The Freebie
Heyo, Nik here!
This weekend, I learned a new lesson the hard way: After I sent out the newsletter, kind subscriber Ken alerted me to the fact that Gmail had marked my email as spam. There was a big red banner at the top with some not so nice (and definitely untrue) words about the contents of the email.
As a result, if you're using Gmail, you likely won't have gotten the latest edition of The 4 Minute Read. If that's you, you can now read it here.
When I dug into the issue with the ConvertKit team, it turned out the problem was as simple as it was silly: Gmail has started treating shortened links from Youtube as spam — but guess who owns Youtube? Google! The company making Gmail!
So essentially, Google is censoring links to its own platform, and thus also hurting the ability of creators to reach their own audience. Great! But wait, it gets better.
According to the team, normal Youtube links are okay. So let's get this straight:
- A link that looks like this, "youtu.be/xyz," which is the very link you get if you press "Share" on Youtube = bad.
- But a link that looks like this, "youtube.com/xyz," is perfectly fine. Really?
So that's one reason I'm sending this email. To test that theory.
The other is that the irony of which link Google singled out could not be any thicker: It was the link to our brand-new, 12-minute, in-depth summary of 1984 by George Orwell. I mean, you can't make this stuff up!
Nowadays, we all know George Orwell for his writing. But in his younger years, he was an Imperial policeman in Burma (modern-day Myanmar) and fought in the Spanish Civil War. During that time, but also later, when he worked as a journalist during World War II, he witnessed the terrifying consequences of governments with complete control both first- and second-hand.
Spain, Russia, Germany — these are just some of many countries who were under a totalitarian regime at one point or another. But what does "totalitarian" mean? What does a government with too much power look like? And what would it be like to live in such a world?
To answer all these questions and more, in 1949, Orwell published 1984, a book now taught in thousands of classrooms around the globe each year. It's a dystopian work of science-fiction that provided compelling rational arguments and political criticism via a riveting, highly dramatic story.
In our video summary, we discuss the main points of the plot for you to follow along, but we also draw 3 valuable life lessons about language, societies, and what it means to be a free individual along the way:
- Language is the most powerful way to either control or empower people.
- Freedom is being able to say what's true, what you think, and to make your own choices.
- Totalitarian governments win when they gaslight us into giving up our individuality.
Winston Smith is the protagonist of 1984. As he finally leafs through the pages of a forbidden book he's been dying to get his hands on, he concludes:
"The best books are those that tell you what you know already."
In that sense, 1984 truly is a great book: Most of us know that governments, big companies, or really any entity whatsoever shouldn't have too much power, but only once we really feel the consequences — and hopefully only thanks to reading a book like this one rather than in real life — can we actually understand and act to keep our countries free and beautiful.
I hope you'll give this video a watch — and I hope this time, the Ministry of Truth won't prevent you from doing so ;)
Happy watching,
-Nik
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