Ours has been called an “Age of Propaganda” and a “Surveillance Society”, as if each gets at something fundamental about our time.1 George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is an important point of reference for both points of view. The reason for its centrality is obvious: the novel takes propaganda and surveillance to extreme limits, thus bringing essential aspects of each into sharp relief. However, in addition to being a rich resource for thinking about each of these important dimensions of social reality, by relating them in an essential way the novel also challenges us to think the two together.2 In this paper I give a reading of Orwell’s novel based on a careful examination not just of how propaganda and surveillance work in its world but