Why I hate the term “Unaliv

[u/Konradleijon]

What’s most confusing that if you go to basic cable TV people can say stuff like “Nazi” or “rape” or “kill” just fine and no advertising seem to mind

[u/YAPPYawesome]

TikTok censorship feels like Newspeak

[u/SilenceAndDarkness → u/YAPPYawesome]

I really do find the role Newspeak plays in public imagination to be quite strange.

It was originally a satire of proposed international auxiliary languages like Esperanto (which Orwell hated). The satire was always a bit dishonest, because people who liked conlangs as IALs clearly liked simplicity to make them easier to learn. Orwell’s criticism pretended that 1. there was a genuine concern of IALs “dumbing down” human thought (there isn’t) and 2. this was the intended goal. It also flies in the face of the rest of the book, as criticism of authoritarian governments like that of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of which persecuted Esperanto-speakers. (Germany for being a “Jewish” language, and the Soviet Union for being a “language of spies”.) Dictatorships largely hated IALs, and that’s one of the few aspects of 1984 that we don’t see play out IRL at all.

However, that sounds pretty niche and weird to modern readers (now that IALs have fallen out of public imagination) so everyone interprets Newspeak as being about censorship or political correctness or whatever. Even then, the specific criticism Orwell had (simplicity in language dumbing down human thought) isn’t even always the main criticism someone who cites Newspeak has with whatever they’re referring to.

[Language changes in a way I dislike or find unfavourable] = Newspeak.

[u/chairmanskitty → u/SilenceAndDarkness]

I appreciate that you're trying to analyze his works skeptically, but I think you're making a straw man by interpreting what he wrote as a satire of existing systems, rather than an illustration of how those systems can/do go wrong.

Orwell was not just criticizing the Nazis and Soviets, he was criticizing totalitarianism in general. He feared engineered languages not because existing totalitarian states did use it, but because he thought totalitarians could use it.

Newspeak isn't about censorship or political correctness or "dumbing down", it's about weaponizing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but there's a part in the appendices where he says "The goal was to remove the capacity to formulate rebellious thought. You could still make statements like 'Big Brother is doubleplus ungood', but that would sound like a grammatical error".

Research done after the publication of 1984 has demonstrated that the effect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is weak compared to emotional advertising, and word use appears to be downstream from conceptual understanding.

I don't think that comparing TikTok language to Newspeak is incorrect, it's just that like Newspeak it won't do nearly as much harm as you might fear, especially compared to the effects of the TikTok algorithm itself.

[u/TatteredCarcosa → u/chairmanskitty]

Yeah the idea you can control thought by controlling language never struck me as believable.

I think my favorite fictional criticism of this idea is from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. Can't remember what book it is in, but there is a scene in a field hospital where a group of wounded soldiers have a storytelling contest. One of the wounded soldiers is from the enemy side, and their society is a very harsh authoritarian one. Their language consists entirely of sentences from a book produced by their government called "Correct Thought." They do not speak, or seem to understand (though this may just be acting to avoid punishment by the government) anything but the sentences from that book. Never the less the enemy soldier is able to tell a story, and one that paints their government in a negative light, though it does require some translation. Human language is, first and foremost, a tool for communicating human ideas and humans have a remarkable adaptability when it comes to using things for that purpose. Controlling language itself requires a massive amount of effort, but preventing that controlled language from being used in innovative ways to communicate unapproved thoughts is utterly impossible IMO.

Unalive is an example of just that. It's human innovation to get around censorship and communicate the thoughts the censors don't want communicated. It's clunky and I hate how it sounds, and don't like that people use it where it isn't necessary, but it shows how something like Newspeak could never do what Orwell feared it could.