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ANATOMY OF DESIGN
When George Orwell published his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (in
1949), originally titled The Last Man in Europe, he meant it to be a social critique
of Great Britain, a cautionary prediction of what his society might become as
the postwar world’s superpowers realigned and dictatorial rule usurped
traditional democracies. The book was (and still is) a shocking and prescient
foretelling of the Cold War. Orwell could not have known the extent to which his
Frankenstein monster, Big Brother, sewn together as a patchwork of past and
present leader cults, would eventually become a synonym for squashed civil
liberties and government ...