Orwell's Nightmare

What, then, was the Orwellian nightmare behind this burgeoning ease of use of the computer? In Orwell's book 1984, the ease of use of technology has created a replacable workforce, where no one is valuable for the knowledge they bring to a job. In fact, a large part of 1984 focuses on how knowledge is controlled by a small, elite group - Big Brother, who is always watching you.

Although Orwell wrote 1984 almost twenty years before the computer priesthood culture at MIT, there are obvious parallels of control. While the Brotherhood of resistance in 1984 was likely a fictionalized threat to maintain Party order, MIT's priesthood faced an actual resistance that morphed into our current hacker culture, and Microsoft Windows faced resistance from Apple Computer and the Macintosh.