Digital control operates by word proliferation, not word destruction

Evidence

‘Newspeak’ is the name for the ideal language in George Orwell’s surveillance state. It is meant to supplant ‘oldspeak’ entirely. Newspeak has only one goal: to restrict room for thinking freely. Every year, words decrease in number, and the space for conscious thought diminishes. Syme, a friend of 1984’s hero Winston, raves about the beauty of destroying words. ‘Thoughtcrimes’, he enthuses, will be made impossible when the words necessary for them are struck from the lexicon. In the process, the notion of freedom will be abolished too. On this score, Orwell’s surveillance state differs fundamentally from the world of the digital panopticon – which uses freedom to excess. Today’s society of information is not characterized by destroying words, but by multiplying them without end. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 87

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the Newspeak-with-1984 contrast; resonates with Communication as Culture on discourse regimes, and White Noise’s media-saturated noise. — connects to: Digitalization reduces the sensory continuum to standardized discrete units manipulable by logic — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 208; Writing is an early digital technology that never degrades with copying — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 482
• FICTION: The counter-image — a control society that drowns thought in surplus language rather than starving it — is a striking dystopian premise.

Broader Connections

• Writing is an early digital technology that never degrades with copying #expands (0.80) — Eric J. Heller, Why You Hear What You Hear- An…, 482
• Digitalization reduces the sensory continuum to standardized discrete units manipulable by logic #expands (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 208