recognize who you are.
You could have your face covered
or you could be obscured.
These systems
are very, very smart.
They can recognize you by gait,
by posture,
by how you're walking,
and so if you've caused
an infraction,
your face gets thrown up
on a digital billboard
at that intersection
along with your name
and where you work,
and that information
is transmitted to your employers
and to your family members.
[Lin Junyue in Mandarin]
[classical music]
[music begins distorting]
[AI greeting customers
in different languages]
[Tufecki] Much of the technology
that threatens our freedom
and our dignity
in the near-term future
is being developed by companies
in the business of capturing
and selling our data
and our attention
to advertisers and others.
[woman's voice] Smith,
outer-party members
have to wear
their identification badges
in the evening.
Don't forget again!
If the people in power
are using these algorithms
to quietly watch us,
to judge us and to nudge us,
to predict and identify the
troublemakers and the rebels,
that authoritarianism will
envelop us like a spider's web,
and we may not even know
we're in it.
[propellers buzzing]
The surveillance capitalists
have tried to get us to believe
that their practices
are the inevitable outgrowth
of digital technologies.
So, that's why I believe
that the future is private.
This is the next chapter
for our services.
What do you prefer?
Being safer when you wake up
in the morning
and go to the street
or not being, you know,
analyzed by AI systems?
I wanna be safer.
What do you prefer?
[Etshtein] What do you prefer?
Safer when you stir?
[Etshtein] What do you prefer?
Or not be scared by AI?
-Tell me no lies
I wanna be safer
-[Etshtein] I wanna be safer.
- I wanna be safer
Safer. Safer. Safer.
I wanna be safer
[Trump] Surveillance
is okay if you don't mind.
I wanna be... I wanna surveil.
I want surveillance of these
people that are coming in.
The Trojan horse, I wanna know
who the hell they are.
[Snowden] You don't have
to have done anything wrong.
You simply have to eventually
fall under suspicion
from somebody,
even by a wrong call,
and then they can use the system
to go back in time
and scrutinize every decision
you've ever made,
every friend you've ever
discussed something with
and attack you on that basis
to sort of derive suspicion
from an innocent life
and paint anyone
in the context of a wrongdoer.
[sinister music]
It should be that when
we make things more productive,
when we greatly
increase productivity,
it helps everybody,
but there's the worry that
it might just help the rich.
[female voice] The new,
model-three generative android
from Funky is a fully
autonomous humanoid robot
with features never before seen
in the consumer market.
[Zuboff] We are increasingly
trapped in a world of no escape
and even if we want
to make a choice, we can't.
[upbeat, old-timey music]
[Orwell] It would probably not
be beyond human ingenuity
to write books by machinery,
but a sort of
mechanizing process
can already be seen at work
in the film and radio,
in publicity and propaganda,
and in the lower reaches
of journalism.
Even so, what they write is
merely a kind of raw material
to be chopped into shape
by producers and censors.
Books would be planned in their
broad lines by bureaucrats
and would pass through so many
hands that when finished,
they would be no more
an individual product
than a Ford car at the end
of the assembly line.
It goes without saying
that anything so produced
would be rubbish.
At present, we know only that
the imagination,
like certain wild animals,
will not breed in captivity.
[radio jingle]
[newscaster]
Every hour of the day,
the voice of London
goes around...
[Orwell]
Second of December, 1942.
Dear George Woodcock,
as to the ethics
of broadcasting
and in general
letting oneself be used
by the British governing class,
it's of little value
to argue about it,
but for heaven's sake,
don't think I don't see
how they are using me.
I doubt whether I shall stay
in this job very much longer,
but while here, I consider
I have kept our propaganda
slightly less disgusting
than it might otherwise
have been.
[lighthearted music]
[wheels squeaking]
The Tribune ,
222 London Western Central 2,
14th of July, 1944.
Dear John Murry,
I am smothered under work,
and also I've been bombed out
and we have a very young baby
we adopted,
a three-week-old boy
who Eileen and I christened
Richard Horatio Blair,
all of which
adds to one's work.
Life is pretty full now.
What a wonderful thing
to have a kid of one's own.
I've always wanted one so.
