The technology of 1984 is predominantly a tool for Party control. Instead of advances benefiting or easing the lives of men, they reinforce the Party’s yoke.

Telescreen

The single most prevalent piece of technology, found in every Party member’s home, in the novel is the telescreen. This device not only acts as a sort of plasma / LCD television screen to spew forth propaganda and orders, but it also views and hears anything within its visual and audio range. As the eyes and ears of Big Brother, the telescreen prohibits all but the most thought out and carefully planned subversion. If a person so much as twitches his face or has a suspicious heartbeat, he or she may be arrested by the thought police, who spy unpredictably and undetected through the telescreen.

Speakwrite

This device is not unlike modern dictation software that we see today. By speaking into the mouthpiece, which is part of the cubicle, Winston can write with only speech. It is used by Winston in the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history according to the Party’s taste.

Memory Hole

Memory hole is a nickname for the openings in walls or cubicles where workers in the Ministry of Truth could send any piece of paper or documents into a giant furnace. Effectively, the hole allows this information to be erased from the memory of Oceania. History is forgotten and new history is placed in its stead to keep the memory of the Party and its subordinates under control.

Pneumatic Tube

This device is not unlike the deposit tubes you might find in a bank drive through or in a large office building. Through it, Winston receives his instructions and assignments from the leaders of the hive (or Records Department of the Ministry of Truth). He also able to deliver his completed work through the tube to the unseen brains controlling the swarm.

Brainwashing

Likely the most significant technology used in the novel, brainwashing is a pivotal piece of psychological technology employed by the Party to further its control. The entirety of the brainwashing technique is vast and detailed. The novel, as a whole, is an exercise in brainwashing, but the specific passages concerning the mind control process are generally related to the systematic torture of Winston in the Ministry of Love.

While brainwashing as a scientific matter cannot be actualized in the likes of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), it exists through evidence that the world, outside of fiction, has seen its totalistic merit and non-fictional reality. America, along with the world, had its introduction to the term "brainwashing" during the Korean War, when captured troops renounced their homeland and championed the enemy's cause. Before the Korean War, Stalinist Russia was utilizing brainwashing (though not called so) techniques to strengthen its totalitarian grip, most clearly visible in the show trials that are also seen in Orwell's novel.

"Brainwashing" is a term that originates from the Chinese language, which calls the process "thought reform". Robert Jay Lifton, an established psychiatrist, deeply researched the subject and broke down brainwashing, or thought reform, into eight essential criteria: Milieu Control, Mystical Manipulation, The Demand for Purity, The Cult of Confession, The "Sacred Science," Loading the Language, Doctrine over Person, and The Dispensing of Existence. The first four, Milieu Control, Mystical Manipulation, The Demand for Purity, and The Cult of Confession will be the focus of this explication due to their immediate relevance to Winston's time in The Ministry of Love.

Milieu control is has to due with total inner and outer communication control for the individual, as Lifton describes it:

The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual's communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads or writes, experiences, and expresses), but also - in its penetration of his inner life - over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984 (Lifton Chapter 22: Ideological Totalism).

This first of the eight is an essential aspect of the totalitarian regime of 1984, as intimated by Lifton. The Party controls all communication from the outside when Winston is locked up for weeks in the windowless Ministry of Love – where there is no darkness. This principal is also applied to the general public, with their access to only Party generated information and Party condoned communication

Winston is tortured slowly (sleep deprivation / communication restriction / wretched conditions) and acutely (electric shock and the rats) to destroy his inner communication that runs against the Party ideology, which is the only communication the Party deems acceptable to communicate inwardly or outwardly.

Mystical Manipulation involves the notion of the totalitarian institution(s) and ideology in a nearly religious sense:

Included in this mystique is a sense of "higher purpose," of having "directly perceived some imminent law of social development," and of being themselves the vanguard of this development. By thus becoming the instruments of their own mystique, they create a mystical aura around the manipulating institutions - the Party, the Government, the Organization. They are the agents "chosen" (by history, by God, or by some other supernatural force) to carry out the "mystical imperative," the pursuit of which must supersede all considerations of decency or of immediate human welfare. Similarly, any thought or action that questions the higher purpose is considered to be stimulated by a lower purpose, to be backward, selfish, and petty in the face of the great, overriding mission (Lifton Chapter 22: Ideological Totalism).

That is to say, ultimately the Party is the higher authority that provides for the well being of its underlings through its mystical mastery of the ideology and that

At the level of the individual person, the psychological responses to this manipulative approach revolve about the basic polarity of trust and mistrust. One is asked to accept these manipulations on a basis of ultimate trust (or faith): 'like a child in the arms of its mother.'"

In the novel, Big Brother takes a patrimonial / matrimonial role, and, generally, the inner Party itself is shrouded in mystery. O'Brien, as Winston's Torturer in Chief, takes on a parental role himself, forcing Winston to accept the ideology of Big Brother and of him as a child does a father.

Also, the Demand for Purity plays a huge role in Winston's return to sanity (sanity as the Party would call it). The notion of doing something wrong by thinking outside of the Party's enforced limits is impure and wrong. As Lifton explains it:

At the level of the relationship between individual and environment, the demand for purity creates what we may term a guilty milieu and a shaming milieu. Since each man's impurities are deemed sinful and potentially harmful to himself and to others, he is, so to speak, expected to expect punishment - which results in a relationship of guilt and his environment. Similarly, when he fails to meet the prevailing standards in casting out such impurities, he is expected to expect humiliation and ostracism - thus establishing a relationship of shame with his milieu. Moreover, the sense of guilt and the sense of shame become highly-valued: they are preferred forms of communication, objects of public competition, and the basis for eventual bonds between the individual and his totalist accusers. One may attempt to simulate them for a while, but the subterfuge is likely to be detected, and it is safer to experience them genuinely (Lifton Chapter 22: Ideological Totalism).

Winston is beset with guilt, eventually, because of his wrongdoing -- his treachery. This feeling allows him to accept himself as a traitor and outcast from the Party, as someone who deserves execution at a show trial where he would righteously confesses his guilt.

The notion of impurity directly relates with the Cult of Confession, which Lifton states:

Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities (Lifton Chapter 22: Ideological Totalism).

Winston is "brainwashed" into feeling guilt and shame. The subsequent need to confess, like the condemned communist leaders and citizens of Stalinist Russia, at a show trial is evident by the end of the book. Winston sees himself in terms of the Party's ideology, no longer his own, and he is committed to communicating his wrongdoing to pacify the guilt and shame of injuring the Party, which he did through his subversive thoughts and actions. Thus, Winston went from the individually minded Party opposition to a brainwashed Party fanatic – a lover of Big Brother.