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MIT Technology Review on Where Orwell Went Wrong
nakhla writes "MIT's Technology Review is running an interesting article entitled Who's Afraid of 1984? The article talks about Orwell's famous work, and examines how Orwell's view of technology's impact on freedom and democracy was flawed. The article points out that, in fact, freedom and democracy were strengthened by technological innovations, and addresses its affect on Stalinism and Nazism. An interestng read for those who are worried about technology's impact on our generation and beyond."
While the point is well taken that technology has been used for more good than evil throughout history, we should not celebrate it blindly. Recall that such innovators as Henry Ford and Eli Whitney had worldviews that we would call racist and fascist today, and that Nazi Germany gave us advances in physics (via rocketry) and mathematics (encryption). The current crop of rogue hacker terrorists is just the latest iteration of this all-too-common archetype. Technology can be a great thing, but it shouldn't be worshipped without skepticism.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I think Orwell was more afraid of Socialism than technology.
Someone you trust is one of us.
So between:
Facial profiling
Universal Id's
Echelon systems
Wiretaps that don't require court orders
Carnavore systems
We don't have an increasing trend of monitoring technology?
With almost all forms of communication going digital we don't have increasingly easy monitoring?
With the war on terrorism we don't have justification for increased monitoring?
What about all the cameras we now have all over Britain and increasingly in other metro areas?
We definitely are increasingly having Orwell's big brother/sister. I'd say the distinction is that society is welcoming/asking for it.
They did not use technology to make totalitarianism unstoppable, they did it through doublethink. You imprisoned yourself. In fact they never killed anyone who did not wish to be killed for the crimes they did against the state.
The whole idea of doublethink and the ability to hold 2 contradictory ideas at once as truth is a powerful tool of control. It requires zero technology. The MIT guys totally missed the boat. In the end if you remember Smith wished to die for his sins.
I wish I could say our society was doublethink free, sadly everyday I see more evidence of its growing existence. Orwell may have been off a few decades, but he was right on the ball.
The point of 1984 was not so much that there would be technology sufficient to implement totalitarianism (which as others have pointed out, we have today). The main thing was that "whoever controls the past controls the future".
That's why I fear Big Media aggregation. When news, history and other public information gets disseminated from fewer and fewer sources, it's going to be more and more tempting for those sources to use that information power to their own ends. Consider the term "Disneyfication." Also:
Ketchup is a vegetable.
Global warming? It's not true, and besides, there's nothing you can do about it.
Corporations are not bound by the pesky constitutions that kept governments from doing what Orwell predicted.
The article's premise that Orwell was a "futurist" is flawed.
Even a cursory examination of 1984 reveals it to be not a prediction of the future of technology, or any, future, for that matter. It is a heavy-handed condemnation of totalitarian states, whether they be "communist" or "capitalist". One could also view it as the "dark" Animal Farm, but that would be glossing over targets: AF *was* about communism; 1984 was about statism in general.
Excluding the lugubrious prose, 1984 is still a pretty effective argument against the total state, and its message is all the more germaine in this day of Homeland Security and PATRIOT acts. Remember that Winston Smith was an English bloke, one of the "good guys", but he still wound up eye-to-eye with ravenous rats.....
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
> I can't think of any other book which has had such impact on freedom and human rights in this century
Mein Kampf, perhaps? Maybe not the effects of the book itself, but the effects of the horrors arising from its "teachings" have had a huge impact.
(And what's the betting that somebody mods this down because they didn't read that scentence correctly?)
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
It's especially crazy that they would write now about how mistaken Orwell was. Last year, it might have made some sense, but now... Nearly every day I hear about more and more moves by the U.S. government to loosen restrictions on police to spy on U.S. citizens. Also, there's talk about an American Empire -- how the U.S. government should rightly rule over the rest of the world, and from "mainstream" intellectuals rather than extremists.
The fact that the U.S. government is using technology to move towards totalitarianism does not mean that technology is the important ingredient. And, of course, the fact that many Americans are responding to the propaganda they're being innundated with by calling for more security doesn't suggest the absence of totalitarianism. When the Reichstag burned, most Germans were scared and were willing to give up some of their liberty for some more security. Totalitarianism only works when the people ask for it.