[newscaster]
The Pacific service from London
is sending you all greetings
and wishing the best of luck
to those of you listening
who are serving
in our armed forces on sea,
land or in the air
and in the merchant navy...
[Orwell]
BBC, 24th of September, 1943,
Dear Mr. Rushbrook-Williams,
in confirmation of what I said
to you earlier in private,
I want to tender my resignation
from the BBC.
I am not leaving because of any
disagreement with BBC policy.
On the contrary,
I feel that I have been treated
with the greatest generosity
and allowed
very great latitude.
I am tendering my resignation
because for some time past,
I have been conscious
that I was wasting my own time
and the public money.
I feel that by going back
to my normal work
of writing and journalism,
I could be more useful
than I am at present.
-[solemn music]
-[birds chirping]
Hotel Scribe, Rue Scribe,
Paris 9th, 13th of April, 1945.
Dear Tony,
I don't know whether
you will have heard
from some other source
about what has happened.
Eileen is dead.
It was a most horrible
thing to happen
because she had had
five really miserable years
of bad health and overwork,
and things were just beginning
to get better,
but it was terribly sad
that she should die
when she had become
so devoted to Richard
and was making such a good job
of his upbringing.
Richard, I am glad to say,
is very well,
and for the moment
is provided for.
[soft piano music]
-[low murmurs]
-[man clears throat]
[hesitating]
[whoosh]
[intriguing music]
[branch snaps]
Look.
-[Winston] It's a dream.
-[Orwell] But for a moment,
he did not look at her body.
His eyes were anchored
by the freckled face
with its faint, bold smile.
He knelt down before her
and took her hands in his.
[Winston]
Have you done this before?
[Julia] Of course!
Hundreds of times.
-With party members?
-Yes.
Inner-party members?
Not with those bastards,
though there's plenty who would.
[Orwell] His heart leapt.
[soft singing in French]
"In the old days," he thought,
"a man looked at a girl's body
and saw that it was desirable,
and that was the end
of the story.
But you could not have
pure love
or pure lust nowadays.
No emotion was pure
because everything was mixed up
with fear and hatred.
Their embrace
had been a battle,
the climax a victory.
It was a blow struck
against the party.
It was a political act."
[music fades]
[chanting hymn sung]
In the past, at any rate,
throughout
the Protestant centuries,
the idea of rebellion
and the idea
of intellectual integrity
were mixed up.
A heretic, political,
moral, religious,
or esthetic was one who refused
to outrage his own conscience.
His outlook was summed up
in the words
of the revivalist hymn,
"Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known."
To bring this hymn up to date,
one would have to add a don't
at the beginning of each line.
[Milan Kundera in French]
[solemn music]
[Orwell] Daring to stand alone
is ideologically criminal
as well as practically
dangerous.
The idea
of intellectual liberty
is under attack
from two directions.
On the one side
are its theoretical enemies,
the apologists
of totalitarianism...
-[clamoring]
-[gunshots]
[shouting in Russian]
[speaking Arabic]
[newscaster] Jamal Khashoggi
was a Saudi journalist
and an outspoken critic
of his country's government.
[newscaster] CNN can now confirm
Jamal Khashoggi's last words,
"I can't breathe.
I can't breathe."
The transcript records
many voices and noises,
then says, "Scream from Jamal."
Again, "Scream," then "Gasping."
Noises are identified as "saw"
and "cutting."
-[solemn music]
-[birds chirping]
[joyful chatter
of indistinct voices]
[Orwell] And on the other, its
immediate, practical enemies
monopoly and bureaucracy,
which are actively interested
in maintaining the status quo
and therefore
in preventing the common man
from becoming too intelligent.
The independence
of the writer and the artist
is eaten away
by vague economic forces
and at the same time,
it is undermined
by those
who should be its defenders.
[Schechter]
We falsely think of our country
as a democracy when it has
evolved into a media-ocracy,
where a media that is supposed
to check political abuse
is part of political abuse.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
This is extremely dangerous
to our democracy.
[Orwell]
Political writing in our time
consists almost entirely
of prefabricated phrases
bolted together like the pieces
of a child's mechano set.
This is extremely dangerous.
This is extremely dangerous.
This is extremely dangerous.
-Dangerous.
-Democracy.
