Eleven editions since 2021. That is how many new versions of one of the most discussed books of our time have appeared over the past five years in Bulgarian alone. That was exactly when 70 years had passed since George Orwell's death, which “opened” the publishing rights. The years run out, but the relevance of the most famous dystopia only seems to grow.
“Didn't I tell you?” If Eric Arthur Blair were still among us, he would have every reason to repeat that beloved line often. Are we really living in Big Brother's world, or did Orwell turn out less accurate in his judgments than we think?
Let's discuss this big and important question, because it also says a lot about the future.
I know the next sentence will put many of you off reading this text… but I promise you'll find at least one thing in it that is new to you.
The lines that follow were written by artificial intelligence.
We talk, and will talk more and more, about “AI slop.” In Bulgarian we might call it “AI drivel,” though it deserves a more colorful label. Generated texts are already everywhere, we read them every day, and many people even think they can spot them. The fact is, though, that they are almost never worth a brass farthing.
1984
Here something different awaits you. Together with several of the models, we compiled a list of many directions in which to discuss and test whether Orwell turned out to be right. To what extent, in 2026, does the world live in 1984?
From those we chose 15. Then, with quite detailed instructions, I asked two instances of one and the same of the most popular AI models to analyze the topics and give their arguments—first why and how Orwell got his predictions right, and separately, how the present day has refuted him.
Then we brought in a third model to score the arguments “for” and “against” on a ten-point scale, with a very brief justification. It was asked to be objective and impartial.
You'll see for yourselves: the reflections of all “three” give plenty of reasons for human reflection too. Can AI argue with itself coherently? Have we really lost the truth in post-truth? Why, in so many of their positions, based on more than 1,200 sources that the AI cites directly…, do the arguments “for” and “against” Orwell's insights resemble so frighteningly many of our current social fault lines here in Bulgaria?
Yes, when human and AI find a way to interact, the result can be better than the hard, stubborn work of either of them alone. I say this as the organizer of the first AI-generated poetry competition in Bulgaria. The results, at least for me, are unambiguous.
And once you've read the text… I'm curious whether, when we meet, I'll get the chance to ask you: “Didn't I tell you?” And even more curious about your non-generated answer…
1. Attitude to Truth
👍 Orwell gets it right that the most successful control begins not by arguing with facts, but by replacing the very criterion of what a fact is. The key is the command: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” Today's analogue is the industry of synthetic credibility. In online life the mechanism is accelerated by distribution itself: fake news spreads faster and farther than true news, precisely the kind of ecosystem in which “eyes and ears” lose their value. Orwell did not foresee the specific chip or algorithm—he foresaw the result: a society in which reality is chosen as a version rather than established as a fact.
👎 Orwell states the principle of total substitution, but today truth cannot be destroyed with a single “final command,” because the evidence is distributed across logs, satellites and public archives that do not belong to one center. Orwell is wrong on the decisive point: in our world truth has not been abolished as a principle, but turned into a contested field with verification tools that power itself does not fully control.
2. Memory and the Past
👍 Orwell gets it right that control over memory is the cheapest substitute for violence: if the past is edited, the present becomes the only permitted reality. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” When access to archives, search engines and public statements is regulated, society gradually loses not only facts but also the ability to argue about them—the “memory hole” transferred into digital administration. Orwell is right on the decisive point: the battle for the past is not nostalgia but a technology for governing the future.
👎 Internet infrastructure makes the past redundantly copyable rather than centralizable. The Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine are precisely an anti-Ministry of Truth: they store versions of websites as a public memory that does not depend on one government or one publisher and can be called up back through time. And Wikipedia shows the other side of the same coin: the past is not “handed down” but edited collectively according to rules of citability and neutrality. That is why the model “control the past—control the future” fails in practice: the past is not a single door that can be locked, but a labyrinth of public traces that can be restored.
