I just read 1984…

An I only want to share a couple of reflections, nothing more, after reading 1984 — one of those books that became famous not only because of its story, but because of the time in which it was written and the way it imagined a dystopian world shaped by ideological struggle, state control, and the obsession with dominating the individual.

One of the ideas that interests me most in the novel is this: if a State can spy on you, sooner or later it will.

And perhaps the most disturbing thing is that this idea has not aged badly. Quite the opposite. Today, from the United States to Europe, China, or the United Arab Emirates, states have increasingly sophisticated tools of surveillance over their populations. The main argument is usually always the same: public safety. And of course, no one denies that safety matters. But it is not hard to understand that a power capable of observing millions of people can also use that information to protect itself.

Knowing what people think, where they hurt, what they fear, their routines, their relationships, their movements, and their habits of consumption is not just information. It is a form of power. Possibly one of the most effective forms of control that exists.

One curious thing in the novel is that not everyone is watched in the same way. The members of the Party, especially those who belong to the Inner Party or the Outer Party, live under constant surveillance. They know they are being watched. They know that their words, their gestures, and even their facial expressions can be interpreted as signs of disloyalty. Surveillance is not only there to discover crimes; it is there to shape behaviour before rebellion even appears.

The easy analogy would be to say that today we all carry a telescreen in our pockets. But the most unsettling part is that nobody forced it on us. We bought it ourselves. We upgrade it, charge it every night, carry it everywhere, and feel anxious when it is not near us. Even though we know our data is constantly exposed, we keep using these devices because they offer us convenience, connection, productivity, and entertainment.

In 1984, the telescreen was a tool of the State. Today, perhaps the modern telescreen does not belong only to the State, but also to large technology companies. If the watcher was once an official of the Party, now it may be a platform, a cloud provider, a social network, an app, or an artificial intelligence model that learns from us with every interaction.

And here another layer of comparison appears: artificial intelligence. We could imagine AI as a new form of telescreen, not necessarily because it watches us directly, but because it concentrates context, behaviour, decisions, preferences, and dependency. More and more tasks will pass through intelligent systems: writing, deciding, buying, programming, creating, negotiating, learning, and working. The more we delegate, the more these systems will know about us. And the more they know, the more capable they will be of influencing our behaviour.

There is also another uncomfortable point: to belong to this new technological elite, you will have to pay. Whether through cloud services, advanced models, infrastructure, or computing power, real access to artificial intelligence will not be equal for everyone. Those who can afford to control their own agents, automate processes, analyse data, and operate at scale will have a massive advantage. Those who cannot will depend on someone else’s platforms.

To put it a bit ironically: if you want to command your “minions” — sorry, your agents — you will need compute.

This does not only mean surveillance. It also means dependency. Even addiction. AI may become such a useful tool that not using it will feel almost impossible. At the same time, it may become too expensive for many people or companies. We will see AI-native projects disappear not because they lack good ideas, but because they cannot sustain the operating cost of their own artificial intelligence. It will be a modern version of something we already know: before, you could not afford salaries; now, perhaps you will not be able to afford tokens, GPUs, or infrastructure.

To conclude, I have the feeling that humanity is moving more and more toward some form of collective control. Not necessarily a brutal, visible, militarised control like in 1984, but a softer one. A more comfortable one. A more efficient one. A kind of control we accept because it saves us effort. A control that is not always imposed from the outside, but one we often invite in ourselves.

The defeat of the individual may not arrive with a boot stamping on a human face forever, as Orwell imagined, but with a notification, a personalised recommendation, an assistant that decides for us, and a form of convenience too useful to reject.

It is true that we will see the rise of one-person companies, businesses run by a single owner with armies of AI agents. But perhaps that promise of freedom will also come with a new kind of dependency: fewer employees, yes; less friction, certainly; but also more submission to the invisible infrastructure that makes everything work.