The problem, though, is that there's a sort of event-horizon with liberty. There's a point beyond which you have little room for resisting. And it's possible for most people to cross it without noticing. As long as nobody is shooting at you or otherwise interfering in your life, you might not notice that some of the most effective means for radically changing government have been eliminated, and that suppression of dissidents has become so efficient and effective that effective dissent becomes impossible. When you start to see the darker side of the "security" you asked for, you find that there's no turning back. In Germany, it took the destruction of the country and the deaths of millions to unseat Hitler.
Fortunately things aren't so stark as that. Supressing dissidents is never easy, and human ingenuity has a way of somtimes finding ways around "insurmountable" problems. But I think the event-horizon analogy is appropriate, because it doesn't take large scale repression to protect power and stifle resistance. There is a point where resistance and chance of success become much more difficult, and you can easily pass that point without noticing.
The article seems to view Western democracy as the antithesis of totalitarianism. The fact is that anyone can start a web page and say any number of things that will get them interrogated, watched, arrested, or shipped off to camp X-ray without your lawyer. Really, just start a site claiming to be an Al Queda operative, post some bluprints of a government building.
The article seems to take the argument that "look how much better we are than 1950" But in reality, has freedom and privacy increased since 1970, 1980, or 1990? Sure we can exchange information easier.
And the quip about democracy spreading between 1989 and 1991 makes me think about what life has been like in the former Soviet union since that time. It seems to me war, strife, and poverty are the most prevailent things that have spread in the region. And what about organized crime?
No one can honestly claim that western democracy is the epitome of a perfect free and private society. The system is not perfect, but only works most of the time. Innocent people are put to death or jailed for decades. Cops abuse wiretap all the time.
And last time I checked there is still a totalitarian regime in place in China despite faxes and the internet. According to this paper we should be flooding Iraq, Cuba, Iran, etc with technology to liberate it from their dictatorship. And look at Japan, despite being one of the most high tech places on the planet, is still occupied by the country that conquered it over 50 years ago.
Short wave radios may have carried the news, but that doesn't mean anything if it only carries CNN or better yet, Army PsyOps officers. Guess who has an office within the CNN offices? one man's radio free whatever is another's war propaganda.
The author seems to agree that Hitler was able to use radio to spread propaganda to millions, while saying that Orwell was mistaken in thinking that radio would be used for propaganda. Huh?, we sent PsyOps to every warzone we've been in to spread propaganda.
He also makes the statement that Orwell was mistaken about governments using technology for surveillance. Remeber that 747 the US sold to Chinese premier with something like 200 listening devices installed in it. What exactly is Carnivore if not using technology for surveillance on the populace. And thats just the one we know about. In fact now corporations have more ability to spy on us than ever. Employee routinely look up private information for "fun", as do cops. IsP Technicians have packet sniffers running at all times and can look up what page your computer is surfing at any time, and they log the stuff. Any bank employee can get your credit info at any time.
(call up your ISP and tell them that you can't connect to your web page, ask them to watch for the connection to find the problem. Ohh, How'd they do that?!?)
This article is very Jingoistic. It claims that its only 1984ish if someone besides Western contries does it. Since our democracy is infallible and perfect.
Be careful not to mix up governments and economic systems. Pure communism is only an economic system (i.e. it's actually possible to have a democratic government and a communist economic model). Nazism is a form of fascism, which is a system of government. Stalinism was a dictatorship - also a form of government.
The economic spectrum ranges from capitalist to communist, with socialism somewhere in the middle. Since there are no strict examples of pure capitalism or pure communism in the world (and probably never will be) we all basically live in socialist economies, which lie at various points along that spectrum. As an example, Americans like to dub Canada a socialist country, because it has universal health care, but Canada and the U.S. are actually close together on the socialism continuum: both have public schools, welfare, and strong labour unions, for instance.