3. Language as a Social Instrument
👍 Orwell gets it right that language is not a mirror of society but a lever: whoever commands the vocabulary commands what is thinkable. “Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Today this is visible in political euphemisms that legalize the morally unacceptable: in post-9/11 American bureaucracy, the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked as a clerical mask for torture, turning a crime into a “procedure” and a dispute into a technical detail. The mechanism is Newspeak: first meaning is “compressed” into a label, then the label replaces reality, and finally society argues not about the facts but about loyalty to the terminology. Orwell gets the final blow right: you don't need to convince people of a lie if you can make the truth unsayable.
👎 Digital modernity has systematically done the opposite: it has expanded writing systems, accelerated translation and democratized publishing. In Orwell's world words are destroyed in order to destroy thought; in our world words multiply (including through memes, slang and local communities), because platforms reward new forms of signification and standards allow them to be written and shared.
4. Freedom of Speech
👍 Orwell gets the subtle twist right: freedom of speech does not die through a single great act of censorship but through a change in the definition of “crime”—from action to thought, from text to intention. “Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.” Today states criminalize political speech under labels such as “fakes” or “discrediting,” which turns public commentary into a legal risk and pushes the media and citizens toward self-censorship. The mechanism is Orwellian: instead of “this is forbidden,” you hear “this is dangerous/harmful/illegal,” and from then on every sharp argument is treated as a risk to the system.
👎 Today's legal reality in large parts of the world is built precisely as a rejection of the logic Orwell described. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights grants the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas”—a global normative anti-Oceania in which opinion is a protected status, not a punishable condition. Yes, there are regimes that persecute speech; but that is exactly what highlights the weakness of Orwell's generalization: he takes total hopelessness as a universal fate, while the real world is uneven—with spaces of freedom, institutions of appeal and enduring traditions of human rights advocacy. This is where Orwell is most structurally wrong: he underestimates law as a technology for stopping power.
5. Media
👍 Orwell foresees with surgical precision the merging of information and entertainment into a single central “factory” stream—not to inform, but to organize consent, fear and habit. “The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts.” Today's media landscape is exactly such a hybrid: a continuing decline in engagement with and trust in traditional media, and a growing dependence on social platforms as the gateway to news. The media are also a geopolitical battlefield. So “news” becomes at once a product, a weapon and an object of regulation—in other words, the central nerve of governance. Orwell gets the essential point right: when the media are infrastructure rather than a profession, power does not merely “speak”—it builds everyday reality.
👎 Orwell describes a central media conglomerate, but the European framework today is explicitly the opposite: pluralism as a legal norm, not an accident. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights requires that “the freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected”—a constitutional antithesis to single-center media, because it makes pluralism not a matter of taste but an obligation. Of course there is concentration and political pressure; but that only strengthens the counterpoint to Orwell: today the media are not a “ministry” but a field of competing players, which is exactly why they are subject to rules, oversight and court battles.
6. Managing Attention
👍 Orwell gets it right that power does not need to persuade constantly—it is enough to manage attention, to turn it into a reflex and to provoke “a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.” Today the “Two Minutes Hate” is distributed across billions of micro-impulses in our pockets: the “addictive design” of social networks—infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications and highly personalized recommendations—deliberately sustains compulsive use. When the reward is attention, the system rewards the extreme and the emotional, and the rational becomes uncompetitive—just as in Oceania the ecstasy of the crowd displaces thought. Orwell gets it right that control over people runs through their time and their nervous system: from there on, the content is interchangeable.
👎 Today attention is not a mandatory state ritual but a manageable habit, against which the devices themselves build in safeguards. Apple offers Screen Time as a system feature: reports, limits, downtime and parental controls. The Android ecosystem supports Digital Wellbeing, measuring unlocks, notifications and time spent in apps—metrics that make attention visible and therefore changeable, rather than hypnotically inevitable. Orwell is wrong in his absolutism: the “rhythmic noise” exists, but not as an unswitchable mechanism of power; rather, as a behavioral problem that can be addressed with the very same technologies.
