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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."
TCPA/Palladium is the begining.
I don't think Orwell was really that far off. We already have major cities with Big Brother Facial Recognition Software running.
/joke
joke If HDTV ever catches on, I'm not buying one... I don't want their camera looking back at me.
It's easy to stand out when the general level of competence is so low.
So far, the only thing we know for certain that Orwell was wrong about was the year.
It is just a good book, but look where MS is going, that P thing, that sounds like big brother to me.
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)
Is it possible it took the direction it did because of 1984, rather than inspite of it.
Do writtings such as 1984 make us more aware?
I think Orwell was more afraid of Socialism than technology.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Oh, hey, what a freakin' surprise!
"New Institute of Technology finding: Technology is Good"
What about Maoism?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Sorry to ruin everyone's paranoid, delusional fantasies. The next time somebody uses 1984 in an argument about our eroding rights and privacy please remind them of this.
word.
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.
Rather vanilla article, pretty much just a re-hash about what's been said about 1984 over the past 2 decades.
Hidden near the end, for those that can't/won't read the article:
Radios have become so inexpensive that Intel is now planning to engrave a miniature one on the corner of every silicon microchip, at no extra cost.
It links to a subscriber-only article, so there really aren't any further details. Hell, I think something like this deserves a Slashdot story all to itself! This has gotta be the coolest hack I've heard all year.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
If nothing else, it's a little early to have this verdict, particularly given the US's disappointment that we weren't vigilant enough with the technology already in place to stop terrorist attacks. If I believed the article, I guess I'd find it comforting that all my police-state-growth fears here are apparently unwarranted because technology will save me.
Wrong isn't exactly the word.
It's still a matter of time.
Just looking at your previous story "Crypto Restrictions Are Taking Over the World" I would think that he is becoming less "wrong" every day.
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
[Redacted by Homeland Security Autofilter]
A big part of the reason that Orwell's 1984 didn't come true is because we had Orwell to warn us. I can't think of any other book which has had such impact on freedom and human rights in this century.
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.
Like all great sci-fi, 1984 isn't (and wasn't) about the future, but about the present. In this case, it was about the reality of life in communist regimes. It has little or nothing to say about "technology's impact", and only the over-literal who managed to miss the point of the book would think it does.
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 points out that they believe Orwell was wrong, for thinking that the government would be made more powerful by technology.
I understand that maybe it is not always the Government that is gaining these powers, but possibly big corporations instead, but does it really matter?
I don't really care if Big Brother is the government, or big business, the point is people are watching what we do, and how we do it. Maybe their intentions are not as malicious as those in 1984, but Big Brother is watching
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
That would be surprising since he almost gave his life fighting for it in Spain (Homage to Catalonia). What Orwell was against was Stalinism, not socialism.
1984, if you have read it, is about what happens when the unions have been crushed.
Palladium + ISP snooping on customers without consent or knowledge and without a search warrent.
We are getting there.
Orwell was just wrong about the year.
(as you can tell by my name, I am no fan of Stalinism either).
Orwell, and other writers such as Dick, by warning of some of the dangers of technology have helped us to steer clear of some them. If you know your future, you can change it... right?
Although, I must say, the Department/Office of Homeland Security is the most Orwellian sounding name the US Government could've used.
he wasn't wrong, he was just off 20 years...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
Let's look at this from a different angle.
First, we'll agree that the more you know, the more powerful you are.
Then we'll say that technology can be harnessed to process data into information at alarming rates.
And observe too how much of our lives takes its course through technological means; e-mail, television, telephone network, cell phone, ad nauseam.
Put all three together, stir well, leave overnight, and what do you get?
With proper resources, we live in a time with unprecedented opportunity for data harvesting and processing. Such proper resources are most likely to be found in an organization as large and unaccountable such as 'government'.
I could be on the wrong track here, but things like Echelon, Carnivore, Magic Lantern, etc. make me think not.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Sure if you want to read that piece of MIT propaganda then sure, technology is good, me I'm sending this message to slashdot by humming into the Cat-5.
