I am rereading Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), through the lens of today’s emergence of Big Tech, which has the power to monitor every person who carries a smart phone.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig iron the over-fulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what the system the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that the watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized.

The attempts by the Progressive movement, and a complicit mass media, to alter or erase our American history are the inevitable result of an ideology that puts absolute power into the hands of a political system that requires totalitarian government control over every aspect of a person’s life, from cradle to grave. Therefore, to achieve the goal of a “Progressive” State, achieving, consolidating and holding power becomes the driving force, rather than the welfare of the subjects (citizens in name only).

That drive for power includes the use of the complicit mass media in attempted psychological mind control, and the rewriting or erasing of history.

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all other accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it; in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

Sound familiar?