Nobody who sat down with George Orwell’s “1984”, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”, or Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” in the decades after World War II could have imagined the implications of reading them on a glowing rectangular device in their hand.
These three writers had already mapped it out. None of them knew anything about the Internet and yet they described almost exactly how it would go wrong. These three novels form a moral atlas of the Internet age by describing its surveillance states, its mob dynamics, and its profit-hungry corporate empires that now challenge the authority of nations.
That’s not a coincidence. It’s what good literature does. It doesn’t predict technology — it predicts people. And people, it turns out, are pretty consistent.
Let’s Start with the Obvious One: Orwell
When people talk about 1984, the novel and the Internet, they usually mean surveillance. Big Brother watching your every move through a telescreen is an uncomfortably tidy metaphor for a world where your phone tracks your location, your smart TV has a camera, and a handful of companies know more about your daily routine than your closest friends do.
Orwell’s scariest idea wasn’t the surveillance. It was why there was surveillance in the first place. The point of watching everyone wasn’t just control, it was also reality management. The Ministry of Truth didn’t just spy on people. It rewrote history, manufactured facts, and used language itself as a weapon. Newspeak wasn’t about censorship. It was about making certain thoughts literally unthinkable by eliminating the words you’d need to think them. Newspeak finds its modern analog in the reduction of complex political reality to outrageous headlines, the replacement of argument with hashtags, and the social media pile-on that punishes dissension. When platforms reward the most emotionally inflammatory content, they are, in functional terms, running a Newspeak program.
Sound familiar? It should. State-sponsored disinformation campaigns such as Russia’s election interference operations, the US “fake news” paradigm and China’s coordinated manipulation of social media, aren’t just lying. They’re trying to make truth itself feel unstable, to flood the zone so thoroughly that people give up on the idea that facts exist at all. Even in liberal democracies, intelligence agencies have conducted mass surveillance programs of a scale that would have seemed fantastical to Orwell.
Golding Was Scarier, Because He Blamed Us
Here’s what’s uncomfortable about Lord of the Flies: Orwell’s villain is the government. Golding’s villain is you and me.
The story’s plot described a group of British schoolboys stranded on an island with no adults, no rules. Within weeks, they’re hunting each other. The novel’s central theme was that the civilized behavior we think of as normal is actually pretty fragile. Take away the social structure that keeps it in place, and what’s underneath is not pretty.
The Internet took away the social structure. Anonymity did what Golding’s island did i.e., removed consequences. And the result has been... well, you’ve been online. You’ve seen the harassment campaigns, the pile-on, the comment sections that seem specifically engineered to produce the worst possible version of human interaction. You’ve watched ordinary people who are probably perfectly decent in their offline lives participate in coordinated cruelty toward strangers.
None of that required a villain. No single person designed it. It emerged, the same way Golding’s chaos emerged from the combination of human nature and an environment that stopped punishing bad behavior. The platform didn’t radicalize anyone. They simply create the island, and human nature does the rest.
That’s actually the more frightening diagnosis, if you think about it. Because you can, in theory, fight a government. Fighting human nature is harder.
And Then There’s Heller, Who Saw the Part Everyone Else Missed
Orwell and Golding cover state power and human nature. However, there is a third force shaping the Internet’s darker side that neither novelist fully anticipated. It took Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to see it coming.
Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer turned war profiteer in Catch-22, builds an enterprise so vast and so indifferent to loyalty that he contracts simultaneously with the Allied forces and with Nazi Germany. He bombs his own squadron because he has a contract to fulfill. When confronted, he offers everyone a share in M&M Enterprises, and somehow, this works.
The joke is that Milo isn’t evil. He’s cheerful. He genuinely seems to believe that what’s good for M&M Enterprises is good for everyone, because everyone has a share. He’s just following the logic of profit to its natural conclusion, and that conclusion happens to include bombing his own people.
Now think about the big technology companies. They’re not evil either. They’re cheerful. They genuinely convinced themselves that connecting the world is an unqualified good. Their advertising model that monetizes attention, the growth imperatives that reward engagement over wellbeing, the cross-border data flows that render national regulation nearly impotent, reproduce Milo’s moral architecture at societal scale.
For example, Meta makes money from engagement, and outrage drives engagement, so Meta’s systems have a structural incentive to amplify outrage including the kind that destabilizes democracies. Amazon’s market power has reshaped entire economies. Google knows things about individual users that would make any government intelligence agency envious.
Nobody planned any of this. It’s just what happens when you follow the logic of profit at a societal scale without anything to push back against it.
Here’s an example of something that would make Heller cringe. Sometimes, corporate logic doesn’t just ignore geopolitical reality, it overrides it. When Elon Musk’s SpaceX declined to activate Starlink satellite coverage over Crimea during the Ukraine conflict, the stated rationale was essentially a business and liability calculation. It was not a foreign policy decision made by an elected government. It was not a military judgment made by a general with accountability to a chain of command. It was a business call made unilaterally by a private citizen who happened to own the satellites. Ukrainian forces were reportedly left without the connectivity they needed at a critical moment, not because any government decided so, but because it didn’t fit the business calculus of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Milo would have understood completely. He wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with it at all.
Corporations don’t need to replace governments to neuter them. They just need to be bigger, faster, and more borderless than any regulatory framework can handle. Milo didn’t destroy the military. He made the military dependent on his supply chains, his contracts, his logistics. Today’s technology corporations have done something similar to democratic governance. They have not replaced governments so much as rendered them increasingly unable to govern by being too slow, too local, too poorly resourced to regulate entities that operate across every jurisdiction simultaneously and move faster than any legislature can meet. That’s a much more durable kind of power.
What Do Three Old Books Actually Tell Us?
Look, none of this means the Internet is irredeemably terrible. These three novels are lenses, not verdicts. The same platforms that host disinformation also host dissidents. The same anonymity that enables harassment also protects whistleblowers. The same corporate giants that concentrate power also built tools that have genuinely improved billions of lives. The books don’t have frameworks for any of that, and that’s a real limitation.
But here’s why the books matter anyway. We are living through something that is moving faster than our ability to describe it. Most of the political and regulatory vocabulary we have was developed for a world that no longer exists. When we try to talk about what’s wrong with social media, or why online anonymity produces such reliable cruelty, or why we feel so powerless against platforms that answer to no one, we’re often reaching for words we don’t quite have.
Three writers found that language, decades ago. They were describing totalitarianism, human nature, the military-industrial complex and the absurdity of war. They left us maps. It would be a particular failure not to use them.
The underlying dynamics they described are the same ones playing out on your phone right now.
That’s the thing about great literature. It doesn’t age out. It just keeps finding new situations to be right about.
The themes of 1984, Lord of the Flies, and Catch-22 provide useful frameworks for understanding how people, social media, governments, and profit-driven corporations use the Internet in a darker manner.
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