George Orwell’s 1984 was on our Reading Room list from the start. Lily and I both began noticing, separately and then together, that the patterns Orwell described were no longer confined to literary analysis. They were active. The book we had been planning to revisit was describing the logic of information systems we were watching in real time, and that recognition kept pushing it to the top of the list.
The Reading Room is where we go slow with the difficult books. This month, Lily is taking us somewhere harder than usual. She brings Orwell into direct conversation with Philip K. Dick’s 1972 Vancouver speech, and with a March 2026 case study that names exactly what the machinery of propaganda looks like when it has AI tools at its disposal. What she arrives at is a diagnosis: careful, grounded, and harder to look away from than I expected.
Th…
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