We live in the greatest country.
The greatest nation
in the history of mankind.
The strongest, freest,
greatest country.
The greatest healthcare.
The greatest universities,
the greatest schools.
The greatest rise
of freedom and opportunity.
The single greatest nation
in the history of all mankind.
The greatest country ever.
If we're gonna talk about
the elite-medias debate,
then it is still controlled
by the corporate owners
and the corporate sponsors,
who, after all,
provide the revenue
to keep those machines going,
to keep those TV shows
on the air
and those radio shows
and those papers.
[in French]
[Orwell]
The journalist is unfree
and is conscious of unfreedom
when he forced to write lies
or suppress what seems to him
important news.
[man]
What have you got there, Smith?
This photograph was between
the pages of the gazette.
-What photograph?
-Jones and Rutherford.
They confessed to aiding
the underground
and being in Eurasia
during Hate Week.
-But here it says--
-What are you talking about?
I don't see any photograph.
I think it's very difficult
to avoid
going to that pre-prepared thing
that you've got
that's got a quote in it,
that's got a name in it,
that's got background
information in it.
It's fed to you to make easy
for you to tell it that way.
So, what we really require
is something countervailing,
something on the other side
to dig out just that information
that that powerful entity,
that might be the state
or might be a private
corporation
that they don't
want you to hear.
We start with that search,
the race to save five people
who are onboard a submersible.
[speaking Spanish]
[newscaster]
On board is believed to be
the British billionaire,
Hamish...
[Orwell] Everything in our age
conspires to turn the writer
and every other kind
of artist as well
into a minor official
working on themes
handed down from above
and never telling
what seems to him
the whole of the truth.
-[radar trilling]
-[sinister music]
[people shouting]
[Sanders] What the media does
is trivialize what goes on
sensationalizes it,
makes it entertainment,
rather than saying, "Look,
the function of the media
is to educate you
to live in a democracy,
which is pretty serious stuff."
There are 741 no-go zones
throughout France
and they're located
in the ghettos
that are called les banlieues .
I've been to Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Kashmir, India,
and at times,
it felt like, like that.
[in French]
-Franois Macron...
-Emmanuel.
Emmanuel, Franois, it seems
like every French person
I think their name is Franois.
-Who knows?
-Maybe he'll change his name.
-Franois.
-[laughter]
[Orwell] To write in plain,
vigorous language,
one has to think fearlessly,
and if one thinks fearlessly,
one cannot be politically
orthodox.
-It was you! It was you...
-[man] Good lying.
That privatized a large chunk
of the health service
and you're lying,
and you're lying.
[arguing]
I think your fake lashes are
messing up what you're reading.
-[clamoring]
-[man] We have a situation
in which a significant
percentage of the population
doesn't vote,
doesn't care about the issues,
is tuned out entirely,
is what we call depoliticized.
Uh, in fact, we have
a rate of depoliticization
in the United States
that must make a tyrant
like in, you know,
Indonesia envious.
"How can I get one of these
vegged-out populations?"
I say the fact is I've done more
for the Black community
than any president
since Abraham Lincoln.
-I say it,
nobody can dispute it.
-[blues music]
People listen when I speak.
Black people.
[vocalist] Black
Believe me, I've studied it,
I've seen it,
and it's incredible.
Black
Black, your physical strength
is unmatched.
Black
You have this charm,
Black people, believe me.
Jazz, soul, Rosa Parks,
Cassius Clay,
legends, winners, the best!
And you know what?
Black women...
I love Black
Black women,
they make me so hungry.
People listen when I speak,
hungry for gumbo and cornbread.
Nobody does it better.
The mugshot, we've all seen
the mugshot, and...
And you know who embraced it
more than anybody else?
The Black population,
it's incredible.
You see Black people
walking around with my mugshot.
[Orwell] This kind of thing
is frightening to me
because it often gives me the
feeling that the very concept
of objective truth
is fading out of this world.
An atom bomb exploded
in our information ecosystem
because social media
turned our world upside down
spreading lies faster than facts
while amplifying fear and anger,
fueling hatred by design
for profit.
[man] Do you affirm the
testimony you are about to give
will be the truth,
the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth,
so help you God?
We very much believe
that this content is disgusting
and that, um...
