Re: 1984 — Big Brother, Social Media, and the Democratic Fallacy in 2024

Who is Big Brother? The answer is not so obvious in the Democratic Fallacy of 2024—a world where systems that promise freedom and fairness, like social media and democracy, are subtly manipulated to erode truth and critical thinking under the guise of open expression.

The Democratic Fallacy: Freedom or Manipulation?

In the afterword to George Orwell’s 1984, Erich Fromm wrote, “the warning is that unless the course of history changes, men all over the world will lose their most human qualities, will become soulless automatons and will not even be aware of it.”

When the novel was published in 1949, the world was grappling with the aftermath of World War II and the emerging tensions of the Cold War. The horrors of totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were fresh, fueling fears of oppressive governments and ideological control. Orwell’s warnings remain strikingly relevant in 2024. The Iron Curtain had descended over Eastern Europe, dividing the world into capitalist and communist blocs, while nuclear weapons underscored the fragility of peace.

Fromm was a German Jew social psychologist who fled the Nazi regime to the United States. Orwell’s novel resonated with his thoughts as a stark warning against totalitarianism, censorship, and propaganda, reflecting widespread anxieties about government overreach and the erosion of individual freedoms in the face of growing authoritarian ideologies.

Big Brother Then and Now: From 1984 to 2024

Fortunately, history took a different course. The Soviet Union, a manifestation of Orwell’s warnings, collapsed in 1991. The man’s capacity to create justice and peace seemed to be proven strong through the victory of the free nations and capitalism. Meanwhile, the global life expectancy increased from 46.5 years in 1949 to 73 years in 2023. The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 60% in the 1950s to under 20% by 2015. Nuclear fusion and quantum computing are no longer the daydreams of scientists, promising even greater prosperity for the global population. We can trust in humanity, after all...So it seemed.

But our history may take another unexpected turn, leading to our version of 1984. When I say this, I’m not talking about some single election result or what political ideology gains popularity. Nor do I prematurely fear the rise of rogue AI triggering nuclear bombs. I'm talking about how people will be assimilated into power, regardless of who takes it. And it’s much more subtle than how it happened in the novel. The subtlety is what I’m scared of.

Let me explain what I mean. First, I will describe the difference between the world of 1984 (obvious) and ours (subtle.) Despite the difference, we may be falling into a dystopia similar to the novel, and it is harder to realize.

In 1984, the fictional country Oceania was a totalitarian society dominated by “Ingsoc,” or English Socialism. The ruling Party’s strategy was to directly control people’s minds through brainwashing propaganda, surveillance, and torture. Pervasive poverty kept citizens oppressed, and the suppression of sexual desire ensured complete control over personal relationships and individuality.

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.“ Although those propagandas sound absurd to readers, it feels so natural for the citizens of Oceania because of the reprogramming of their brains with so-called "doublethink." This ability to simultaneously accept two contradictory beliefs (e.g., Freedom is slavery) as true enables absolute loyalty to the Party by suppressing independent thought and critical reasoning.

It is 2024, 40 years after Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, woke from the spell of Big Brother but was then tortured and defeated. Today, we do not have a single voice on the “telescreen” telling us who our enemy is and writing the truth and history for people to believe in. Our society is rather segregated, and people are said to live in bubbles of social networks. Many people argue that social media protects the freedom of speech, a counter weapon against the traditional press that allows governments’ propaganda and censorship.

Another difference is the treatment of emotion. Orwell’s 1984, people suppress their feelings, except when Big Brother makes them angrily scream at the enemy nations during the “Two Minutes Hate.” On social media today, people freely express their thoughts and feelings.

The democratic appeal of social media and the freedom to express emotions are the two differences I wanted to highlight. Now, where does our environment lead us to?

Social Media’s Role in Shaping Modern Truth

In social media, emotional posts often drive engagement (likes, comments, and reposts), which has a snowball effect and attracts even more eyeballs. The remaining “quieter” voices are left unheard when a popular account hauls the attention: Attention is a limited commodity, and it is getting scarce as our attention span gets shorter. The influencers become the sole voices, and engagement and the follower counts are the new social proof—quantified proof that the voice is credible, whether from a person, a corporation, or AI.

Engagements are the new ”truth”. And it is an emotional one.

The Science Behind Engagement: How Emotions Drive Influence

It does not take a sophisticated AI to exploit emotional people to believe in fabricated truth in this system. It's as easy as fooling a pigeon: In an experiment, psychologist B.F. Skinner created a device where pigeons were conditioned to peck a lever to receive food. When rewards were given consistently, the pigeons quickly stopped pecking if the rewards ceased. However, random intervals, even if the rewards stopped entirely. They were “hooked” on the chance of getting a reward.

Intermittent reinforcement is powerful because it fosters compulsive engagement by keeping the brain in a state of anticipation. The uncertainty triggers the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward, making the behavior compulsive. Humans aren’t immune from intermittent reinforcement. The consequences are evident in gambling and financial speculation.

