Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
What year is it again? Because people keep telling me we’re in 1984—or at least George Orwell’s vision of it. Doublespeak rules the business and political realms, objective truth has been shattered by a barrage of deepfakes and machine hallucinations, and we’re approaching the final frontier of labor extraction as AI mines our humanity for mimicry and (as we’re so often told) replacement.
The conditions Orwell warned of can’t arrive overnight; rather, a populace must be lulled into allowing it to happen. Not that we don’t seem pretty lull-able these days. When we sense constant threat—of war, of global food insecurity, of a mass surveillance state coming our way—can we be blamed for wanting to chill out? To scroll to something happier, maybe with a dog in it? To consume our way to happy oblivion, to ignore the fact that we essentially live in a caste system striated by economic class and labor potential that we’re increasingly unable to escape?
