Köln | Das Buch von George Orwell, der eigentlich Eric Arthur Blair bürgerlich heißt, wurde am 8. Juni 1949 in den Verkauf gegeben. Geschrieben hatte es Orwell in den Jahren 1946 bis 1948. Die 1984 kam durch das Vertauschen der beiden letzten Ziffern 48 zustande. Was hätte Orwell geschrieben, wenn er die Möglichkeiten von KI gekannt hätte?

Der Roman spielt im Jahr 1984, also vor 40 Jahren. Der Hauptakteur Winston Smith lebt in einem totalitären Überwachungsstaat. Er ist Mitglied in der fiktiven Staatspartei Sozialistische Partei Englands. Orwell schrieb den Roman unter dem Eindruck des Stalinismus und dem Ende der Herrschaft der Nationalsozialisten in Deutschland. Zwei Diktaturen.

Es geht um Propaganda und totale Überwachung, bis hin zu einer Gedankenpolizei, die ständig alle Parteimitglieder überwacht. Geräte die der Überwachung dienen, wie „telescreens“, die alle Wohnungen visuell kontrollieren und abhören schürt das Staatsfernsehen Hass auf den Staatsfeind. Durch das Feindbild, das täglich propagandistisch postuliert wird soll die Bevölkerung zusammengeschweißt und abgelenkt werden.

Sogar eine neue Sprache wird etabliert, die vor allem durch antithetische Parolen wie „Krieg ist Frieden“ das Denken durch ständige Wiederholungen beeinflusst. Smith arbeitet im Ministerium für Wahrheit und frisiert Presseberichte auf Parteilinie. Er führt Tagebuch über seine echten Gefühle. Smith verliebt sich und findet einen Freund, dem er vertraut. Dieser verrät ihn. Er wird im Ministerium für Liebe einer Gehirnwäsche unterzogen.

Im Roman von Orwell geht es vor allem um die Kontrolle der Vergangenheit. So arbeitet das Ministerium für Wahrheit daran, ständig die Geschichte auf die Aktualität anzupassen. Das betrifft Vorgänge genauso wie Personen, Institutionen oder Organisationen. Das Ziel: Die aktuellen politischen Aussagen, sollen nicht anhand von historischen Fakten widerlegt werden können. Das geht soweit, dass auch Tageszeitung immer wieder mit altem Datum neu gedruckt werden. Schließlich entstand der Roman noch in Zeiten des Drucks und nicht Online. Die so aktualisierten Tageszeitungen wurden auch in den Archiven ausgetauscht.

„In  einer  Zeit  des  Universalbetruges ist  die  Wahrheit  zu  sagen eine  revolutionäre  Tat!“

George  Orwell


Was hätte Orwell geschrieben, wenn er KI gekannt hätte?

Eine spannende Frage. Orwell formulierte so, ohne KI zu kennen: „Wer die Vergangenheit kontrolliert, kontrolliert die Zukunft. Wer die Gegenwart kontrolliert, kontrolliert die Vergangenheit.“ Orwells Theorie der Austauschbarkeit alter Daten auf der Grundlage neuer Doktrin und der Aktualisierung von Archiven vor dem Hintergrund aktueller Entscheidungen ist in Zeiten von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) interessant. Das was in Orwells Ministerium der Wahrheit noch mühsam händisch gemacht wurde, ginge heute in Sekundenschnelle und müsste nicht einmal gedruckt werden. Archive, allen voran Online-Archive, könnten ständig aktualisiert werden. Einen Datumsstempel auf einem digitalen Dokument zu ändern ist kinderleicht. Missbräuchlich wäre, wie in Orwells Beschreibung, der Austausch nicht die Ergänzung um neue Erkenntnisse.

Stellen wir uns vor, eine rechtsextreme Partei gelänge in Deutschland an die Macht. Eines ihrer Ziele wäre Geschichtsrevisionismus im Hinblick auf den aktuell durch Dokumente, Filme und Fotos belegten Holocaust. Die Partei würde bestimmen, dass alle Archive digitalisiert werden und nach Digitalisierung die analogen Dokumente vernichtet werden. Im Zuge der Digitalisierung lässt die Partei alle Daten mit KI überarbeiten. Aus Dokumenten werden alle Daten getilgt, die auf den Holocaust verweisen. Alles Film und Fotomaterial wird mit KI so aufbereitet, dass aus den Vernichtungslagern wie Auschwitz Erholungslager werden. Also die Vergangenheit, wie es in der Orwellschen Dystopie beschrieben ist, kontrolliert und manipuliert wird. Dazu wird objektive Wahrheit nicht zugelassen. Wie einfach wäre es, Orwells Theorie der Hasswoche und täglichen Zwei-Minuten-Hass mittels Social Media umzusetzen.

Revival und Aktualität

2013 war es Edward Snowden, der das PRISM-Überwachungsprogramm des US-Geheimdienstes NSA öffentlich machte. In den USA stieg das Buch „1984“ daraufhin in den Bestsellerlisten von Internethändler Amazon weit nach oben. Und 2017 stieg es sogar auf Platz 1 in den USA, als der Begriff „alternative Fakten“ hoffähig wurde im Zusammenhang mit Trump. Der ging aktuell mit seiner Medienplattform „Truth Social“ gerade an die Börse und sprachlich ist Orwells „Ministry of Truth“ nicht weit entfernt. Der russische Angriffskrieg auf die Ukraine, der am 24. Februar 2022 startete, wurde in der Russischen Föderation als „Befreiung“ propagandistisch dargestellt und in den Schulen gar „Friedensmission“ genannt.

Ein kurzer Ausschnitt aus „1984“ (Englisches Original)

Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live–did live, from habit that became instinct–in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague distaste–this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?

And the bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against no background and mostly unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth–Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.]–was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

  WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by penetrating through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorilla-faced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed truncheons.

Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like nitric acid, and moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY  IGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the next he was more successful. He went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table that stood to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank book with a red back and a marbled cover.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting, and which, when the flats were built, had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was now about to do.

(…)

Hinweis der Redaktion: In einer früheren Version des Artikels befand sich ein Rechenfehler. 1984 ist nicht 50, sondern 40 Jahre her. Die entsprechenden Stellen wurden korrigiert.