On the other hand, there are tonnes of different governments... democracies, republics, monarchies, dictatorships, fundamentalist regimes, you name it. Many are also combinations of those systems.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Whether it's a totalitarian controlling all information or a few media conglomerates, what's the difference? A small group of people decide what's important to the viewers. I just watched a program the other night that compared crime rates to the reporting of crime on TV. Crime reports went way up over the past ten years while the crime rate went down slightly. It gives the impression to the uninformed that crime has actually sky-rocketed out of control.
Keeping a high prison population is also a good waste product that boosts GNP. In the U.S. the prison population has gone from 200,000 in early 1970's to over 2 million in 2002. The majority of that is due to nonviolent drug offenders. Yet prison construction and technology is one of the highest growth industries in the U.S., and it's basically corporate welfare.
The article also claims that technology and democracy were responsible for the demise of Communism. This is not true. The USSR couldn't compete against the U.S. market dominance. Capitalism is geared toward utilizing resources as quickly as possible for maximum capital growth, and the U.S. works very hard to make sure we have access to the world's resources.
It's not just a coincidence that the U.S. has been trying to build a pipeline for natural gas through Afghanistan for the past few years with no luck. Now that we've installed a U.S.-friendly regime the pipeline will be built, and the engineers will have U.S. Rangers to guard their construction efforts.
In summary, the author saw a few differences between Orwell's vision and reality today and decided that everything was incorrect. We're suddenly living in a wonderful utopia and can go back to merrily consuming products without any worry about totalirianism or big brother. No thanks!
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Eighteen years ago, the technology to bring us to something like Orwell wrote about wasn't quite there. Now it is -- or nearly is -- and we have reason to worry about Orwell's vision. (Though I'm not all that comfortable using the word ``vision'' as it normally connotates something a lot more positive than what we could get if we're not vigilant.)
And, while I usually think highly of the articles I read in T.R., I have to disagree with this one. First, because I think the author doesn't look deeply enough into those technological advances that he says are liberating. The average citizen may be the first to adopt these new devices but when government takes notice and starts implementing systems or programs around them watch out. For example, small/inexpensive cameras were a boon to ordinary people when it allowed them to monitor their front door or the baby sitter that might be abusing their kids. Now the government is taking more pictures and videos than they can possibly analyze; so many that they now want to use computer systems to scan them to look for certain individuals. How many times was your picture taken today?
Second, look at the top of the T.R. column. ``Technology for Presidents''. Hah, no wonder the tone of the article seemed like nothing more than happy talk. Yep, just go on with all your homeland defense measures. And don't worry about those folks that warn their Orwellian implications. They don't count if it's Democracy(tm) that employs those measures.
Third, he screwed up about the GPS receivers being used in Desert Storm being available at Radio Shack. That might be true today but it wasn't back during Desert Storm. There were commercial C/A-only GPS receivers available back then but they were mostly marine units and weren't the sort of thing that you'd want to be shlepping around the desert. There were some handheld LORAN receivers available back then (maybe at Radio Shack, I can't remember) which came in handy as the Arabian peninsula and surrounding areas had very good LORAN-C coverage. I heard stories of soldiers -- when they found that they'd be advancing across the desert -- asking their wives to run down to the PX to buy one and have it shipped via ASAFP Express to their spouse. All those oil tankers had to use something to stay inside the lines and if it was good enough for them, it ought get you across the desert without too much trouble. Crimeny, where'd he get his facts.
Overall, I give the article a thumbs down.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I always thought Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 hit a little more closer to the target - A society of the future self enslaved through political correctness, the need to conform, and technology enabled diversions from real life.
I don't think the pledge of allegiance is right so we should ban it. The money in the US says "under god" and that offends my atheist beliefs, remove it! I think having homo sex is ok and I'm gonna cram it down your throat MTV style to make sure you know it's ok. I don't think we should target young muslims at the airport as potential terrorists because that would be racist. We should check grandma in the wheelchair instead to show that we are "being fair".
Watch your neighbor! They may be terrorists. Children, do your parents smoke an occasional joint? They are contributing to terrorists! Turn them in. Everyone watching for the inevitable attack by evil doers.
