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Every time the world breaks down, sales of a 1949 book skyrocket on Amazon. It happened with Snowden in 2013, with Trump in 2017, with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and again with Trump in 2025. It’s not nostalgia or fashion: it’s money. The Internet, mobile phones and AI materialized the Big Brother that Orwell imagined. That’s why the most astute investors reread it: to anticipate the future and make a move before the rest.
Is the present more dystopian than we realize?
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
When the world is shaken, readers run to the same shelf. They look for a skinny book, written in 1949 by a British journalist sick with tuberculosis who barely managed to see it published.
The book is called “1984” and George Orwell signed it thinking that it warned about Stalin.
Seventy-six years later, it still functions as a seismograph.
Every time the needle of collective anxiety goes off, the sales of “1984” do the same. And that, far from being a cultural curiosity, has become an economic fact that should be looked at carefully.
Going over the peaks.
In June 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked that the U.S. N.S. spied on its own citizens through phones and servers, sales of “1984” on Amazon skyrocketed.
According to the publisher Penguin, one of its editions rose almost 10,000 percent in twenty-four hours.
CNN Money reported an increase of close to 9,500 percent. NPR spoke of 6,021 percent. The figures dance according to the measured edition, but the direction is unequivocal: the book went from No. 11,855 to No. 3 on Amazon in one day.
Penguin spokeswoman Liz Keenan summed it up with editorial elegance: The book’s themes felt more relevant than ever, and the news cycle seemed prescient.
The second big spike came in January 2017.
Three days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his adviser Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” live on “Meet the Press” to defend a Cabinet lie about the size of the inaugural audience.
Journalist Chuck Todd corrected her on the air: alternative facts are not facts, they are falsehoods. That was enough. In less than forty-eight hours, “1984” reached the top spot on Amazon.
Sales grew, according to the New York Times, ninety-five times their usual pace. The publisher Signet, which publishes it in paperback in the United States, ordered a reprint of 75,000 copies and an additional 100,000 copies of other Orwell titles in the same week.
Along with “1984” flew from the shelves “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood and “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, the latter multiplying its sales by sixteen.
The third peak is the most paradoxical. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was not the Ukrainians but the Russians who emptied the bookstores.
The digital platform LitRes, the country’s largest, declared “1984” as the most downloaded fiction book in Russia in all of 2022 and the second most downloaded in any category. Paper sales through Wildberries rose 75 percent in March compared to the same month a year earlier. In 2023 it was the most stolen book in the Chitai-Gorod chain, with 460 confirmed thefts.
Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova tried to reappropriate the author by claiming that Orwell was actually criticizing Western liberalism, not Soviet totalitarianism. Pure Newspeak applied to real life, in Putin’s version.
And then came the fourth peak. After Trump’s victory in November 2024 and his second inauguration in January 2025, “1984” rose again, but this time with less fury.
250 percent on Amazon in November, 192 percent in January according to Circana BookScan, about 19,500 copies per week. “The Handmaid’s Tale” shot up 6,866 percent. Amazon’s number one, however, was occupied by Melania Trump’s memoirs. The phenomenon has been trivialized. The dystopia is digested.
Why does this happen?
The comfortable explanation is cultural: people seek comfort in literature when they do not understand the present. The uncomfortable explanation is economic.
Investors, fund managers, geopolitical analysts and a handful of well-read intellectuals on Wall Street use Orwell as a field manual. Not to get excited, but to anticipate scenarios.
Knowing what happens when a State controls language, what happens when the truth becomes negotiable, what consequences mass surveillance has on consumer behavior, are questions that directly affect the valuation of companies, country risk, portfolio decisions. That is why “1984” has become silent reading in boardrooms.
And here comes the twist that Orwell did not see. The great thinker on the subject, Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” wrote in TIME a few years ago: “We took it for granted that the danger would come from the state, and we were wrong.”
The new Big Brother is not called Big Brother but Big Other, and it doesn’t want to break you: it wants to automate you.
Google stores 39 categories of data per user. Twitter, 24. Amazon, 23. Alphabet billed 264,590 million dollars in advertising in 2024. Meta, another 160,600 million. Added together, there are 425,000 million reasons why Orwell is reread on boards of directors.
The Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han finishes it off best: “the smartphone replaces the torture chamber, and Big Brother now has a friendly appearance.”
Yuval Noah Harari warns that the next generation of authoritarian regimes may get “under the skin” of the citizen.
China already has a social credit system in place that in 2019 had prevented almost 27 million airline ticket purchases.
There are about one billion video surveillance cameras working in the world. And meanwhile, ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly users in December 2025.
I leave the provocative question to Tim Cook himself, president of Apple, who in 2016 said something that continues to sting:
“the twist that Orwell didn’t see coming is that Big Brother wasn’t imposed on us by anyone. We did it ourselves.” Tim Cook
Every cookie accepted without reading, every geolocation always activated, every like delivered for nothing, is a voluntary signing of the contract that Winston Smith signed under torture at the Ministry of Love.
Orwell thought they would have to force us. It turned out that it was enough to offer us discounts.
The book sells again because the book portrays us. And the most disturbing thing is not that Orwell predicted the present. It is that the present, reading Orwell, does not flinch.
In short, a disturbing pattern is revealed: sales of Orwell’s “1984” skyrocket in every global crisis, from Snowden to Trump’s two terms in office and the war in Ukraine. Behind the phenomenon there is no literary nostalgia but market logic. Investors and intellectuals reread the author to understand how the internet, mobile phones and AI materialized Big Brother, and to anticipate where the world is moving.
References
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