( man is work boring )
"Many of the GPS receivers used in Desert Storm were bought at Radio Shack."
Oh sigh, I used to work retail electronic sales and dream about some guy in fatigues walking in and saying "Do you have 183,000 of these in stock? When can you have them in by?"
And the military guys always go for the extended warrantee and the spare battery plus cleaning kit.
Orwell's vision wasn't wrong, it may be he just had the year incorrect. Not everything has come to pass yet. Yet being the operative word, especially if we as a society allow it. Just look at proposed legislation in our own congress (copy right and anti-terrorist and `protect the children`). Look at the DCMA (Is reverse engineering really illegal???).
Here are some other things that HAVE come to pass
1. Many Police units have their own paramilitary force
2. Camera Camera everywhere, and more on the way
3. Reading certain books can and will get you put on a "watch list"
4. Members of certain political parties are actively discriminated against (not all presidential canidates will face each other in a debate)
5. Loosening controls on wiretaps and eavesdropping (more so in Europe than here)
This article didn't convince me that our freedoms aren't under attack. It just reminded me how many sheep there are in the world
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
Perhaps the author is a communist and doesn't want to cast communism in it's ideal form in a bad light.
Reportedly Orwell just switched the last two numbers of the year of its writing. It wasn't meant to be a warning of the future, but a critique of the present (Stalinism, etc.)
Orwell was warning us about the natural progression of communism and how technology could facilitate the communist machine. In 1984 there wasn't a capitalist block of countries competing with the communist ones, so the communist countries couldn't have exclusive control over information systems.
Orwell's book succeded in its purpose in warning generations of people of what communism would become if it could. However, what we need now is an equally compelling book about what capitalism can become now that it is attempting to gain control of the technology of information. Technology is giving the top dog capitalists greater knowledge about each and every individual. This can lead to a larger power shift against the poorest 90% of the population then there is already.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I don't claim to be an expert on China, but I have heard some interesting things about the media control in China, Great Firewall of China, etc., which are very similar to parts of the book.
An example I heard on NPR recently involved a damn which is being built, and the propeganda being sent to the people. People are being kicked out of their homes. If you are a card carrying communist, you may get offered new housing close by. If not, well, good luck. There are many negative aspects to the damn, but the general population just seems to know and repeat back when questioned, that the project "is for the greater good of the motherland."
While maybe not as extream as the book, or as technically advanced, the gist is the same.
As I said, I am no expert of China, but that is the "propeganda" my media sources in the United States are feeding me.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Technology changes the rules of the game. Technology used as a freedom enhancing device today is the freedom restricting device of tomorrow (all depends on who's controlling the tech). Do you think the government being able to track your every move as something that would give you or them more control? It seems to me that the government is controlling the citizens more and more every day. Instead of the citizens controlling the government.
Who knows what the hell the NAZI's would have done with today's technology.. I shudder to think. In today's technology laden atmosphere is has become easy if not commonplace to lie and manipulate statistics to back up your arguments.. We're seeing it already in our government and corporations on an alarming scale.
Take the reigns before they reign you in.
Contrary to popular believe, 1984 was not Orwell's vision of the future. The original title was 1948, the year he wrote it. It was his take on society at the time, not a prophecy of the future. It was his publisher who suggested he transpose the last two digits, to make the book sell better.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
1984's goal was to show how future technology could be used for propaganda. Orwell was good at playing with reader's emotions, which holds true today. When the book was first released, the idea that someone was watching us was still unknown, but now current readers see it as a reality.
Propaganda is very interesting and complicated, it seems the less you believe it affects you, the more it actually does.
It's all good.
>>>However, when the technologies that would enable this totalitarian global village reached fruition, the victim was not democracy, but totalitarianism itself. What went right? >>>
It ain't stalinism but look at the big corps.
BIG CORPORATION = BIG BROTHER
They give money to both sides in elections so it makes no difference who you vote for. Their man is in either way. They have control over you cradle to grave. Orwell wasn't too far off.
