How does Orwell enslave thought? Rosen mentions legal scholar Daniel J. Solove, who has argued that focusing on Orwell means that we center surveillance as a problem rather than the "inscrutable" bureaucracy that grows up to process information and make decisions about citizens in secret. Solove suggests that Kafka's The Trial would be a better touchstone. You many not care if some computer recorded which website you just visited, but finding yourself on a no-fly list for some unknown reason can be a nightmare.

Perhaps a more central problem with using Orwell, though, is that Orwell imagined not just a totalitarian state, but a totalizing one. The Party in 1984 controls everything and watches everyone. People have no rights, no power—even language and metaphors themselves are officially vetted by the state machinery. This isn't the world we live in, and, as Solove says, it's not the world we're "heading toward" either. Most people, most of the time, are not directly confronted with a police state.

That "most people" is, I think, crucial. There are, after all, some citizens who are watched and controlled in a systematic manner. Our massive prison population, for example, experiences surveillance and control on a par with that of Winston in 1984. Arun Kundnani, in his recently published The Muslims Are Coming, argues that Muslim communities in the U.S. are systematically infiltrated and observed in a manner comparable to the police states under Communism (a blueprint for 1984). Police profiling programs like stop and frisk are designed to give the authorities the power to regulate young black and Hispanic men, while leaving others largely unmolested. Big Brother is watching you—but only if "you" fit certain criteria.

Orwell doesn't capture that reality—but there are books that do. Philip K. Dick's 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for one, is set in a run-down future dystopia that is dilapidated rather than authoritarian. The protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a policeman, but he doesn't spy on his neighbors or terrorize the general populace. Instead, he is focused on identifying, tracking down, and destroying androids. The surveillance apparatus and the murderous force of the state are targeted, specifically, towards those defined as different.

The fact that the difference is hard to see, or that Deckard at times thinks he himself might be an android, suggests the extent to which policing one group can bleed into policing everyone. But it also emphasizes the importance of difference, and the way that a vision of normality, of good guys and bad guys, is central to police power. Big Brother may stomp on a face forever, but that face isn't his own face. Surveillance—Decker's android test—codifies or creates differences, and those differences (of gender, religion, race) in turn justify surveillance.