Author(s): Felipe Gonzalez Ortiz

Abstract: This article develops a critique of contemporary society through a close theoretical engagement with George Orwell’s 1984, read not as a prophetic text but as what Georg Lukacs termed realist fiction: a narrative form capable of grasping social totality. Drawing on critical theory, visual culture studies, and contemporary analyses of surveillance and algorithmic governance, the article proposes the concept of scopic regimes to analyze how visibility and occlusion are socially produced and normalized. By examining practices of diffuse surveillance, disinformation, the editing of truth, and the administration of fear, the article argues that contemporary societies increasingly resemble an anomalous social order in which the vulnerable are rendered invisible and residual populations are structurally managed. Rather than claiming a direct fulfillment of Orwell’s dystopia, the analysis traces structural resonances between totalitarian mechanisms depicted in 1984 and current forms of market-driven, algorithmic, and media-mediated power. The article concludes by conceptualizing communication without communion as a defining feature of the present, one that undermines solidarity, weakens the moral contract, and calls into question the viability of human rights as the foundation of modern social life.

Keywords: Scopic regimes, dystopia, algorithmic governance, visual culture, communication without communion

Article Info: Received: 18 May 2026; Received in revised form: 15 Jun 2026; Accepted: 20 Jun 2026; Available online: 26 Jun 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.81