Rage Against the Machine

It was a Thursday afternoon.

Perhaps the only cold thing that day was the bead of sweat tracing the groove of my spine as I tried to position a worn-down copy of “1984” to shield my face from the sun. New Mexico’s swelteringly hot summer afternoons, such as this one, are practically unbearable. Even the ice-cold drink I had brought to the poolside had begun to sweat from the inside out, droplets of water falling from the glass as its contents surrendered to an unsatisfying lukewarm temperature. Unbearable, and yet, I could spend an eternity just like this.

Five summers had elapsed since I had first read “1984.” Five years of relationships, both loved and lost. Five years of lessons, both lived and learned. In the five years between fifteen and twenty, I am both still her, the girl I was, and someone entirely new. Moments of reflection were prompted by the annotations I had littered the text with the last time I had visited its pages. You see, this was not just any copy of “1984”—it was mine. And it had once been hers.

As a physical object, the book records the past. The barcode, which clearly proclaimed that the book was the property of Las Cruces Public Schools Library, was merely a deception. The cover, indented with chew marks from my Belgian Malinois, Duke, and torn from being carelessly thrown into my backpack, showed this book was no longer public property. No, a reckless fifteen-year-old bookworm had purloined it.

The changes I noticed between myself and fifteen-year-old me were subtle at first. I still annotate texts much the same way, despite the “formal” training of the Harvard English department—an intuitive strike of a pen on a page when something resonates. By this philosophy, I can only infer that the passages I left unmarked but would now underline were not untouched because of a lack of training, but because they were not relevant to who I was then. Partly because I had not yet truly entered society—I was fifteen. But also because, in the last five years, the world has evolved faster than I can keep up.

I returned to “1984” after reading an article about how some authors are drawing parallels between the novel and our current political state, saying that it “feels closer to real life than ever before.” The article’s subtitle raises what I think is a valuable question: “Is [2026] the new ‘1984’?”

The five authors who tackled the question had impressions not much different from my own. Most were returning to the text for the first time since high school. For some of the authors, high school was decades ago. Yet a common thread emerged in our impressions upon revisiting it. Overall, we agree that the totalitarian society criticized in Orwell’s dystopia once seemed distant, but today it feels too close to home.

While the article largely focused on censorship, each of us identified undeniable parallels between the text and our contemporary world. Political tension, censorship, surveillance, and a populace susceptible to manipulation—all themes that seem to leap off the novel’s pages.

“DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” Orwell wrote. Perhaps a modern application of doublethink is that, despite being the most connected society in history thanks to the internet, we still exist in a paradox: divisiveness prevails over unity despite how digitally linked we appear.

In our current political landscape, book bans move through local and national legislatures, restricting what we can read—“1984” is among those on the list. Cancel culture increasingly dictates who and what is socially “acceptable.” At the same time, an article in “The Atlantic” equated the current literacy crisis to a second burning of the Library of Alexandria. This is fitting, given that the National Literacy Institute found in 2024 that 21% of adults in the United States are illiterate and 54% have a literacy level below a 6th-grade level. A well-rounded education equips citizens to question the systems of power that govern. To put this in perspective, over half of Americans are not only being told how to think but, more importantly, do not know how to question it.

A diversely educated society is crucial to maintaining the checks and balances that uphold democracy. Instead of encouraging dissent as part of our democracy, we currently treat disagreement as a hazard. We suppress it even in its early stages as the sources we can access become increasingly restricted in ways that align with a common viewpoint.

Flock camera installations and the imaginary “FBI” agents many of us believe are watching us through our devices leave us with an uneasy feeling of constant surveillance akin to that of Big Brother. If matters were not dystopian enough, AI now, more than ever, prompts us to question how far our humanness can be mechanized. Meanwhile, our own government attempts to strip federal funding from media outlets and public libraries—what should be our frontier data centers.

It seems as if the solution we are currently devising to our experience of division is to forcibly close the gaps that exist between us. But what happens when the collateral offered is our capacity for individuality?

I have been given the label of “Luddite”—which I wear as a badge of honor—for my outward disdain of AI. During the Industrial Revolution, the Luddites were a movement of textile workers who destroyed machinery, breaking into factories in the middle of the night to protest the replacement of skilled laborers. The term’s resurgence today suggests an underlying intergenerational struggle between society and technological advancement.

While I have not personally been involved in the destruction of an AI data center (…yet), I tend to align with the sentiment the movement captures: emerging technology often pushes society toward a dangerous end, one that places efficiency and profit above all else.

The implications of this shift extend beyond what we can quantify as market value. By limiting craft in all its forms, we compromise cognition. Each of us becomes a cog in a well-oiled, technology-dependent machine. Stifling individuality of thought is not only tolerated as a means to rectify social division, but actively normalized under the disguise of “advancement.”

We are in the midst of a cultural shift toward efficiency. In this context, intentionality is crucial to preserving some of the most tangible parts of our individuality.

Sure, beyond its benefits to development, technology has its place. It lets my grandpa and me connect over our shared love of ’70s rock and western music. But our engagement with the physical world and the active role we take in shaping the culture of society ultimately define our humanity.

The scratches on a vinyl nestled within my grandpa’s robust collection reveal, decades later, what his favorites were. The oily finger marks along the edges of a family photograph tell me how cherished a relative I never met was. Maybe someday, my keen ability to ruin a favorite book with ballpoint scribbles and the chew marks of a childhood pet will give my grandchild insight into who I am.

These marks record something fundamental that, above all else, cannot be sacrificed: who we are and what we love.

Megan Legault ’28 (mlegault@college.harvard.edu) loves to write.