7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling
👍 Orwell gets the most effective surveillance regime right: not the constant camera, but the psychological effect of uncertainty—living as if you are always being watched. “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.” Edward Snowden's revelations described programs for the mass collection of digital data. In parallel, outside the state, the data economy builds the same “telescreen” through the market. This is profiling as power: habits, contacts and vulnerabilities are inferred from metadata and location, and then used for advertising, pressure or investigation. Orwell gets it right that to control people you don't need to know their every word—it is enough to know enough to predict and correct their behavior.
👎 Europe's legal trajectory over the past decade has been precisely a dismantling of the idea that general and indiscriminate monitoring is normal. EU law does not permit the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data—in other words, “watch everyone, always” is a legally prohibited design. And the GDPR subjects the processing of personal data to principles, rights and penalties—on the premise that data are not the observer's property “by right” but a risk that must be limited and justified. Orwell assumes that the technical capacity for surveillance automatically turns into political totality; today we see the opposite: the capacity breeds regulation, judicial tests of proportionality and constant battles over limits.
8. Technology and Power
👍 Orwell gets it right that technology is not merely a tool but an architecture of subjugation: when the environment is “always on,” power becomes a background rather than an event. “The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.” Today this repeats itself through dependence on platforms and devices: switching off is not a neutral choice but social and economic exclusion—coercion through infrastructure, not through orders. That is why regulations now treat AI as an instrument of power: the EU recognizes that algorithms can be a form of administrative coercion, meaning that code enters the law as a political problem. And when the state wants full access, it can now buy it as a service. Orwell gets the ending right: the “machine” serves whoever holds the switch, and in the 21st century the switch is in the computer code.
👎 In the 21st century the key trend is the opposite—the institutionalization of the requirement that technologies be auditable, assessed for risk and limited by design. The European Commission has recognized free software and open source as strategic instruments of independence and security—in other words, it encourages technological transparency rather than an unswitchable “black screen” that only issues commands. In Orwell's world technology is by definition an instrument of power, and there are no institutions to hold it to account; today technologies are also a field of standardization, civic pressure and regulatory built-in limits.
9. Democracy
👍 Orwell gets the paradox of “managed democracy” right: power can keep the word “democracy” while draining its substance through control over information, elections and the very possibility of a shared reality. “To believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.” When elections become a behavioral problem, the public sphere breaks into segments, each with its own truth—and then democracy remains a ritual without common informational ground. This is exactly where Orwell is right: democracy does not collapse only under tanks; it is quietly dismantled when the information ecosystem becomes an instrument of governance.
👎 Our time is characterized precisely by the fact that democracy not only survived but invented new procedures against manipulation and new channels for participation. The EU regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising, for example, addresses one of the real anti-democratic vectors of our time—covert microtargeting—by making it more transparent and more limited. Orwell assumes that modernity leads logically to “impossible democracy”; reality has shown a more pragmatic evolution: democracy repairs itself through regulations and procedures rather than capitulating to technology.
10. Security and Emergency
👍 Orwell gets it right how “security” turns into a universal argument: the extraordinary becomes permanent, and rights become a temporary privilege that can be suspended with no end date. More and more often the citizen is treated as a potential risk by default, and the system demands transparency of one's life as a form of “loyalty.”
👎 Orwell throws in a grim detail: “nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws.” Orwell assumes the “absence of laws” as a functional norm; our world works the other way round: it is precisely the law that is used as a tool to limit the state of emergency, including against the state itself. Yes, the struggle is constant—but it exists, which in itself refutes Orwell's premise of hopelessness.
11. War
👍 Orwell gets it right that “perpetual war” is domestic policy: it aims not at victory but at a continuous justification for mobilization, scarcity and obedience. “The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects.” In the real world this is visible in the “post-9/11 forever wars.” In parallel, Europe is living with a prolonged war on the continent—one that is becoming at once an economy, a demographic reality and an information regime. Just as in Oceania, the very “state of war” becomes an administrative and media environment in which criticism is easily labeled disloyalty, and restrictions are labeled necessity.
👎 Modern history shows the opposite: wars do end, societies demand withdrawal, and alliances set deadlines. Even if today's world is far from peace, the European Union received the Nobel Peace Prize precisely for its contribution to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”—a historic marker that entire regions can turn war from a norm into a taboo through integration and institutions. Yes, war is often used rhetorically; but the thesis that it is enough for it simply “to exist” does not stand up to the fact of real withdrawals, real peace dividends and real institutional projects against war.