I disagree with this flimsy article. Pick up a copy of "The Transparent Society" by Brinn. It was written a few years ago, and offers three possible scenarios: a) society watches the watchers with the same technology, b) we let them survey all they want and pretend it doesn't exist, or c) we acknowledge the technology and learn to live transparently. Either way, privacy is FUCKED.
The question is, how many people can be secretly detained indefinitely without a warrent before the dumbed-down McPopulace takes notice??
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The risk isn't in the technology itself but in who controls the technology. Sure it is possible to listen to dissention but that is merely because those in power have failed to keep ahead of the curve. Look at the western world now. Information is controlled by a small handfull of media conglomerates, these conglomerates in turn set the political adgenda and present the populace with their own views on the world. The internet is a great source of information but with the exception of google think about where they are going. Remember that the internet is still a somewhat new phenomenon to corporations. People with power and money can already pay to have their sites appear at the top of any search leaving dissenting sites almost impossible to find and litigation can destroy sites critical of them. While we are still in very good shape as far as access to information goes on the web how long is it before ICANN becomes completely dominated by corporate interests and won't accept "unsatisfactory" webpages.
Sure there is a good chance that in the west we may be able to avoid it but that doesn't erease the chance of it happening. I would argue that China is very much becoming 1984 as envisioned. As to fabrication of information just look at the Beijing newspaper's response to finding out The Onion story was false "'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'" Is that bending the truth enough? Add to that blocking certain content from being accessable over the internet, controlling the media, numerous human rights violations, indocternation, spreading false news about "enemies" (Falon Gong), they arn't that far away from reaching Orwell's vision.
I stole this Sig
There is another point where Orwell failed in this description of the future: His book became a bestseller and partly because of that every reader in the past 54 years became aware of the dangers of technology control by governments.
Technology is never good or bad. Technology just is.
Technology is simply a tool that expands the power and abilities of the user with certain side effects. Are guns 'bad'? No! Guns exist, and free thinking individuals decide how to use them.
Are CCD cameras bad? Of course not. But in the hands of a repressive government they can be terrible.
I don't really think 1984 was meant to portray technology in a bad light any more than animal farm was a warning against farm animals. The real point is that man, as a species, is selfish and power hungry, and that technology only amplifies his abilities to manifest the desires of his heart.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Especially coming from MIT, this article seems rather shallow, idealistic, and pretty blind. Democracy hasn't spread anywhere. Dictatorships with the very thin facade of democarcy have become quite popular around the world, but thats about it. It also wouldn't be too far off calling the agenda-ridden world media the 'Big Lie.' And for all the rhetoric about technology and the internet bringing freedom into China, the "people's" party seems to have gained total control of the way the internet functions in China. In the US, we even have the faceless, never-ending threat of terrorism(or The Enemy) that we are letting justify some rather frightening laws that will be using technology against the populace. The situations in 1984 were intentionally extreme to illicit an extreme reaction, but the idea of technology used as a tool to control the minds and actions of people seems like a reality to me.
It's true! I turned on my television, and there, was Big Brother staring at me!
I turned it off and ran and hid...
I stick to walls...
Who exactly is this article trying to convince? With public video and internet surveillance growing at a pretty quick rate as well as the police powers to go along along with them, I find this an odd view to take. In the name of our security, the government is convincing us that this whole infrastructure is necessary to protect us from the bad guys. Why do they need these powers specifically designed with no checks and balances?
MInistry of Truth
I think the problem with this article is the leap at saying since the populous has technology it can obtain the knowledge to make informed decisons (and therefore fascism cannot take hold).
Of course things we have seen in the last decade has proven that false: the 90's being the most prolific era of post 1945 National Socialism and the rise of a-political Islamic terrorism is only now coming to light.
