What’s a book you think deserves a sequel?

1984.

Not because George Orwell got it wrong.

Quite the opposite.

He got so much right that it’s almost unsettling to read today.

The genius of 1984 wasn’t really Big Brother. It wasn’t Room 101, the Thought Police, or even Winston Smith.

It was Orwell’s understanding that power doesn’t just control people.

It controls reality.

Back then, that meant burning books, rewriting newspapers, and dropping inconvenient facts into the Memory Hole.

Today?

I’m not convinced anyone would even bother.

Why erase history when you can simply personalise it?

Imagine an Orwell sequel set in the present day.

Every citizen has a different version of yesterday.

Not because the government rewrote it overnight, but because an algorithm quietly decided which version would keep you engaged.

Your neighbour remembers an event differently because their feed told a different story.

Your parents saw another version.

Your children never saw it at all.

History wouldn’t disappear.

It would fragment.

Truth would become localised.

Debatable.

Optional.

And that’s far more dangerous than censorship.

Because it’s difficult to fight lies when everyone is convinced they’re looking at the facts.

Big Brother would have changed too.

In Orwell’s world, oppression wore a face.

There were posters.

Slogans.

A dictator watching from every wall.

Today’s version wouldn’t need any of that.

Big Brother wouldn’t be a man.

It wouldn’t even be a government.

It would be a seamless partnership between corporations, artificial intelligence and state interests, quietly learning everything about us while insisting it’s all for our convenience.

No boots stamping on faces.

Just terms and conditions we never read.

No compulsory telescreens bolted to our walls.

We’d happily carry them ourselves.

We already do.

Tiny glowing rectangles that know where we are, what we’ve bought, who we talk to, how fast our heart beats, what keeps us awake at three in the morning, and which adverts are most likely to make us click “Buy Now.”

And we’d queue overnight to upgrade them.

The Thought Police wouldn’t arrest you for thinking the wrong thing.

They’d predict what you were likely to think before you knew yourself.

They’d know when you were lonely.

When you were angry.

When you were vulnerable.

Not to protect you.

To market to you.

To influence you.

To gently nudge your decisions until they felt like your own.

The cleverest form of control has never been force.

It’s persuasion disguised as freedom.

That’s what makes Orwell’s world feel less like fiction every year.

The scary part isn’t that 1984 might need a sequel.

It’s that, if Orwell were alive today, he might simply rename it…

2026.

Stay safe,

Bc