I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
There is a core message about the nature of not just ingsoc but the other governments of the world as well, and their relationship with each that gets left out when talking about 1984. The overbearing surveillance capital state is all people think about, that's part of it, but why that state exists, the motivations of it's leadership, the sheer and terrifying brilliance of the architecture of their government. in many ways, I'm glad the leaders of major countries and political movements don't grasp 1984 well (or at all).
But I agree that in 1948, Orwell's frustration and experience was not just that there was a world war, but that it was the second one in his life time. War-time mentality does approximate the levels of repression he mentions in the book, but in any country, it doesn't quite get there. But it could!
That's the scary part, things like "facecrime" weren't possible in 1984, now not only is it possible, it can be done without humans being involved too much. We have all the surveillance, more than he could have even imagined. But not only that, we have the means to analyze all the surveillance data in real time and do something about it. The capability to implement a world much worse than the one in 1984 exists. The villains of our times and the people they rule over just haven't managed to negotiate the imagination and sophistication of a strategy to abuse it yet.
EDIT: Coincidentally, I just stumbled on this timely piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62rexy9y3no
This is what I mean. just random people are doing the spying parts already. [SPOILER] a very similar scene is in 1984, except with the government behind the cams.
I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks.
Can you describe the basis for the claim?
He wrote of it, and in some ways his writing on those times is better than his fiction.
Like if you take Zamyatin's "We", and make the main character a propagandist working for the government, you get 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...
A very interesting read, but it did not verify any of your claims.
Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!
Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
For those reading who are curious on which comment is accurate, I would encourage you to read up on it to confirm for yourself. It's a highly fascinating subject to read about.
Another thing the Spanish Civil War did make Orwell was a hardcore realist.
"Half a loaf of bread is better than no loaf."
>‘I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.’
He was a libertarian socialist at various points, sure, but you're painting him as something he wasn't. He was avowedly a socialist throughout most of his adult life even if he wasn't playing patty-cake with the Trots and the MLs and various other 20th century Euro-centric leftist revolutionary groups
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
My original comment was just a counterpoint to the doom in parent: not all is lost, and in fact, quite a lot is not.
The situation of “things we care about are far away and require intermediaries to connect with” and “our ability to trust intermediaries is gone” are both human creations, and totally addressable.
Edits: more words, and wording
Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc
Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.
To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
It's one of the oldest tools we have to control society. And it gets abused. All. Of. The. Time.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
Why is valued if it is removed?
Edit: I was correct, and I don't understand why. Was AS somehow twisted for political reasons? It's a great book.
Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason.
I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.
It could be as simple as budget changes.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
I read the Handmaid's Tale and my first thought after finishing it was "Oh wow, this might actually happen here!"
The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook.
That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it.
One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion.
There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.
Upvote from me :)
I disagree with this. I think the comment was perfect quality. As we are slowly sinking into totalitarianism in the US, you will understand that this "noise" was in fact the signal you should have been listening to.
It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.
It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
That feels a little horrifying to me.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring".
it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened.
I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
I realize this is kind of a joke, but...
The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses.
Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia...
On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order.
On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less.
I get the impression that Trump is pretty negative on nuclear weapons and I don't think he'd do something that could provoke nuclear retaliation. But I doubt he'll be our last mad king. I think the odds are pretty high of at least a small nuclear war within my lifetime. Even if the US keeps it together, proliferation means much higher odds of some idiot leader somewhere pressing the Button.
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.)
It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world.
Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime".
Yeah, that -screams- competence.
I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise.
wut. this is a joke, right?
Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools.
No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists.
I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as.
Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope.
The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that.
How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction.
The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish.
The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say, lust or many other trappings of power.
I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic.
At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence":
he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious.
In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force.
And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough.
Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure.
In any case, all you have to do is listen to the man talk. If you can hit stop before your brains start leaking onto the floor, the conclusion is inescapable.
For most of his life he did nothing that would require any sort of smarts. Becoming POTUS was quite an accomplishment, but he lucked into it. He happened to have a style and set of opinions that appealed to a large group of voters. He's charismatic in an empty sort of way that still works on a lot of people. He had a pretty pathetic set of opponents both in the primaries and the general. And he just barely won. Nothing in his campaign was shrewdly designed, he was just doing what he does, and it happened to work.
Birth him into an ordinary family instead of a rich one and he's going to be a used car salesman griping about getting bumped into the next tax bracket when he makes too many sales.
This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files.
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
I am not sure that even if they could minority report their way into killing off all the future Fred Hamptons, they have either the man power to do it or the mental ability to define an ontology for their little scrye to even tell them who they -should- target.
It is easy to confuse these folks with the mostly competent neoliberal technocrats they replaced, but that's the whole point of this thread, no? Patel and Bongino were more interested in how to win twitter points after Kirk was killed than, like, going and playing g-man, after all.
Also, one of the nice things about living in a panopticon is that it gives the folks running it the idea that they actually know what's going on. I'll take the long bet on the over-confidence and under-competence of these WWF wrestlers.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
For example, if the army keeps launching raids that kill civilians because the government can only track progress through body counts, it is not "facts are the enemy" to stop counting the bodies. (Obviously it would be wiser to stop using the counts as the deciding factor, but if the generals have different values than the government, as immigration courts do, then stopping the count is the only way to stop the bleeding.)
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...
Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources.
If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis.
Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control.
If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.
Great where do I find a spare identical copy of the CIA to use as the control group?
https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
It's not even a bad submission saying that he mirrored it here: https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026
I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.
Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.
I'm sorry, I think you have a math or data error here. The US government budget for 2025 was not $62.5 trillion dollars.
I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda
From the CIA Factbook History page it writes,
> It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook
Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.
Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.
The world factbook was mostly things that the military or politicians might care about the truth of, and data they need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value that might have is outweighed by you can fact check everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be caught.
Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I would expect they would see distorting facts help them.
It's definitely not the worst that can happen. Happens fairly often - google: CIA lying to congress. Getting audited is the worst that thing that happens to the CIA. ie The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last actively audited the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the early 1960s, specifically discontinuing such work around 1962.