Many people think of 1984 as a science fiction novel, but almost the only item about 1984 that would lead one to suppose this is the fact that it is purportedly laid in the future. Not so! Orwell had no feel for the future, and the displacement of the story is much more geographical than temporal […] The great Orwellian contribution to future technology is that the television set is two-way.
Hot take: Asimov was off the mark on this point. He seems to be falling into the same trap that LeGuin criticized in her essay “A Rant About “Technology””:
Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources.
This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t “hi,” isn’t necessarily '“low” in any meaningful sense.
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…
In that sense, the society depicted in 1984 is very much one that has advanced technologically compared to the time and place when the book was written, but most of those advancements come in the realm of bureaucracy and social control: in its security apparatus, in its production of trashy low-effort media to keep its citizenry distracted, and in its sheer capabilities of keeping people under watch, compliant, and obedient.
It’s still a bad novel for many other reasons, though.
It’s more that the world of 1984 has regressed even from the technology of the time it was written, but this is entirely unintentional on Orwell’s part. Washing machines existed in reality, yet people in 1984 wash clothes by hand, people have to lace their own shoes rather than shoes being made with laces. It’s a nostalgia for the past buried in a confusing “future” setting. It’s not so much that it is an “advanced” future, but rather one that has regressed, but that isn’t something the author is even aware of. Plenty of novels set in the future deal with a regression of technology, but this isn’t used as proper set up of 1984 or anything, it just is a part of the setting because Orwell was unable to imagine how people might operate in the future, rather than being actual worldbuilding.
Hot take: Asimov was off the mark on this point. He seems to be falling into the same trap that LeGuin criticized in her essay “A Rant About “Technology””:
In that sense, the society depicted in 1984 is very much one that has advanced technologically compared to the time and place when the book was written, but most of those advancements come in the realm of bureaucracy and social control: in its security apparatus, in its production of trashy low-effort media to keep its citizenry distracted, and in its sheer capabilities of keeping people under watch, compliant, and obedient.
It’s still a bad novel for many other reasons, though.
It’s more that the world of 1984 has regressed even from the technology of the time it was written, but this is entirely unintentional on Orwell’s part. Washing machines existed in reality, yet people in 1984 wash clothes by hand, people have to lace their own shoes rather than shoes being made with laces. It’s a nostalgia for the past buried in a confusing “future” setting. It’s not so much that it is an “advanced” future, but rather one that has regressed, but that isn’t something the author is even aware of. Plenty of novels set in the future deal with a regression of technology, but this isn’t used as proper set up of 1984 or anything, it just is a part of the setting because Orwell was unable to imagine how people might operate in the future, rather than being actual worldbuilding.