Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine.
Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.
There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.
Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.
They’re clearly referring to “doublethink” which was absolutely part of Newspeak in 1984…
Quote from the book:
“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”
Serverless being in fact server-based seems like a pretty clear example of this, and so calling it an Orwellian term seems perfectly reasonable.
It's not doublethink any time there's a misnomer. It doesn't require an active effort of cognitive dissonance. It's not a manipulation or a conspiracy. You don't have to get the severance operation to use an FaaS offering.
Serverless eliminates the management of servers; the name is meaningful and directionally aligned with what the thing does, even if it can cause confusion when you first encounter the topic.
That doesn't mean it isn't a bad name. But it is not comparable to the Ministry of Plenty deliberately causing famine. "Famine" and "plenty" are directionally opposed and so require dissonance to maintain. "Serverless" and "abstracting resources provided by servers so that you can focus on application logic rather than managing physical or virtual machines" are not opposed and only require learning the terminology. There's no active, ongoing effort to deliberately maintain cognitive dissonance.
Unless you find yourself in a situation where you have that queasy feeling of being gaslit or having to actively push thoughts out of your head to continue operating under premises you know are false, no, it is not doublethink.
Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.
There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.