Mark Zuckerberg's 'A Year of Books' SelectionGeorge Orwell's bleak
visions of the future, one in which citizens are monitored through
telescreens by an insidious Big Brother, has haunted our imagination
long after the publication of 1984. Orwell's dystopian image of the
telescreen as a repressive instrument of state power has profoundly
affected our view of technology, posing a stark confrontational
question: Who will be master, human or machine? Experience has shown,
however, that Orwell's vision of the future was profoundly and
significantly wrong: The conjunction of the new communications
technologies has not produced a master-slave relation between person and
computer, but rather exciting possibilities for partnership. In an
extraordinary demonstration of the emerging supermedium's potential to
engender new forms of creativity, Huber's book boldly reimagines 1984
from the computer's point of view. After first scanning all of Orwell's
writings into his personal computer, Huber used the machine to rewrite
the book completely, for the most part using Orwell's own language.
Alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, Huber advances Orwell's
plot to a surprising new conclusion while seamlessly interpolating his
own explanations and arguments. The result is a fascinating utopian work
which envisions a world at our fingertips of ever-increasing
information, equal opportunity, and freedom of choice.
