A new documentary, Orwell: 2+2 = 5 has landed, and puts the notion of truth back in the spotlight.
Don’t think it’s the whole story.
Orwell got inspiration from the original speculative dystopia, The Iron Heel by Jack London (1908), which predated Orwell by four decades. It’s a sharper manual for how wealth and power actually work in society, and what resistance looks like.
If Orwell warns us what to fear, London shows us how power gets organized: Rules, information, and financial influence.
This week’s Ink & Time is a crash course for readers who would rather not be managed by those with extreme wealth.
It’s urgent reading for the civic-minded in America, 2025.
"Don't forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the university that mould public opinion, set the thought-pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the Plutocracy."
Here Ink & Time unpacks just one element of The Iron Heel’s sinister mechanisms of control: the management and manipulation of what we read. Below you’ll get:
A framework for understanding information control and managed opinion
Data that maps The Oligarchy’s oppression to recent developments in 2025
Key backstory and quotes extracted from The Iron Heel
Takeaway links for ongoing awareness and tracking
We could do entire posts on their union-busting and class-fragmenting tactics, the brutality of their private military force The Mercenaries, or the infiltration of solidarity movements using agent-provocateurs and the infamous “false flag” operations.
It all sets a disturbingly dystopian context for the revolutionary, thriller, love-story that is The Iron Heel.
Click to get your copy of the new Time Warp Editions’ release of The Iron Heel.
It couldn’t be more prescient. It’s never been more timely.
Welcome to The Iron Heel: From Plutocracy to Oligarchy
Original illustrations from The Iron Heel (2025)
Written as a memoir from a resistance movement, the novel envisioned a near-future United States where an oligarchic elite seizes control of the state, society, and culture. Far from a futuristic techno-tyranny, it was a plausible system of control through wealth, information, and institutional force, then and now.
The plot follows Ernest Everhard, a revolutionary intellectual, and Avis, the narrator who becomes his wife and comrade. As democratic movements gain traction, the Oligarchy made up of the great trusts and plutocrats, strikes back.
London foresaw techniques of domination that would take decades to materialize: propaganda machines, false-flag operations, elite-controlled information systems, and the criminalization of dissent.
From book bans to policed protests, from election finance to ever-deepening inequality, themes from The Iron Heel are descending on contemporary American life.
As it was then, as it is today, the enforcers of repression often believe they are the “saviors of civilization.”
The calling cards of Oligarchy are easy to identify, if you look
Who decides what’s allowed, what you find, and what gets boosted? Control is structured, systematic and persistent. We find similar tactics used by The Oligarcy, dubbed “The Iron Heel,” a ruthless elite that will preserve its power at any cost.
We meet Avis’ father, a prominent professor whose book on the Economics of Education is throttled, then erased, because it is too critical of the funding establishment.
An investigative journalist admits he ignored evidence that would cost the corporation in worker compensation when a textile worker loses an arm.
The Bishop is discredited and eventually put in an asylum when he breaks ranks with class orthodoxy, seeking instead to serve the poor, and admonishes elites to follow suit.
"One and all, the professors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose their jobs."
Today, the levers of power over what we read, and even get to see, are proliferating.
Rule-setters — Decide what’s allowed to circulate.
Gatekeepers — Decide what you see first.
Funders — Decide what gets boosted.
Rule-Setters: Protecting Readers or Limiting Perspectives?
We have more access to books and to diversity of thought than ever before? Or do we?
Book bans are not simply a recent flare-up. They’ve become a new normal. In the 2024–25 school year, PEN America recorded 6,870 bans across 23 states and 87 districts. This should be worrying for every reader:
Rules decide what’s allowed to circulate. When a district pulls books, wholesalers and platforms adjust their lists. A local choice can become a quiet national absence, to the detriment of personal perspective and civic discourse.
Freedom to read is a common ground. You don’t have to like every title to defend the right to choose. The personal liberty to find and read books is not a partisan issue.
“Big things are happening secretly all around us… The suppression of the book is a precipitation… We are in the dark. We have no way of learning.”
