Onslow Poly on Nostr: And how far back does one need to go to achieve that. There seems a belief that ...

And how far back does one need to go to achieve that. There seems a belief that Orwell wrote a fiction.

He didn't. Arguably he wrote 1984 as a roman à clef (a novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction), and predicted the future technologies which would be used. He isn't predicting a future solely, he is satirizing 1948.

Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He saw first-hand how "official truth" was constructed to manage a populace that lacked the means to verify it.

Orwell’s experience at the BBC during the war—where he produced propaganda for India—directly informed the Ministry of Truth. He saw how "the reporting of such to the populace" was a curated, technical process.

The tools outlined were never a prediction of the future; they were the tools which were already in use.

Orwell was never fiction.