George Orwell was born on this date 112 years ago. He remains the invaluable writer on matters of a phenomenon that resembles censorship but somehow goes beyond. Censorship, after all, simply suppresses. This other thing goes further, altering the DNA of facts and making untruths into truths. Orwell’s 1984 is, of course, the dystopian novel built around the modern state’s mastery of this special and sublime form of tyranny. When a fact is inconvenient to the state, it is sent down the “memory hole” and a new fact is crafted to replace it.
So “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
Apple is not quite the state. Not yet, anyway. But on the matter of rewriting history, it inched up to the line, as Jason Schreier at kotaku.com writes, by:
There was an actual American Civil War. One side in that war flew the Confederate flag. Not even Apple can change that fact.
Not yet, anyway.
Ironic that Apple announced, in a 1984 TV ad, that it had come to deliver us from the iron grip of Big Brother.