A parent asks why a book is gone. The school points to a new vendor rule. The wholesaler changes a default list. One local decision becomes a national absence.
If you wouldn’t let strangers choose your books, don’t let systems do it.
Gatekeepers: Curating Visibility in a Mediated Society
Only 28% of Americans say they trust the mass media to report the news fully and fairly (Gallup, Oct 2, 2025). That’s a record low.
But declining trust is more a symptom than the disease. The American media ecosystem has become structurally vulnerable to plutocratic capture. It’s not unique to the United States.
It’s also not unlike what we read in London’s story, and so it is instructive to see what happens when the trends are taken to extremes.
"The Bishop’s utterance was a violent assault upon the established morality. The newspapers will purge his heresy in the oblivion of silence. The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it."
Press freedom in the United States has experienced what analysts call its "first significant and prolonged decline in modern history," falling to 57th place globally in press freedom rankings.
This is not a partisan issue. It’s structural: administrations of both parties have increasingly used lawsuits, regulatory pressure, and criminal prosecution to constrain journalism.
It’s a slippery slide from wealth to power to the coercion of oligarchy.
Major media companies now routinely settle lawsuits regardless of merit when regulatory approvals hang in the balance. Broadcasting licenses become leverage points. Lawsuits and regulatory pressure have been weaponized to extract unprecedented concessions.
CBS and Paramount paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit coinciding with their need for FCC merger approval. ABC and Disney settled for $15 million. The New York Times currently faces a staggering $15 billion defamation lawsuit.
When the FCC chairman uses overt threats (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”) it represents a chilling politicization of broadcast regulation.
You search a bookstore website. The first row looks like “what’s popular,” but it’s paid placement, plus an algorithm that favors “momentum.”
A week later, the same search shows different titles, because the rankings are bought, and dangerous books are buried.
"The papers made no mention of the book, but they misreported him beautifully. They twisted his words and phrases away from the context, and turned his subdued and controlled remarks into a howling anarchistic speech."
Funders: Follow the Money, Connect the Dots
The United States in the late 2020's exhibits clear characteristics of a modern plutocracy. Wealth concentration has reached historic levels. America's 400 richest individuals are worth a combined record $6.6 trillion (2025).
Federal Reserve data shows the top 10% of families control 69% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 50% possess a mere 3%.
In 2024, outside spending on U.S. federal elections hit about $4.5 billion, with a huge share from groups that don’t fully disclose donors (often called “dark money”).
Yet the translation of wealth into direct political power is nowhere more starkly illustrated than in the composition of the administration. An unprecedented 13 billionaires have been appointed to key government positions, creating the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history: a combined $450 billion.
America has a government run by the top 0.0001%.
Why should this matter to all of us: Money funds messages. Messages drive what gets talked about next. Rules get written. We feel it in prices, wages, safety, baselines for “normal.”
“Editorial policy… We’re all solid with the corporations… If you paid advertising rates, you couldn’t get any such matter into the papers. A man who tried to smuggle it in would lose his job.”
None of this is unique to the United States. Various governments around the world deploy similar tactics. That should not be cause for acceptance of just tuning out.
Orwell gives us the language of control: slogans, doublethink, “2+2=5.”
London gives us the machinery: how elites align institutions to set boundaries, shape visibility, and write the rules.
Control of accessibility (Rule-setters): “Show me the data.” Share PEN’s book ban counts if you care about what we can and can’t read. (PEN America)
Control of visibility (Gatekeepers): Ask three simple questions about any platform: Who owns it? Who sets the rules? Who pays for what’s boosted? Keep the Gallup 28% stats for calm conversations. (Gallup.com)
Control of influence (Funders): Follow the investment, cash flows, ad buys and the groups behind them. Start with OpenSecrets. (OpenSecrets)
A topic starts trending. You see more of it. Ads follow. Then a policy explainer lands in your inbox. Rules, visibility, funding working together in sinister harmony.
Read. Think. Discuss. Connect the dots.
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