this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Broke: Using an AI to arbitrarily blacklist books based on a black box algorithm.
Woke: Banning 1984 because it's capitalist propaganda written and published by war criminals.
When I read it, I was frustrated that it was a socialist dystopia, but I think it holds up as a valid critique of surveillance-state authoritarianism, regardless of the x-coordinate on the political compass.
Specifically Stalinist dystopia
Orwell was a socialist
Nah, he was a great anti-Stalinist socialist. Sure he had some flaws, but the list was mostly of Stalinist sympathizers and people unfit for counterpropaganda.
Got any sources for that? I'm not sure I understand your viewpoint
The Life and Times of Reading Toxic Men #14 | George Orwell: The Colonial Cop and the Cynic of Power
Incidentally, Orwell never got to see his books truly take off. He died of tuberculosis at age 46. However, his more explicitly anti-communist works were picked up by Allen Dulles, at the CIA and turned into children's cartoons.
In an ironic twist, the books about state manufactured propaganda and national indoctrination became tools of state manufactured propaganda and national indoctrination.
Real "Don't Build The Torment Nexus" moment.
Huh, never knew that, thanks. That quote is about Animal Farm though. In the second source you linked, it literally says at the end that 1984 was propagandized, but that it unwittingly gave people a lexicon for criticizing the US. So it was proagandized, but backfired? Idk, I'll have to read into that more, but TIL!
And this is why everything goes to hell when we let the deranged left or right run anything.
Hey now. The deranged right aren't all bad.
They gave us AI and vaccine denial and climate change, which I've been raised to believe are all good things.