“During The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before—at least, to this extent—and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.

When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the game’s A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.”

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.”

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.”

In Animal Farm, the animals represent the working class, and each different species represents a different social category within the working class. The pigs — the most intelligent animals — are the professional revolutionaries, Orwell’s stand-in for the Bolsheviks. The chickens, the horses, the sheep and so on are representations of the workers. The humans represent the bourgeoisie, and the book depicts class struggle in terms of animals versus humans. [...]

In this book, George Orwell expresses aristocratic contempt towards the people, the working class. The main target of critique in this book is not the revolutionaries, but the working classes themselves. They are depicted as dumb, incompetent, incapable of reasoning, without any historical initiative — a manipulable mass lacking any capacity for political protagonism. When you analyze its narrative, only two subjects emerge as having the capacity for reason and historical autonomy: the human beings (the bourgeoisie) and the pigs (the Bolsheviks). The working class — the rest of the animals — is depicted as dumb and docile from beginning to end. In fact, about 70% of the book consists of nothing but such depictions. [...]

Orwell begins his story with Old Major, a pig metaphor for Karl Marx, who introduces the principles of Animalism — Marxism. With the exception of the other pigs, none of the animals can really grasp the depth of his theory, but they like what they hear anyway. With the exception of the other pigs, none of the animals can really grasp the depth of his theory, but they like what they hear anyway. The stage is set, and Orwell begins introducing the rest of the cast. Boxer and Clover are the first representatives of the working class that the reader learns about [...]. Orwell then goes back to Old Major and the preparation for the upcoming revolution, caricaturing Marxism as a simple doctrine where animals simply label humans as a great enemy, and insist that all life will immediately improve as soon as the humans — the bourgeois — disappear. [...]

The pigs, the revolutionaries, are said to be the cleverest. But what about the working class? [...] Orwell describes Boxer as a hard worker — excited for working, someone who believes in the revolutionary project, and also always as dumb. Boxer as subject is pure, he truly and wholeheartedly believes in the revolution and in Animalism, and this makes him gullible. [...]

In Animal Farm the process is straightforward: the animals are fooled because they are dumb; there’s no complex scheme here. You might argue “Jones, it’s not a complex book, the narrative is simplified!” Listen, I understand that the book is simple by nature, that everything is direct for a reason, but you notice this in turn: when it comes to the betrayal of the revolution, the subversion of the revolution, there’s no challenge for the pigs. Do you get it? It’s easy for the pigs, because the working class is stupid. [...]

At all times the working class is described as subjects who feel a disturbance, who sense something is off, but are incapable of even verbalizing their own dissatisfaction in a conscious, intelligible way. They can feel, but are incapable of reasoning. This is the core message of the book. The working class are, in the metaphor of the narrative, farm animals incapable of reasoning. [...]

Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book! The main target of this book’s critique aren’t the revolutionaries or communism: it’s the working class. George Orwell writes from an aristocratic ethos. “Elite theory” posits the people as incapable of self-governance, without the capacity to constitute themselves as a political subject, and therefore always the object of dispute and manipulation by vying elites. The people lack the capacity for political self-determination, cannot build a political program or engage in autonomous political action. This is George Orwell’s theory, borne out by his choice of metaphors.

Notice that the revolution isn’t lost to repression. In the book’s narrative structure, it is not the repression that kills the revolution and it is not the institution of privileges that kills the revolution. The book’s narrative structure indicates that all the processes that led to its corruption have their roots in the fact that the working class is incapable of intervening on its own behalf. For example, in the Sunday assemblies in which the direction of the revolution is debated, nobody from the working class can think for themselves — only the pigs speak. It’s not the case that the pigs manipulate the working class. When the animals undergo a literacy campaign, the working class proves incapable of learning how to read and write. This point is very important! It’s central to the argumentative and narrative structure. The pigs don’t try to stop the rest of the animals from learning how to read and write, it’s the animals themselves who prove incapable… because they are dumb. [...]

Animal Farm isn’t a critique of revolutionaries; it’s a critique of workers. It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class.

When you get down to it, the villains in the book are more meritorious than the workers. The humans are described as exploiters, but they can negotiate. They manage to hold on to the other farms and, by the end, they are happily collaborating with the pigs, satisfied that they have squelched all the potential out of the revolution. They are intelligent, cunning, and achieve their goals. Same goes for the pigs: they’re capable of fooling everyone, etc. Meanwhile, the non-pig, non-dog animals — especially the horses Boxer and Clover — are imbeciles. They have no merit outside of their kind character and ability to work. This point is crucial. The novel repeatedly describes Boxer as a hard worker of great character, and an imbecile. He explicitly gets called stupid at five separate points; there’s even an interesting aside where, approaching the age of twelve, Boxer contemplates retiring and using that time to finally learn the last twenty letters of the alphabet. In other words, the representative of the working class needs to dedicate his entire retirement to overcoming illiteracy. [...]

The pig-revolutionaries are also targets of critique, of course. Here we simply see several anticommunist myths recycled. I will spare the reader tiresome citations, but, for example, mid-way through the story Orwell ridicules the Soviet accounts of siege, sabotage, and espionage endured at hands of the imperial powers, portraying them all as Napoleon’s (Stalin’s) fabrications. The book showcases no real sabotage carried out by other farms still run by humans — that is, other capitalist countries. Orwell reproduces the myth that the Soviet Union didn’t face sabotage or terrorism, you dig? There’s no Animal Farm metaphor for the actions of England, France, the United States, Japan, Spain, Portugal. No metaphor for industrial sabotage, the blowing up of water treatment plants and hydroelectric dams, etc. Everything is a “Stalinist” lie. Whether you like or dislike Stalin is completely besides the point. Nobody can deny that the same imperialist nations which invaded Russia in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, who fueled the civil war which killed more than six million people — 17 countries banded together to invade Russia after the revolutionary war! A story where all of these capitalist countries simply stood by the sidelines and peacefully observed the growth of Soviet industry? That’s a fairytale. There’s so much documentation out there: telegrams from ambassadors, CIA reports, British intelligence reports, diaries from agents and spies, etc. all discussing systematic sabotage, assassination attempts, the organization of groups of exiled reactionary Russians to commit terrorist attacks in the Soviet Union, etc. [...]

George Orwell’s ommisions are so conspicuous they in fact qualify as a form of Naziphilia. At around page 80 (in my edition), he begins to construct a metaphor of the preliminary stages of WWII, and criticizes Stalin (through Napoleon) for the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Throughout the book, there is no literary metaphor whatsoever that captures the gravity of the Nazi menace, the dangers Nazism presented to mankind. The story is constructed such that the denunciations against the neighbouring Foxwood and Pinchfield farms are all fabricated by the pigs. This is a seriously disturbing choice. It is tantamount to whitewashing the Nazis. [...] Any account of WWII should be honest about the fact that the Soviet Union made several desperate attempts to establish antifascist alliances with the liberal imperialists, especially England, France and the US, and that these same liberal imperialists rejected these efforts because they wanted the Soviet Union to experience maximal losses warring against Nazi Germany by itself. Particularly in the US, many of the figures from the political-economical establishment worked off of the thesis that Nazi Germany would invade and dominate the Soviet Union. If Europe fell to the Nazis, the Americas would still belong to the US, you dig? The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was a brilliant diplomatic maneuver because only thanks to this pact was the rest of Europe forced to join the war against the Nazis. That deal, in fact, prevented the forging of a liberal-fascist pact against the Soviet Union. There were concrete possibilities of an alliance between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, France, England, the US, and Fascist Japan against the Soviet Union. [...]