Senator, that behavior
is disgusting and reprehensible.
We provide in-app
reporting tools
so that people
who are being harassed
or people who have been shared
inappropriate sexual content
can report it in the case
of harassment or sexual content.
You announced recently that
the official policy of Facebook
now allows politicians to pay
to spread disinformation.
Well, could I pay to target
predominantly Black zip codes
and advertise them
the incorrect election date?
No, congresswoman, you couldn't.
We have, even for these policies
the newsworthiness of content
that politicians say
and the general principle
that I believe that...
[Cortez] But you said you're not
going to fact-check my ads.
We have, if anyone,
including a politician
is saying things
that can cause,
that is calling for violence,
or could risk imminent,
physical harm,
or voter or census suppression
when we roll out
the census suppression po...
policy, um,
we will take that content down.
So, would I be able
to run advertisements
on Facebook targeting
Republicans in primaries
saying that they voted
for the Green New Deal?
If you're not fact-checking
political advertisements,
I'm just trying
to understand the bounds here.
-What's fair game.
-Congresswoman, I, uh...
I don't know the answer to that
off the top of my head.
You don't know
if I'll be able to do that.
Can you explain why you've named
the Daily Caller
a publication well documented
with ties to white supremacists
as an official fact checker
for Facebook?
Congresswoman, sure,
we actually don't appoint
the independent fact checkers.
They go through
an independent organization
called the Independent
Fact Checking Network
that has a rigorous standard
for who they allow
to serve as a fact checker.
So...
You would say that
white-supremacist-tied
publications
meet a rigorous standard
for fact checking?
Because of deep fakes,
you can't trust
your eyes and ears.
Instead of the facts,
the enshittification,
enshittification
of the Internet,
is in full bloom.
More trash, more propaganda,
more information operations
that push our emotional buttons.
We will have to struggle harder
for agency,
for independent thought,
and it's not just
the tech companies
that abdicated responsibility
for protecting us.
It's also democratic governments
like the United States.
Tech is the least-regulated
industry around the world.
[all] USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!
[labored breathing]
[muffled speech]
[waves lapping]
[bagpipes]
[shouting]
[Orwell] Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
Argyllshire,
28th of November, 1948.
Dear Gwen, all is well here
and Richard
is bursting with energy.
He goes out fishing
with the others now
and sometimes catches
quite a lot of fish.
The weather just lately
has been very nice,
beautiful, still, sunny days,
and not at all cold,
but I hardly ever
go out of doors
because the smallest exertion
upsets me.
The pig has grown
to a stupendous size
and goes to the butcher
next week.
We are all longing
to get rid of him,
as he is so destructive
and greedy.
Even gets
into the kitchen sometimes.
I have finished my book,
which I'd been
messing about with
since some time in 1947.
Yours, George.
Death!
[cheering]
Brothers and sisters,
one week from now
in this very square,
we shall, as a demonstration...
[speech fades]
[eerie music]
[opera chorus singing
dramatic piece]
[man] Eurasian prisoners
will be passing
through Victory Square!
These are the evil men
whose ruthless lust for power...
[shouting in German]
[chanting]
[in Spanish]
Let me have the fight!
[marching orders shouted]
[in Italian]
The mother is a woman,
the father is a man.
[in Italian]
[music and speech fades]
April 4th, 1984.
Last night to the flicks,
all war films.
One a very good one of a ship
full of refugees being bombed
somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Audience much amused by shots
of a great, huge, fat man
trying to swim away
with a helicopter after him.
[indistinct shouting]
Then you saw a lifeboat
full of children
with a helicopter
hovering over it.
There was a middle-aged woman,
might have been a Jewess,
sitting up in the bow
with a little boy
about three years old
in her arms.
[helicopter propellers]
Then the helicopter
planted a 20-kilo bomb
in among them.
Terrific flash and the boat
went all to matchwood.
Then there was a wonderful shot
of a child's arm
going up, up, up,
right up into the air.
A helicopter with a camera
in its nose
must have followed it up.
There was a lot of applause
from the party seats.
Winston stops writing
partly because he was suffering
from cramp.
Oh, what a piece of work
is the pursuit of truth.
Don't be a writer, Richard,
whatever you do.
