If George Orwell Were on Facebook

The following is written for Lana V Lynx’s unofficial challenge on creating Facebook posts for great deceased writers. To learn more and participate yourself, follow this link.

Eric Arthur Blair, best known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. He is best known for allegorical novella Animal Farm and his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. (If you grew up in America, you were probably forced to read one, if not both, of these books sometime in your high school years.) He is also critically acclaimed for his nonfiction works and his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture.

Although written during the Cold War and earlier, Orwell’s works are as relevant today as they were back when they were published. Ideas of Big Brother watching you, newspeak, Thought Police, etc., are so well ingrained into both popular and political culture that we often seem to forget where we even got them from—and what they originally meant.

When trying to figure out what a Facebook post by George Orwell would look like, I first thought, “What the hell would he think of the world now?” Trust me, the answer wasn’t pretty. I immediately went to his book Nineteen Eighty-Four and knew that he would think that we were living it (almost). So, from there came the prompt that I used for ChatGPT: Create an image of a Facebook post for George Orwell containing the text “For those who need to hear this right now: he who controls the past, controls the future.” and an image of a burning book and a George Orwell profile pic.

Well, it came out like that eventually. It took about three times of adjusting the prompt to get it to show up properly. (The first time, I wanted it to show Trump burning a book, but it wouldn’t do that because it would be “political” and “misinformation”, so I had to adjust. The rest of the time, I had to adjust it just to get a freaking profile pic for the author.)

The result was the post below.

For those of you who don’t recognize it, part of this is part of one the most famous quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Those who control the past, control the future. Those who control the present, control the past.

May we never forget those words.