1984 Today!
Mike Freedman
1984today.substack.com
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Top 10 1984 Today! Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best 1984 Today! episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to 1984 Today! for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite 1984 Today! episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
09/15/24 • 83 min
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I found out about Sanne Van Oosten’s work on X when she shared her experience of being shunned by media outlets indifferent to her research findings that voters don’t discriminate on the basis of gender and ethnicity.
A social scientist at Oxford University specialising in meta-analysis and intergroup conflict, Sanne is uniquely positioned to comment on Kamala Harris’s prospects in the US presidential election, as well as the social status factors that may drive some of Donald Trump’s supporters.
Sanne’s meta-analysis of 43 studies spanning 10 years and involving over 305,000 respondents shows that voters are overwhelmingly interested in policy, not identity, and that the presumption of voter bias by political apparatchiks is out of step with a public that actually favours female and minority candidates.
Our conversation gets into the detail of her work, taking in the ways that academia as well as media have played a narrative-shaping role not entirely aligned with the reassuring reality that, as a voting public, we are not as divided and prejudiced as some might claim.
You can find Sanne on X and BlueSky as @SBVanOosten.
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07/07/24 • 73 min
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Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter at the New York Times and the author of an excellent book about facial recognition technology called Your Face Belongs To Us.
She very kindly agreed to come on to talk about her book, and how she discovered the existence of Clearview AI, a shady tech company that just lost a court case in the State of Illinois brought against them (thanks to her reporting) by people whose pictures were scraped off of social media without their permission.
In the UK, Clearview managed to beat a similar rap and the Information Commissioner is trying to appeal.
In our conversation, we get into other examples of facial recognition and biometrics gone wrong, the abuses that a search engine for faces makes possible, the creepy concept of LOVEINT (when law enforcement use intelligence tools to track or stalk their love interests), and much more.
Somehow, Kashmir remains hopeful that “the rickety scaffolding of the Panopticon” can be dismantled before it’s too late, although time is running out.
You’ll also find out what a ‘red list’ is, and it’s as Black Mirror as you think.
You can find Kashmir on X as @kashhill, and I can’t recommend her book highly enough. It’s an exposé of the grotty game being played by surveillance technology companies, and a travelogue of her journey into the engine room of the dystopian present.
Find us on X: @1984todaypod
Website: https://www.1984.today
Substack: https://1984today.substack.com
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07/21/24 • 76 min
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Christina Dalcher is a professor, linguist, and the best-selling author of the novels like VOX, Q (Master Class in the US), Femlandia, and The Sentence.
In VOX, a religious conservative movement comes to power in the United States. By technological means, the Pure Movement prevents women from speaking more than 100 words a day, and embarks on an unspeakable plot to destroy the very root of human language.
In Q, a strictly stratified educational system relentlessly tests children to measure their Quotient (hence the Q).
In Femlandia, a woman and her daughter encounter a women-only commune where, inexplicably, children continue to be born.
Underpinning Christina’s work is a clear and powerful desire to examine the human condition in tension with government, technology, and social hierarchy. Her central characters tend to be women struggling to protect their children, or driven by a fear of what might happen to their children.
We discuss her background in linguistics as a key part of imagining the worst that could happen to the world, her methods for developing and structuring a thrilling narrative, the way she approaches character and world-building, and some unexpected sources of inspiration for her dark creations.
We had a fun, open, personal conversation which left me with a deeper appreciation of her and her writing. I hope you enjoy it.
You can find Christina at www.christinadalcher.com or on X as CV_Dalcher.
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@1984TodayPod on X
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Episode 120: Emmanuel Goldstein on Surviving Communism, A Gnostic Cult, and A War On His Mind
1984 Today!
08/18/24 • 125 min
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This episode was a surprise.
After releasing Episode 119, I received the following message from a listener who goes by the name Emmanuel Goldstein:
Just listened to your podcast with Jerry Barnett and loved it, but now I feel like kinda HAVING to offer to be you next guest (if you are interested). I can mainly talk about socialism and how I experienced it growing up in East Germany and then later through the communes my mother joined afterwards.
The fact that his pseudonym is taken from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it all the more intriguing.
How could I turn that down?