12. Relations Between Communities
👍 Orwell gets it right that managing communities means managing hatred: instead of resolving social contradictions, you redirect them toward an external enemy and internal “traitors.” “Discontents are deliberately directed outward by devices such as the Two Minutes Hate.” Today the most powerful mechanism of hatred is not the town square but the algorithm. Scientific data show that falsehood spreads faster than truth on social networks, which makes demonization more effective than refutation. Orwell gets it right that when communities are kept in a mode of permanent moral mobilization, they begin to polarize themselves—and then power can stand aside while the crowd does the work.
👎 The digital age has also produced the opposite phenomenon—transnational solidarity that connects communities instead of keeping them in a permanent “ritual of the enemy.” #MeToo became a global movement across many countries and languages—an example that networks can turn private abuse into public debate and collective action, not just into mobilized hatred. Orwell is right that hatred is an instrument; he is wrong that it is the only mass energy a networked society can produce and channel. Today's communication allows a “Two Minutes Hate,” but it also allows two years of solidarity—and it is precisely this two-way nature that breaks Orwell's one-way machine.
13. Intimacy and Private Life
👍 Orwell gets it right that the destruction of intimacy is a political technique: when private life becomes transparent, love, trust and autonomy turn into manageable variables. “Private life had ceased to exist.” The modern analogue is social media. The economy of intimate data. Intimacy can be breached directly through the device. No policeman in the room is needed—it is enough for the infrastructure to turn every conversation into something potentially extractable, every habit into data, every intimate choice into a profile. Orwell gets it right that when intimacy shrinks, society loses the place where disobedience is born: the place where a person is “alone with oneself.”
👎 Orwell believes power will colonize intimacy down to physiology, but the present shows the opposite tendency: intimacy is protected technologically and legally, and sexuality is culturally liberated rather than centrally destroyed. Orwell models intimacy as the last fortress that inevitably falls; the reality is that it is precisely in the intimate sphere that the strongest counter-technologies (encryption, data minimization) and the strongest legal claims have emerged. Even when there is pressure toward scanning and surveillance, it runs into public resistance and legal debate—not silence and inevitability.
14. Corporate Power
👍 Orwell gets it right that “corporate” power becomes more stable than state power when it controls the infrastructure of the economy and of information: ownership is concentrated, and control is exercised through access and dependence. “The concentration of property in far fewer hands than before.” Today's equivalent is the platform “gatekeepers,” the social networks. Orwell gets it right that economic concentration breeds concentration of narrative, attention and opportunity—and so the corporation becomes a political actor, regardless of electoral legitimacy.
👎 Orwell misses what is key to our world: corporate concentration is not an ending but a starting point for antitrust measures, regulation and public conflict. The European Commission has designated the “gatekeepers” and placed them under specific obligations for interoperability and market fairness—in other words, it acknowledges their power but turns it into a legal object, not a destiny. Orwell sees concentration as a one-way historical gravity; today's world treats it as a governance problem that generates tools—regulations, fines, lawsuits and political mandates.
15. Resistance and Opposition
👍 Orwell gets it right that resistance is rarely crushed head-on—it is diluted: through blurring, through fear, through turning the opposition into a vulnerable network that can be identified by its contacts and habits. “If there was hope, it lay in the proles.” Today digital resistance is born online—and that is why it is crushed online. Freedom House reports a 15th consecutive year of decline in internet freedom, including arrests for online expression and internet shutdowns as a tool against protests. The mechanism matches 1984: power does not fear opposition as an idea, but opposition as coordination.
👎 Today's real victories often come not from a mythical “prole” but from legal protections and coordinated journalism. The EU Whistleblower Protection Directive is an institutionalized counter-Oceania: it makes exposing abuse more defensible rather than automatically suicidal. Yes, repression exists—but the very fact that there is legal protection for whistleblowers, and demonstrable financial and political consequences from investigations, refutes Orwell's total hopelessness. Therefore “hope” is not locked inside one class; it lies in the institutionalized channels for disclosure, verification and sanction.
