1984
by George Orwell
About the Session
We had our second session of the Hopeful Speculations Book Club, where we gathered to discuss George Orwell’s 1984. It was an engaging & thought provoking conversation in a room full of great energy where the dialogue flowed effortlessly.
We explored how 1984 speaks to today (surveillance, power, and control) but we also spoke about rebellion. We asked why did Orwell choose to end without a win? What does that mean for how we resist? There was heaviness and hopefulness throughout the conversation. I was so grateful that we could hold these two feelings in contradiction with one another — together.
We shared some wonderful resources along the way, including feminist citation practices and the growing conversation around citation refusal which reflects on who we cite, why it matters, and what it says about the systems we uphold or challenge.
Then we moved into a Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) of 1984’s world, working through the litany, systemic causes, worldview, and down into myth, metaphor, and narrative. Then we flipped it. We built a new myth and worked our way back up toward new culture, new systems, and ways of measuring change.
As a group we observed that collectively we chose to not include more-than-human actors and systems in our analysis and spoke about the absence of it in 1984 itself. That felt worth sitting with. We also found ourselves wanting to go deeper into what rebellion actually looks like from the ground up. What are the very first steps needed to shift a myth as totalizing as the one Orwell imagined?
Those are questions we’re carrying forward from this session. Thank you so much for those of you who came, it was a truly wonderful conversation.
Thoughts & Connections
One of the things I keep returning to after this session is how 1984 came into existence. It sits inside a conversation that was already underway and reading it alongside its predecessors changed how I understood it.
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, is the clearest of those ancestors. Published in 1924, it’s widely considered the book that inspired 1984, and the lineage is unmistakable: a totalitarian future where citizens have numbers instead of names, where glass walls ensure constant visibility, where the very concept of an inner life is treated as a kind of illness. What strikes me most is how We frames surveillance not merely as control, but as an ideology — the belief that transparency and conformity are virtues, that the self is a problem to be solved. Orwell sharpened that idea, but Zamyatin had already named it.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) pulls at the same thread from a different angle. A city split between those who live in the towers and those who toil underground; a rigid hierarchy held together by spectacle and fear. Different medium, different story, but the same underlying question: what happens to people when systems are designed to consume them?
Set side by side, the three works feel less like separate visions and more like one long argument across decades. Each picks up where the last left off. Each asks: how did we get here — and how do we find our way out? That second question is the one that lingers. These works are so often read as warnings, but read together they start to feel more like diagnoses: careful maps of how systems hollow people out, and quiet invitations to imagine the way back.
A dispatch from the world we imagined
The conversation didn’t end when the session did. Alicia took the rebellion we dreamed up and wrote it into being. Her piece, Secret Story Circles Seed Rebellion in an Orwellian World, is a dispatch filed from inside Oceania itself: unconfirmed reports of people gathering in the back rooms of bars and out on hikes, simply talking — sharing their pasts and their fears, getting to know one another. It takes the “way out” we traced through Causal Layered Analysis and renders it as living fiction, asking the question that stays with me: if radical acceptance is the way out of the Party, what small act of rebellion can we play with now, in 2026?