We set up a date and time, and I went in basically blind, with almost no idea of what he would share with me.
The result was a startling, spontaneous, and deeply personal conversation, about the impact of parental ideology on a child’s development, living with trauma, and learning to think independently after dealing with indoctrination.
From being the privileged child of a Communist Party official in East Germany to living on a Gnostic commune in Bavaria, from being forced to live as a girl to growing into a man, what Emmanuel shared is enough for several lifetimes, of both experience and therapy.
I hope you find it as fascinating and as moving as I did.
Enjoy.
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@1984TodayPod on X
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06/09/24 • 77 min
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Bjørn Karmann is a Danish inventor based in Amsterdam who created Paragraphica, a lens-less camera powered by AI that uses data instead of light to create images. It generates a photograph of what it ‘thinks’ you are looking at, using variables like the weather, the time of day, and of course, your location. It also looks wild.
I saw his demo of how it works and had to speak to him.
We know our memories are imperfect, but a photo of a moment is still a snapshot of a point in time in our lives. Now, with Paragraphica, that snapshot of a moment of life is not just mediated by technology, it is generated. Is it real? Is it fake? Something in between? What could a future of moments generated rather than captured look like? What will the past look like from that future? Would it really even be our past?
You can try the online version of Paragraphica on his website.
Bjørn’s work could be called ‘subversive design’; he creates things that comment on or alter existing technology. His previous inventions have included Alias, a “teachable parasite” that gives you more control over your home ‘smart assistant’, and Occlusion Grotesque, a font that changes over time because it is carved into a tree.
We had a great conversation about his work, his philosophy of design, intrusive technology, the relationship between memory and reality, and much more. We even came up with an idea for our own app, but you’ll need to listen to find out what it is.
Bjørn is on X as @BjoernKarmann and his website is https://bjoernkarmann.dk/.
Find us on X, on Instagram, on Substack, or on our website.
Enjoy!
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05/26/24 • 96 min
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Crisis! Anxiety! Liberty!
Dr Ashley Frawley joins me for a conversation about what she calls “the tendency to communicate social problems as emotional problems,” and how that degrades the power and autonomy of the individual while ignoring complex structural social issues.
Ashley is a sociologist at the University of Kent in the UK, a columnist at Compact Magazine, a regular contributor to Unherd, the COO of Sublation Media, and a Research Fellow at MCC Brussels. She is the author of the books Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age, and Semiotics of Happiness.
She argues that people, rather than clamouring for solutions to unhappiness, lack of self-esteem, and poor mental health, have been taught to constantly monitor themselves, critique their position in life, and seek intervention by authorities and experts.
The result, she says, is “the politics of the void”: A society in constant crisis, obsessed with fixing people it assumes are broken, rushing from one wellness fad to another, placing on the shoulders of individual citizens the blame for social problems that have complicated external causes which conveniently remain unaddressed.
The increasingly widespread legalisation of assisted dying is a further sign of this trend, “a policy that reflects the fatalistic mindset of those who rule over us, leaders who can no longer promise a good life so instead offer a ‘good death’.”
We had a fascinating discussion, one that left me with much food for thought. I hope you enjoy it.
Find Ashley on X, YouTube, and Patreon as @AshleyAFrawley.
Visit our website at https://www.1984.today or find us on X as @1984todaypod.
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05/12/24 • 143 min
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Communists! Assassination! Romance!
Carol Cohn is an exceptional man with an incredible story.
Born in Romania during World War Two, he survived the deportation of the country’s Jews, returned and grew up under the Communists, escaped to the West, and became a journalist married to the girl of his dreams.
In this very special episode, he shares his experiences of mid-century European Jewish life, Communist indoctrination, Cold War politics, Western liberalism, Israel’s kibbutz collectivism, a Soviet hit squad, and, most touchingly, true love.
For those of us who have grown up in countries that never knew the repression and stultification of true totalitarianism, it is easy to be seduced by or indifferent to an idealised, sanitised version of a system we never experienced or suffered under. Our own social and political failings and shortcomings are notable, and worth commenting on and correcting, but they do not excuse or make more attractive the horrors visited on the millions of people who lived with the tyranny of Communism as it was, and in some places, still is. To wish it had been otherwise or to assume it could be different if tried again is to ignore the one thing we can know for certain: What actually happened to the people who had to live with it.