Be a farmer.
And grow things.
Keep goats.
[solemn music]
[Orwell]
Our civilization is decadent
and our language,
so the argument runs,
must inevitably share
in the general collapse.
The words, democracy,
socialism,
freedom, patriotic...
-[echo of crowd clamoring]
-...realistic, justice,
have each of them
several different meanings
which cannot be reconciled
with one another.
[in French]
[Orwell] But if thought
corrupts language,
language can also
corrupt thought.
And here's the truth,
Israel seeks peace.
Israel yearns for peace.
Israel has made peace
and will make peace again.
[intriguing music]
[Orwell] Political language
is designed
to make lies sound truthful
and murder respectable.
[gulls calling]
Barnhill, Isle of Jura,
22nd of October, 1948.
Dear Fred, I have just read
Sartre's book on antisemitism,
which you published, to review.
I think Sartre is a bag of wind
and I'm going to give
him a good boot.
The less talk there is about
"the" Jew or "the" anti-Semite
as a species of animal
different from ourselves,
the better.
[intriguing music]
At the start of 2024,
Google cut 1,000 jobs.
Why? Pichai says it's about
"removing layers
to simplify execution."
Tesla, we're told
the company will lay off
over ten percent
of its workforce.
[newscaster 1]
UPS announced it will lay off
12,000 employees.
[newscaster 2] The practice
of staff ranking employees
might be making a comeback
in Silicon Valley.
[newscaster 3] The lay-offs are
already piling up this year.
[newscaster 4] The lay-offs
in technology just keep coming.
The latest, Google
cutting hundreds of jobs.
[Zuckerberg] Okay,
it's one thing to do that,
to, like, decide that
at a high level.
How do you execute that
as compassionately as possible?
And there's no good way, um...
There's no perfect way,
for sure,
and it's gonna be tough
no matter what,
but as a leadership team here,
we've certainly spent
a lot of time just thinking,
"What is the most compassionate
way that we can do this?"
[music softens]
[Orwell]
From where Winston stood,
it was just possible to read,
picked out on its white face
in elegant lettering,
the three slogans of the party,
Freedom is Slavery,
War is Peace,
Ignorance is Strength.
[solemn music]
[officer]
Again, how many fingers?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Four, five, six?
In all honesty, I don't know.
[Orwell]
The Cotswold Sanatorium,
Cranham, Gloucestershire,
the 2nd of February, 1949.
Dear Julian, I wonder how you
and your family are getting on.
I have been in this place
about a month.
I think I told you
last time I wrote
that I had been feeling
very bad again.
Richard is getting
on for five now
and is enormous
and very healthy,
though still not interested
in learning his letters.
I suppose this coming winter
he will have to start
going to school,
which he is certain to enjoy,
as he is very gregarious.
[labored breathing]
Cranham, 8th of April, 1949.
Dear Richard, don't depress
the others too much with this,
but the fact is
I am in a bad way at present.
They are going
to try streptomycin again.
If things go badly...
Of course we'll hope
they won't,
but one must be prepared
for the worst.
...I'll ask you to bring
little Richard to see me
before I get too frightening
in appearance.
Cranham, Gloucester,
22nd of August, 1949.
Dear Fred, could you please
send one copy each
of Burmese Days
and Coming up for Air
to Sonia Brownell
care of Horizon ?
As I warned you I might do,
I intend getting married again,
to Sonia.
When I am once again
in the land of the living,
if I ever am,
I suppose everyone
will be horrified,
but apart from other
considerations,
I really think
I should stay alive longer
if I were married.
[woman] One, two!
-One, two!
-[coughing]
One, two!
One, two!
-Smith?
-[coughs]
6079 Smith, W.?
Yes, you. Bend lower.
[Orwell] Winston wrenched
his body out of bed, naked.
The physical jerks
would begin in three minutes.
The next moment, he was doubled
up by a violent coughing fit,
which nearly always attacked
him soon after waking up.
It emptied his lungs
so completely
that he could only begin
breathing again
by lying on his back
and taking a series
of deep gasps.
[singing hymn]
Dear Francis A. Henson
of the United Automobile
Workers.
