Three Old Books That Explain Everything Wrong with the Internet
Orwell, Golding, and Heller never sent a tweet. But they provide the most precise map of how people, social media, governments and the corporations that now rival them, have turned the Internet dark.
By Randy Marchany and Claude.ai
Author’s Note: As part of my AI experiment, I asked Claude and ChatGPT to do a blunt review of the previous version of this article. This version corrects the flaws pointed out by those tools.
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.
And yet here we are, reaching for those books to describe what’s happening online. That’s not because these writers were prophets. It’s because they were precise observers of recurring human and institutional dynamics that don’t belong to any particular era or technology. The enduring relevance of these books lies less in prophecy than in pattern recognition. Modern crises often resemble the institutional and psychological behaviors those authors identified, even when the technologies and historical conditions differ dramatically.
These three novels form a moral atlas of the Internet age not because they anticipated it, but because they mapped the terrain of power, human nature, and corporate logic that we keep rebuilding in every new medium we invent.
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Let’s Start with the Obvious One: Orwell
When people talk about 1984 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.
But Orwell wasn’t speculating about future technology. He was distilling what he had already watched happen in Stalin’s USSR, in Franco’s Spain, in the wartime propaganda machinery of his own government. Surveillance states and reality management weren’t inventions of his imagination. They were patterns he observed, named, and pushed to their logical conclusion.
His scariest idea wasn’t the surveillance itself. It was the purpose behind it. The Ministry of Truth didn’t just spy on people. It rewrote history, manufactured facts, and used language as a weapon. Newspeak wasn’t about censorship. It was about making certain thoughts literally unthinkable by eliminating the words needed to think them.
Making truth feel unstable rather than simply false is not a new invention of social media. It’s what state-sponsored disinformation has always done. Russia’s election interference operations, China’s coordinated social media manipulation, the “flood the zone” paradigm that makes facts feel optional. They’re the same pattern Orwell documented, running on new infrastructure. Even in liberal democracies, mass surveillance programs have operated at a scale that would have seemed extraordinary to Orwell, but the institutional logic driving them was exactly what he described.
The platform didn’t invent the playbook. It inherited one that was already centuries old.
The difference is one of scale and abstraction. When the East German Stasi surveilled its citizens, it required an informant network covering roughly one in sixty people. Algorithmic content moderation and behavioral tracking now operate without human informants at all. The institutional logic is identical. But the bureaucratic friction that occasionally created space for error, appeal, or human judgment has been removed. Orwell imagined a Ministry of Truth staffed by people. The contemporary version runs largely without them, which makes it harder to subvert and harder to hold accountable.
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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.
A group of British schoolboys, stranded on an island with no adults and no rules. Within weeks, they’re hunting each other. Golding’s argument was that civilized behavior is more fragile than we’d like to believe, that what we think of as normal is actually held in place by social structures, and that when those structures disappear, what emerges isn’t pretty.
But it’s worth remembering that Golding wasn’t inventing this either. He wrote in the aftermath of a world war that had demonstrated, at industrial scale, what ordinary people were capable of when institutions either collapsed or actively organized cruelty. He wasn’t imagining a dark future. He was processing a dark past.
The Internet recreated the island’s conditions: anonymity removed consequences, just as distance and dehumanization have always done. The harassment campaigns, the pile-ons, the comment sections that seem engineered to produce the worst possible version of human interaction: none of that required a new kind of person. It required the old kind of person in an environment that stopped punishing bad behavior.
History offers precedent here, and it’s actually the more useful frame. The printing press’s first century produced not enlightenment but a century of religious war, pamphlet-fueled mob violence, and coordinated persecution. Early radio became a vehicle for demagogues before societies developed norms, regulations, and institutional responses that interrupted those patterns. The dynamics weren’t unique to those technologies either. They were recurring.
What’s different now is the feedback loop. The pamphlet war had a natural throttle: printing took time, distribution was physical, and the audience was finite. Platform dynamics don’t have that throttle. Algorithmic amplification means the most inflammatory content reaches the largest audience fastest, which creates conformity pressure that earlier mob dynamics didn’t produce at the same scale. It’s not just that bad behavior goes unpunished. It’s that the system actively rewards it with attention, and attention is what the environment runs on. Golding’s island had no such incentive structure. The boys descended into cruelty despite the environment. Online, the environment pulls in that direction.
That matters, because “fighting human nature” isn’t the only option, and framing it that way leads to paralysis. What societies have actually done, repeatedly, is develop the structures, norms, and friction that interrupt the worst patterns. The island isn’t permanent. It’s a governance failure. And governance failures can be addressed.
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And Then There’s Heller, Who Saw the Part Everyone Else Missed
Orwell and Golding cover state power and human nature. But there is a third force shaping the Internet’s darker side, and it took Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 to describe it. Heller, too, was working from observation, not imagination.
Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer turned war profiteer, 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. Heller didn’t invent Milo from nothing. He was writing about defense contracting as it actually functioned, extended to its absurd but logical conclusion, namely, the point where institutional profit motive becomes completely decoupled from any human purpose the institution was supposed to serve.
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. But 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 the Milo pattern: institutional logic, followed faithfully, producing outcomes that are monstrous in aggregate and explicable at every individual step.
The clearest contemporary example: when Elon Musk’s SpaceX declined to activate Starlink satellite coverage over Crimea during the Ukraine conflict, the stated rationale was a business and liability calculation. Not a foreign policy decision. Not a military judgment. A business call, made unilaterally by a private citizen who happened to own the satellites. Ukrainian forces were left without connectivity they needed, not because any government decided so, but because it didn’t fit the business calculus. Milo would have understood completely. He wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with it at all. More to the point: he wouldn’t have been doing anything that war profiteers hadn’t done before him.
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 it dependent on his supply chains, his contracts, his logistics. Today’s technology corporations have done something similar to democratic governance: not replaced it, but rendered it increasingly slow, local, and under-resourced relative to entities that operate across every jurisdiction simultaneously. That’s a recurring dynamic too. The East India Company governed territories. The railroad barons shaped legislation. The pattern of private institutional power outrunning public regulatory capacity is not new. The scale is.
Milo’s enterprise, however sprawling, operated within a war with a defined end. The contracts eventually expired. Contemporary platform economies have no such horizon. The profit logic isn’t running a temporary operation in exceptional circumstances. It’s the permanent operating condition of the information environment most people live in. That’s not Heller’s Catch-22. That’s closer to a Catch-22 with no demobilization.
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What Do Three Old Books Actually Tell Us?
The enduring relevance of these books lies less in prophecy than in pattern recognition. And pattern recognition is more useful than prophecy, because patterns, once identified, can be interrupted.
None of this means the Internet is irredeemably terrible. 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 novels don’t have frameworks for any of that, and that’s a real limitation worth naming.
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 built 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, not by gazing into the future, but by looking clearly at the world they already lived in. Orwell described surveillance states as he had watched them operate. Golding processed what a world war had revealed about human behavior under collapsed institutional order. Heller anatomized what profit motive, freed from accountability, actually produces. They left us maps.
The question isn’t whether the maps predict our moment. It’s whether we recognize the terrain.
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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, not because these authors saw the future, but because they saw clearly.