It was humbling and inspiring to hear Carol’s story, and to receive such an impression of his inner strength, good humour, and faith. I hope you feel the same.
Find us on X: @1984todaypod
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08/04/24 • 86 min
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Jerry Barnett is a technologist, campaigner, and the author of Porn Panic!
His book, and his other writing for outlets like Quillette, examines the junction of free expression, sexuality, and identity, especially recent examples of moral outrage from what he calls “the identitarian Left.”
We had a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, getting his views on identity politics, nationalism, racism, feminism, the way both the modern left and right share a penchant for pearl-clutching, the echoes of Orwell in our current moment, you name it.
He’s always fun to talk to, erudite, mordant, and passionate about reason and individualism.
You can find him on X, as @jerrybarnett, or on Substack at jerrybarnett.substack.com.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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X: @1984TodayPod
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04/28/24 • 108 min
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Live facial recognition! “Legal but harmful” speech! Spycoin!
In this episode, I’m joined by Mark Johnson, the Advocacy Manager for Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties campaign group dedicated to reclaiming privacy, defending freedoms, and rolling back the surveillance state. You can find them at BigBrotherWatch.org.uk, where you can download their reports on the various dystopian issues facing the British public, and find out how you can support them.
Mark Johnson was previously a Parliamentary Assistant working on domestic and international human rights issues including opposition to the death penalty and freedom of religion. He is also active in campaigning against the Chinese Communist Party’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China.
We get into the (unfortunately many) issues facing Britain, from the deployment of live facial recognition by law enforcement to the crackdown on free speech and the push to get rid of physical cash. All in a day’s work for Big Brother Watch, but quite a lot to fit into one discussion!
Mark has an admirable grasp of the myriad angles from which civil rights in the UK are being undermined, and an obvious passion for a free society. Speaking with him was as energising as it was concerning. I hope you feel the same!
You can find Big Brother Watch on X: @BigBrotherWatch
https://www.1984.today
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com
02/18/24 • 70 min
Sergei Loznitsa is an award-winning director of feature films and documentaries, a Ukrainian born in the Soviet Union, and a compassionate interrogator of the human condition.
His 2018 film Donbass, “a darkly satirical omnibus of scathing vignettes” about life in Eastern Ukraine, won him Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.
His description of the film connects it with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love...It is about a world, lost in post-truth and fake identities.
His documentary work, often composed entirely of archive material without voiceover or other commentary, includes The Natural History of Destruction, The Trial, and State Funeral.
On MUBI’s website, where several of his films are available to watch, he makes the following statement:
I want my films to urge the viewers to move towards self-knowledge, self-awareness, and awareness of certain important things that they never considered before. This is of the greatest importance to me.
I met with Sergei to discuss his films, his run-ins with the European and Ukrainian Film Academies, the possibility of truth in cinema, the way language is degraded in wartime, the imprisonment of Vladimir Kara-Murza, and more.
We sat knee to knee in a small studio. It was an intimate setting for what turned out to be a wide-ranging, touching, and resonant discussion. In the recording of our conversation, you can sometimes hear Sergei’s suit jacket rustling when he gestures to make a point or emphasise a statement.
His refusal to fall back on easy answers, and his determination to see the real human questions undergirding political issues, made it an honour and a pleasure to speak with him.
I hope you enjoy the episode.
Please let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
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NB: I owe thanks to The Fifth Column (A Podcast) for bringing Sergei’s work to my attention. Thank you, gentlemen.
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FAQ
How many episodes does 1984 Today! have?
1984 Today! currently has 25 episodes available.
What topics does 1984 Today! cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts and Technology.
What is the most popular episode on 1984 Today!?
The episode title 'Episode 114: Dr Ashley Frawley on 'Constant Crisis' and Why You're Probably Fine' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on 1984 Today!?
The average episode length on 1984 Today! is 92 minutes.
How often are episodes of 1984 Today! released?
Episodes of 1984 Today! are typically released every 14 days.
When was the first episode of 1984 Today!?
The first episode of 1984 Today! was released on Nov 26, 2023.
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