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Blair’s entrailsseemed to grow cold. The worst thing of all would be to delay. His heart was thumping like a drum, but his face, from long habit, was expressionless. He got up and movedheavily toward the door.

THE MACHINE
    The gin is foul, flat, sickly, and oily, like asort of Chinese rice-spirit. It makes your lips purple and grows not less but more horrible with everymouthful you drink. Still, you drink it in gulps, like doses of vile medicine. You breathe it out of your skin in place of sweat, and cry it from your eyesin place of tears. When you wake with gummed-up eyelids and fiery mouth and a back that seems to be broken, it is impossible even to rise from the horizontal, but for the bottle and teacup placed besideyour bed overnight.
    Big Brother drinks from a different cup. His thirst is quenched by The Thing that is not Gin. Big Brother has the telescreen.
    The telescreen is the key to everything else in 1984. The word “telescreen” (or “screen”) occurs 119 times in Orwell’s book, which is to say, on almost every other page. “Big Brother” appears only 74 times. Other related words get far fewer mentions: “the Thought Police,” 39; “The Spies” youth group, 14; “spy” in other contexts, 9; “watching” in the context of snooping, 8; “thoughtcrime” or “crimethink,” 14; “betray,” 24; “slogan,” 19; “propaganda,” 4. “Newspeak” appears 46 times in the body of the book and another 33 in the Appendix. The three slogans of the Party—WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH—occur 6, 7, and 6 times respectively. Other related phrases get only occasional mentions: “memory holes,” 6; “mutability of the past,”3; “informers,” 2; “Thought Police helicopters,” 1; “ear trumpets,” 1; “snoop,” 1; “eavesdropping,” 1. Even the cardinal principle of all Oceania—“doublethink”—appears only 31 times, or about as often as “gin,” with 34 occurrences. From a strictly engineering perspective, the telescreen is the scaffold. It is the single, ubiquitous techno-spy that makes possible Big Brother’s absolute control.
    The political essay set out in the middle of 1984 acknowledges this explicitly:
    By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. . . . Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. . . . [But] [w]ith the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. . . . Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, nowexisted for the first time.
    And that possibility is what defines reality in 1984. The telescreen connects everyone in England not only to the Ministry of Truth, which spews out the pig-iron statistics and military music, but also to the Ministry of Love, the headquarters of the Thought Police. Day and night the telescreen bruises yourears with Party propaganda. And whether or not you attend to it, the telescreen attends to you. It listens for sedition and watches for facecrime, with an ear that never tires and an eye that never blinks. In your home and office, in your bedroom and your lavatory, in private spaces and in public squares, the telescreen is watching. Big Brother is watching. Not just the foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, and thought-criminals: BIG BROTHER IS