My recent novel
is not intended
as an attack on socialism
or on the British Labour Party,
of which I am a supporter,
but as a show-up
of the perversions
to which a centralized economy
is liable
and which have
already been partly realized
in communism and fascism.
I do not believe that the kind
of society I describe
necessarily will arrive,
but I believe
that something resembling it
could arrive.
And I have tried
to draw these ideas out
to their logical consequences.
The scene of the book
is laid in Britain
in order to emphasize
that the English-speaking races
are not innately better
than anyone else.
- [singing hymn]
-And that totalitarianism,
if not fought against,
could triumph anywhere.
[Winston] We are the dead.
[Julia] We are the dead.
[man] You are the dead.
Remain exactly where you are.
Make no move
until you are ordered.
[crash]
[officer] Don't resist.
Stand in the middle of the room!
[man] Do not touch one another.
[hymn music playing]
[man] Take the woman!
[Julia]
No, don't let them take me!
No, no, no!
-[punching]
-[Winston shouts]
I warned you it wouldn't be
as peaceful here
as you would like.
Nothing is hidden
from the Thought Police.
[nervous breathing]
[lock unlatched]
[footsteps approaching]
[Orwell] "How does one man
assert his power
over another, Winston?"
Winston thought.
"By making him suffer,"
he said.
"Exactly.
By making him suffer."
-[machine clicking]
-[screaming]
[yelling]
Obedience is not enough.
Unless he is suffering,
how can you be sure
that he is obeying your will
and not his own?
Power is in inflicting pain
and humiliation.
-[static]
-[grunting]
Power is in tearing human minds
to pieces
and putting them together again
in new shapes
of your own choosing.
[rats squealing]
Not to me.
Not to me.
If you want a vision
of the future, Winston,
imagine a boot stamping
on a human face forever.
[gasping] Please.
Do it to her. To Julia.
I don't care what you do to her,
but do it to her.
Tear her face off.
Do it to Julia and not to me!
Do it to Julia!
Do it to Julia!
Not me!
[Orwell]
Do you begin to see, then
what kind of world
we are creating?
[solemn music]
All we have done
is to advance to a point
at which we could make a real
improvement in human life,
but we shan't do it
without the recognition
that common decency
is necessary.
[indistinct shouting]
My chief hope for the future
is that the common people
have never parted company
with their moral code.
I betrayed you.
I betrayed you.
I told them all about you.
Yes, I told them about you too.
I ask only...
for you to accept my love
of our leader.
I love Big Brother.
-Long live Big Brother.
-[crowd cheering]
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
Long live Big Brother!
[Winston] Long live Big Brother!
[Cheering]
[rock music plays]
[announcer]
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome the next
president of the United States,
President Donald J. Trump.
[Snowden]
The greatest fear that I have
regarding the outcome
for America of these disclosures
is that nothing will change.
People will see in the media,
all of these disclosures.
They'll know the lengths
the government is going to
to grant themselves
powers unilaterally
um, to create greater control
over American society
and global society,
but they won't be willing
to take the risks
necessary to stand up
and fight to change things,
to force their representatives
to actually take a stand
in their interests.
In four years,
you won't have to vote again.
We'll have it fixed so good,
you're not gonna have to vote.
[solemn music]
[Zuboff] How do we solve
collective-action problems?
We solve them with democracy.
So, there is one thing that
surveillance capitalists fear.
It may not be me
as an individual
or you as an individual
or your son or daughter
as an individual,
but what they fear is all of us
mobilized together now.
[Orwell] "If there is hope,"
wrote Winston,
"it lies in the proles.
If there was hope,
it must lie in the proles
because only there,
in those swarming,
disregarded masses,
85% of the population
of Oceania,
could the force to
destroy the party
ever be generated.
The party could not
be overthrown from within."
[crowd clapping and chanting]
[crowd chanting]
[music fades]
[labored breathing]
[Orwell] Daily routine
at University College Hospital.
"How did you sleep?"
7 to 7:30 a.m.
Temperature taken.
7:30 to 8.
Blanket bath.
Back rubbed.
10:30.
Ward maid comes to sweep room.
6:45, dinner.
10, temperature taken.
A drink of some sort.
10:30 about.
Bed tipped
and light put out
shortly after.
[somber music]