Orwell's 1949 novel is set in Oceania, a totalitarian state at permanent war, where Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth revising historical records to match current policy. The Party maintains control through continuous surveillance by telescreens, the reconstruction of the past, the Thought Police, and Newspeak, a language engineered so that unorthodox thought becomes impossible to formulate.
The political mechanisms are the book's substance. Doublethink is the capacity to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both, which the Party requires because its claims change and its members must not notice. The mutability of the past means that history is continuously rewritten and no evidence of any previous version survives. The perpetual war exists to consume production and keep the population poor, since general prosperity would end hierarchy.
The Goldstein book within the novel states the theory directly, arguing that all hierarchical societies use the same mechanisms and that the Party's innovation was recognising that power is the object rather than a means to anything. O'Brien's interrogation of Winston makes the final argument, that the Party seeks power for its own sake, that it will remake reality itself, and that the objective is not obedience but genuine belief.
The novel has been used to describe almost every political arrangement, which has diluted its terms considerably. Orwell wrote against Stalinism specifically, and readers applying it to commercial surveillance should note that the mechanisms differ substantially. Its relevance to technology is in the treatment of surveillance normalised through convenience, of language shaping the range of expressible thought, and of records that can be silently revised.
Readers thinking about surveillance, language and records, with the recognition that the political mechanisms differ from the commercial ones they are often used to describe.
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