George Orwell

IBM commercial from 1984.Screenshot: IBMBefore the year 2000, Super Bowl commercials from tech companies offered millions of viewers their first glimpses of the future. Gizmodo watched dozens of videos from the 1980s and ‘90s to find the most iconic Super Bowl commercials from the early tech industry.Fax machines, internet connections, and Nokia phones may sound outdated now, but they used to be the cutting edge. These ads are far different from the tech commercials you’ll see in this year’s Super Bowl. We had to pull…

The latest iOS 17.3 update will make it harder for thieves to log into your phone, but only if you turn on this feature. The Samsung Galaxy Ultra S24 is out next week, and we’ve got our review of the flagship phone right here. Click through for our top product news and reviews from this week. Read more... The latest iOS 17.3 update will make it harder for thieves to log into your phone, but only if you turn on this feature. The Samsung Galaxy Ultra S24 is out next week, and we’ve got our review of the flagship phone…

Lily Gladstone visits the SiriusXM Studios on January 25, 2024 in New York City. Photo: Jamie McCarthy (Getty Images)It’s not quite her dream sci-fi role, but until Killers of the Flower Moon breakout Lily Gladstone’s Star Wars Ewok aspirations come true, The Memory Police sounds like an excellent entry into the genre. The team behind this project is ridiculous; besides Gladstone as the lead, it includes director Reed Morano (The Handmaid’s Tale, I Think We’re Alone Now), Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman…

We are all the sledgehammer, Apple does like to tell its fans. We are all disruptors hurtling toward one great screen, breaking the iron-fisted hold that other tech firms want to impose on us. The hellscape dystopia world of Apple’s famed “1984” commercial modeled after George Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 never really came to pass. As silly as it is to say, Apple was right. We didn’t win some nebulous liberation, exactly. We won a whole different soup of tech-based dystopia.The M3 MacBook Pro: Made Dark for…

George ORWELL’s essay “Politics and the English Language”, published in 1946, took aim at the bureaucrats, academics and hacks who obfuscated their misdeeds in vague, jargon-packed writing. Abstractions, euphemisms and clichés all served as “the defence of the indefensible”. Orwell lamented how “Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without…

Fox News is once again under scrutiny for a lawsuit filed by former Biden administration disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz on Wednesday. Jankowicz claims Fox News hosts carried out a “malicious campaign of destruction” that continues to threaten her safety and harm her career.Tyler Posey Almost Played a Lost Boys VampireFormer Fox News host Tucker Carlson is cited in the complaint for falsely telling viewers that Jankowicz aimed to censor Americans’ speech and thatshe had been fired from her position. The complaint…

In 2003, a cohort of journalists from Western publications landed up in Motihari, a small town on the India-Nepal border, about 150 km north of Bihar’s capital Patna. They were looking for the house in which Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his nom de plume George Orwell, was born, a hundred years before. A view of the house in Motihari, Bihar, where George Orwell was born. (Sanchit Khanna/H) Most Motihari residents then hardly knew that Orwell, author of novels such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen…

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, the book that you co-authored with the late David Graeber, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022. How did it feel to be recognized by a prize named after author George Orwell? David Wengrow a the Kolkata Literary Meet (Courtesy the Kolkata Literary Meet) Frankly, I was not expecting it at all. My publisher informed me about the announcement. Of all the prizes that are given for non-fiction published in the UK, I think that my…

A mural depicting writer George Orwell, in Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022.Photo: Darko Vojinovic (AP) “If we begin to feel that we’re being surveilled all the time, our behavior changes. We begin to do less. We begin to think about things less. We begin to modify how we think.” - Tim CookThe English language, novelist George Orwell once observed, “is in a bad way.”The critic and notoriously “crabby” grammarian likened the destruction of the written word to the spiraling depression of one caught up in thrall of…

Image: 2K Marin/2KFor those who play video games, 2007 is often considered one of the best years of the medium. It was a year of bangers: Microsoft had Crackdown and Halo 3, Nintendo took Super Mario to the Galaxy, Call of Duty blew the world open by going modern, and so on. It cannot be understated how much that year just kicked ass for games, and in the upper echelon at the time was 2K Games’ Bioshock, which is now 15 years old as of today. Developed by 2K Boston (later Irrational Games) and the now defunct 2K…