Self enslaved by our willingness to finance any and every shiny bubble that comes along this week. Working check to check to support our conformity. TV, radio, Internet, Mp3 players, walkman, car stereo, cd player, dvd in the SUV, movies, shiny clothes, and $4 quad-frapaccinno lattes laced with happiness prozac pills all working to remove you from reality. Citizen! look up here at these shiny bubbles! Now insert your debit card to see more.
Exactly. As it stands now, for the vast majority of the populace, selecting a leader is like deciding which dishwasher detergent to purchase at the grocery store. You have a couple of brands with big, flashy, colorful boxes, that smell the same, look the same, and are probably manufactured by the same company. Want an alternative brand? Sorry, your store doesn't carry those.
People put about that much effort into their decision, too: which of these two mainstream, functionally identical, overblown, similar looking men should I pick for President? Does it matter? No.
Technology can be a great thing, but it shouldn't be worshipped without skepticism.
/. all the time, new breakthroughs in science... we'll celebrate in 5 years when that new technology is applied and an actual product is on the shelf.
There is no problem with technology. Technology is neither good nor bad, it is just the application of science. It is the application of the technology that can be good or bad, as you say in the first line. Why celebrate technology at all? We see it on
There was nothing bad about the Germans inventing the rocket during WW2. The problem was they used the rocket to boost warheads towards London. There was nothing bad about encryption, except the Germans used it to secretly communicate plans of war. There is nothing wrong with technology, there is no reason to be skeptical about technology.
It's also the argument driving human cloning. There is nothing good or bad about the technology itself, it's just science and science must go on. Should we be skeptical of the technology itself because it can eventually lead to "organ farms"? Or should we encourage the technology in hopes that good uses such as tissue regeneration becomes a reality and save our skepticism for when someone proposes to build a baby cloning facility?
Yes, there are some instances where we do want to be skeptical why a person/corporation/country is developing certain technologies- Iraq and bio-chemical research is one example. But is there any reason to be skpetical about IBM and their research? About new technologies they develop? I don't think so. As I said before, I wouldn't go cheering word they've developed mondo-capacity memory chips until they were on the market, but being skeptical of the technology itself, that's overkill. Be skeptical of the uses of technology, not the technology itself.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
http://www.citizencorps.gov/tips.html
"The program will involve the millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places."
:(
"Operation TIPS will be phased in across the country to enable the system to build its capacity to receive an increasing volume of tips."
I'm so glad I live in Canada. Until the tanks roll across the border....
"Such an argument proves nothing because it is incapable of refutation"
I don't think the poster's intent was to claim that an Orwellian world was definately going to happen. The point (as I took it anyway), was to counter the proposition by the original article that Orwell was, and forever will be, wrong that a "1984/Big Brother" type situation could ever occur. While it's true that Orwell's predictions (if that's what they were) didn't come true by the year 1984, it is perfectly reasonable, and probably a good excercise, to always consider the possibility of the devolopment of a repressive government.
Furthermore, the more advanced technology gets, the more technically possible it would be for a government to pull off such Orwellian things. For example, on Slashdot just the other day was the story about robot warriors. Imagine a government (run by a relatively few individuals) capable of weilding the same military power as the US government weilds today, with only a small fraction of actual people (with consciences) needed to "do the dirty work".
So, back to the poster's point that just because such things haven't happened yet, one cannot extrapolate that those types of things could never happen.
A modern day witchhunt.
While in general, your statement holds to be true, like all rules it has its exceptions.
One very large exception is the growth of technology's effect of the environment. The fact that it used to be, if your TV broke, you took it to the repair shop. Now TV's are so cheap, everybody just gets a new one. Disposable devices ad trinkets are all the rage, now, and their use is growing.
I'm sure that in my lifetime, I will see the introduction of a disposible cellphone. Many other things are now considered this way as well, computer printers, and any other computer device, really. There's no way to fix a trashed video card.
Our rampant consumerism may cause our downfall if we don't stop buying the latest gimmick every time a new one comes out. Try to take a second out of everyday and think, "Do I really need this?"
I know, I know, I preach way to much.