Sitting Crooked, Judging Straight
Time to give the floor to our third, independent judge.
Here is my score for each of the 15 topics (10 = a perfect prediction, 1 = completely inaccurate):
1. Attitude to Truth—9/10
Deepfakes, synthetic media and industrialized disinformation have turned “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” from a metaphor into a literal technical reality, and verification tools reach a tiny fraction of the audience compared to the viral lie.
2. Memory and the Past—8/10
The right to be forgotten, algorithmic deindexing and state criminalization of “wrong” memory show that the past is in fact being edited at scale—the Internet Archive is the exception, not the rule, and is itself under constant legal pressure.
3. Language as a Social Instrument—7/10
Multilingualism is a fact, but political euphemisms (“collateral damage,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “special military operation”) prove that power successfully narrows the thinkable at the key moments when it truly matters—and memes are noise, not correction.
4. Freedom of Speech—8/10
Self-censorship is the mass effect Orwell foresaw with surgical precision—billions of people calculate every day what they can say online, and legal guarantees are powerless where the loss of a job or an account comes before any court.
5. Media—8/10
The plurality of voices is formal—the real media diet of the majority passes through two or three platforms whose algorithms decide what counts as “news,” which is de facto centralization through a private rather than a state monopoly.
6. Managing Attention—9/10
Screen Time and Digital Wellbeing are cosmetic: average screen time keeps rising, addictive design is a trillion-dollar business model, and the “rhythmic noise” of TikTok and Reels is more effective than anything Orwell could have imagined.
7. Surveillance, Data and Profiling—9/10
The GDPR exists, but big tech pays for it as a “cost of doing business,” actual profiling is deeper than ever, and the combination of state and corporate surveillance makes the telescreen look primitive next to what your smartphone knows about you.
8. Technology and Power—9/10
The smartphone is a telescreen you buy yourself, charge yourself and carry voluntarily everywhere—Orwell did not foresee that people would record themselves, and regulatory responses lag years behind technological reality.
9. Democracy—8/10
Cambridge Analytica was not an anomaly but a business model—microtargeting, bots and information operations make the “informed voter” a fiction at scale, and regulatory measures always arrive after the damage and rarely make up for it.
10. Security and Emergency—8/10
Surveillance infrastructure is growing exponentially, and every new threat (terrorism, pandemics, cyberattacks) adds a new layer of permanent control.
11. War—8/10
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan brought not peace but chaos, the war in Ukraine has normalized military thinking in Europe for a generation to come, and the “war on terror” has become a permanent administrative state, exactly as Orwell describes.
12. Relations Between Communities—8/10
#MeToo and Fridays for Future are real, but algorithmic polarization works 24/7 at the scale of billions. We have a permanent “Two Minutes Hate” on Facebook, and solidarity is episodic, while hatred is a business model.
13. Intimacy and Private Life—8/10
The smartphones of billions of people are an open book—health apps sell data, Pegasus gets in with zero clicks, and the very habit of documenting your life online liquidates intimacy from within, with no need for outside coercion.
14. Corporate Power—8/10
EU fines are belated and insufficient relative to profits—Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta control the infrastructure of everyday life in a way that makes dependence on them deeper than dependence on any state, and regulation is running after a train that has already left.
15. Resistance and Opposition—7/10
Journalistic investigations and whistleblower protection are real victories, but 15 consecutive years of declining internet freedom, mass arrests of activists in so many countries and the conversion of digital surveillance into a tool for preemptively crushing protests show that coordinated resistance is ever more costly and risky.
Average score: 8.1/10—Orwell did not foresee the specific technologies, but he captured the logic of today with almost prophetic accuracy. Countervailing forces exist, but they are chronically slower, weaker and more fragmented than the mechanisms of control they try to limit.
Well, since you've read this far, all that's left is to ask you… didn't I tell you?
This piece is part of the new issue of Perfect Day magazine.