The same dopamine reward system, anticipation, uncertainty, and habit formation mechanism drive social media engagement. It is also cheaper to implement at scale because the reward is social validation achieved just by flipping digital bits (likes), and the game is always there when you unlock the screen. It drills into the core of human emotion rather than just financial reward in gambling as it is more tied to social comparison, self-esteem, and identity, making it more personalized and emotionally nuanced. It becomes who we are and becomes more challenging to get out of. So, people engage in social media by posting or clicking without financial rewards. People work for free to create emotional stories and help them get attention.

AI and the Cost of Truth in the Digital Age

In today’s digital world, spreading lies is cheaper and faster than uncovering and sharing the truth. You can make up a story as emotionally provoking as you like to rank higher in people’s attention. The spread of disinformation poses one of the greatest threats to global order today. And Generative AIs are the ideal tool for fabricating emotional stories at scale. (It doesn’t require Scarlet Johansson’s voice for an AI to get into our hearts. They are excellent learners of emotional patterns in writing and, perhaps, video.) Truths, on the other hand, are more expensive and slower to discover and validate. Truths are always on an uphill battle in the era of AI and social media.

Out of desperation, I recently wrote:

Truth is expensive to find.
Fake news is cheap to produce.
Truth is often boring.
Fake stories are made engaging.
No one seems to pay for truths anymore.
Many people work for free to spread lies.

The opening quote by Fromm in this article was so compelling and immediately triggered the above thoughts. So I stopped reading his afterword and wrote it. Now I paused my writing and went back to finish reading Fromm's, only to realize he had warned my point more than a half-century ago:

Truth is proven by the consensus of millions; to the slogan "how can millions be wrong" is added "and how can a minority of one be right." Orwell shows quite clearly that in a system in which the concept of truth as an objective judgment concerning reality is abolished, anyone who is a minority of one must be convinced that he is insane.

This is the democratic fallacy. In Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking, philosopher D.Q. McInerny explains, "The ‘democratic fallacy’ is the assumption that the mere fact that most people believe proposition X to be true is sufficient evidence to allow us to conclude that proposition X is true."

Like in Kassandra's tragedy in Greek mythology, the spoken truth is powerless when people do not trust it. The social media voting system appeals to people wary of the traditional press. It sounds democratic. However, it fails to serve the people like political democracy: With misinformation and a lack of education, people vote for what sounds true. The absence of critical thinking is the source of the democratic fallacy. Our emotional responses are mechanized and assimilated into one Big Brother.

The Elusive Big Brother: Stories as the True Masters of Control

Who is Big Brother, then? Big Brother seems above the government or tech mongers and always watches our behavior. While dictators and charismatic people are all mortal and no nation lasted forever in history, Big Brother has survived for generations. Like in the novel, nobody knows or cares to know who Big Brother is to control everything. It's probably not a human.

Yuval Harari shares an interesting idea that may give a hint to find Big Brother. In a conversation with Lex Fridman, he said,

If you look long term in history, all the people die. It’s the stories that compete and survive and spread. Stories often spread by making people willing to sacrifice sometimes their lives for the story. If a story can get millions of people to fight for it, it not only survives, it spreads. It can take over the world.

In their conversation, Fridman fantasized that the stories may be the primary living organisms competing with one another, and humans are hosting them. In his response, Harari continued,

The stories are not really alive, because they don’t feel anything. This goes back to the question of consciousness, which I think is the most important thing, that the ultimate reality is consciousness, is the ability to feel things. If you want to know whether the hero of some story is real or not, you need to ask, “Can it suffer?” Stories don’t feel anything. Countries, which are also stories, nations, don’t suffer. If a nation loses a war, it doesn’t suffer. The soldiers suffer, the civilians suffer. Animals can suffer. You have an army with horses and whatever, and the horses get wounded, the horses suffer. The nation can’t suffer, it’s just an imagination. It’s just a fictional story in our mind. It doesn’t feel anything.

Orwell’s 1984 was a fictional story of English Socialism. The label of socialism made it easy for Western people to see the absurdity. But the stories told under the names of liberalism, democracy, and humanism can also become evil, causing so much killing, war, exploitation, and tragedy. And they travel faster than ever with the information technology. AIs help the main stories be backed by emotional backstories that are fake or real.  Orwell’s insights, while profound, did not fully anticipate the nuances of today’s information age. We must watch for ourselves so we don’t become the automatons of such stories.

In the conclusion to the afterword, Fromm writes:

The hope can be realized only by recognizing, so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love, of critical thought, and yet who will not be aware of it because of "doublethink." Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too.

Lessons from Orwell: Resisting Big Brother Today

The danger Orwell and Fromm warned of is not confined to the shadowy regimes of the past—it looms over our hyper-connected, algorithm-driven world today. We must confront the unsettling reality that truth and individuality are at risk, not from a single omnipotent ruler but from the subtle, decentralized mechanisms of influence that exploit our emotions and shape our beliefs.

Acknowledging these threats is just the beginning. We must cultivate critical thinking, demand transparency, and resist becoming automatons enslaved by the stories we perpetuate. If 1984 teaches us anything, vigilance and self-awareness are the price of freedom—from external forces and the systems we have built to serve us. We can only hope to write a story worthy of survival by confronting this truth.

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