The reason the government doesn't keep track of everybody's moves now is because that kind of surveillance is expensive and labor intensive. What happens when technology makes it cheap enough to spy on everyone? Sure, facial recognition that works and microrobotic cameras are far off in the future. But what about a giant data-mining computer that cross references a few things like say... telephone calling records, mobile phone coordinates, credit card purchases, and the toll-road transponder in your car? You leave a paper trail everywhere you go.
It was only after a decade of national wars, civil wars, revolutions and counterrevolutions in all parts of the world that Ingsoc and its rivals emerged as fully worked-out political theories. But they had been foreshadowed by the various systems, generally called totalitarian, which had appeared earlier in the century, and the main outlines of the world which would emerge from the prevailing chaos had long been obvious. What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bereaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monoploy industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past agees, thew were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and above all, more concious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition. This last difference was cardinal. By comparision with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient ... With the development of television, and the technical advace which made it possible to recieve and transmit simutaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen ... could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda.
Monopoly industry: Multinational clothing, fuel, automobile, electronic, food production and retail. Is there anything of substance tha people use that is not produced by four or five companies in the world? Mosanto, big oil, Intel, Motorola, even Nokia, Ford (realy sucks). Media consolidation is even more frightening. Consider that there are only five music publishers in the world and that all others are prevented from vending in "their" stores. Your local paper gets most of it's prolefeed from the AP, and it's being destroyed by the larger papers. The internet will soon be owned by a few select and unregulated companies and you will not be a part of it. The more prevalent the new media becomes it seems the less open it is becoming as:
There is terrible growing itollerance. Witness Micro$oft's prediction that all computers will run their software and no one else's in the near future. Witness the rest of the world acting in a similar fashion and comming to think of eliminating competition as a normal business practice. Beware of those who play zero sum games, they are the ones who manufacture artificial scarcities now and desire them in the future as a means to crush others. How else can you gaurd your relative position, exept to make what you have scarce and highly desired. The whole concept of public service and making new things to solve old problems and expand everone's resources is endangered by these silly neo-Darwinian business school people. Have you seen what cruelty passes as humor these days? It's not as bad as bombing a boat load of women and children, but it's getting there.
We have yet to have our next big waves of war, but you can see it comming and the results are likely to be as Owell predicted. The traditional powers not listed in the future are landed aristocracy, philanthopists, clergy. Their power is already dissapearing, replaced by the central governments the itollerant are producing.
The technology to monitor citezens is in place and will be used by those who come to power after the wars. Europe will be obliterated, as will much of the US north east, California, and all other hubs of central government. The new power will be decentralized by nuclear necessity, hence a collective oligarchy. They will claim ownership of your Socialist Movement (hence the name Orwel uses, English Socialism, INGSOC) and grind to dust all of it's points but the necessity of itself to be in power. The war will become perpetual and the powers that be will bomb their own populations to keep them working at a feverish and obedient pace. The majority of goods produced by this society will be wasted, the point being to command not to enrich, elevate or ennoble. All print publications will cease under austerity measures, and you will be left with no means of comparison. In time, after the compete destruction of education and language, you will not even be able to understand anything is wrong.
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel ENGSOC. It's so true and you don't even have to be from the UK to see it. All you have to do is read and understand a few select works of Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London, an early work, shows Orwell's underlying belief in humanity's common attributes. Hommage to Catalonia shows early dissalusionment with that nature. There he describes the utter corruption of Communists, Socialists, Fascists and Anarchists alike. Burmeese Days shows Orwell's fear of Empire and his insight into the way people exploit "others" while making themselves misserable to persue abstract, empty and unsatisfying goals. 1984 and Animal Farm are a tour de force, cementing all that he had learned into very compact and entertaining storries. Orwell started out a Socialist, but he died a libertairian hating all but the most liberal forms of government.
Have fun at your next party, and stay infected with liberalism. I suggest a weekly read of the US Bill of Rights, a yearly read of Orwell, a judicious study of Greek and Latin literature (all translated to your language!), even their French and English Enlightenment echos are useful and interesting, a lifetime of New Testament reading, and above all less abuse of your fellow man. We are all in this together. For humor, try non-sequetors, puns and other harmless fun.
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a bannanna.
Get it?
Good, there are no clowns in 1984. As long as I see them and they are not all cruel, there is hope.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.