Both of these groups use technology to find each other. In the midst of it, they plan the "free world"'s downfall. Neither of these groups have been enlightened by the information superhighway. Instead they've used it to become more hardened, fanatical, and closed off. Hell, why go out and make friends with your new Indian neighbors when you can go online and bitch about the smell of kuri and plot their death with like minded e-fanatics (sorry Katz, I got to that one first)?
Some of the WTC terrorist were known to have visited porno stores. Did that stop them ("Man, the only thing I would kill for now would be another moneyshot of Jenna Jameson!")?
Ok, Capitalism and democracy have proven capable of toppling intellectual systems (e.g. we killed the USSR with Big Macs and Levis). But reactionary fear militants? That has only grown stronger. According to this article, using the world wide web to look up articles on the Church of the Creator or intelligent design is a contradiction. Of course it isn't.
The most popular use of the WWW is porno. The second most popular is paranoia.
What is music when you despise all sound?
From the tone of the submitter, I get the feeling that he thinks MIT is off-base on this one. When it gets down to brass tacks, MIT is right -- it's not technology that causes dictatorships, oppressive regimes, totalitarian states.
It's the contents to the human heart and mind, and how they apply technology that are at the root of the problem.
The Internet is obviously the technology being discussed, and it's obvious that it lets dissidents have an open, anonymous voice. Using the Internet as a backbone to ID and track your citizens and everything they do, buy, sell, eat, etc., is going to be put in place by governments and corporations.
blog |
The cure for 1984 is 1776?
******
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
At exactly what point did you realize that you weren't under mind control? That's the problem with deception, it's so damn deceiving.
Huxley's "Brave New World" and "Brave New World
Revisited" are a much better preiction of the dangers we face.
The real threat is not technology but falure to advance our spiritual
side (note: "spiritual" != religious) and learn what healthy
competition is rather than trying to dominate
one another over personal ego.
Conclusions like this, one way or the other,
miss the point and are dangerous in that they
lull us into a since of secuity about how any
one of us is able to see the "bottom level"
reality of human nature and what history will
bring.
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.
Well, the article is happy with the fact that so far, the "good guys" seemingly prevail (in the author's opinion). I.e., Orwell failed.
There are two caveats here. One is measuring the existing balance and judging whether the "good guys" indeed benefit from the technology more than suffering the personal freedom loss to some extent. Different views exist on that. For a good dose of more cautious opinions read some Chomsky thoughts. It definitely is a subjective thing - while a lot of the people in the US and around the world are now giving their govts more and more surveillance and censorship power (or just have fallen prey to unfortunately elected officials who make things look as if their people give them this power), others would never sacrifice their own personal freedoms even if everybody around shouts that this would bring "better security". Depending on what is more important to you, you may or may not think the world is 1984-like today. Unfortunately for me, I am on the pessimistic side here - feeling that the mass media technology does suppress >99% of thinking out of the mainstream political lines dictated by the ruling powers and the capital behind them. The perpetual war going on right now as a series of "isolated conflicts" and hypocritic switch of countries like the US from being at war with "Ostasia/Eastasia" is so much like what was described by Orwell...
The other thing is that the battle is not over. The technologies involved are in fact moved by concrete people - so some classified techs leak out of sole govt possession for everyone's use (for good and for bad - crypto and nukes come to mind). And, of course, there is a lot of public-domain tech which first serves those trying to restrain abusive power representatives forgetting what they are supposed to be there for, even in some democratic states... The balance can shift either way - and who knows what would the article author say in 2084?
VKh
Thats right kids... right from the book to your government. Not onlyl am I afraid of 1984 but I fear its right around the corner.4 /10261851 41232.htmle house.gov/homeland/book/nat_strat_ hls.pdf
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/1
www.citizencorps.gov
http://www.whit
Be a good citizen and join the citizen corps today!
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
I think David Brin in his novel Earth got to the same idea with his concept that in the future it would be total openness that would keep the bad guys at bay. IOW, Orwell's "magic mirror" turned the other way around. Just my .02 worth...
Richard A. Muller doesn't have a clue. In his sheltered ivory tower, he doesn't see that 2004 will be 1984. Big Brother is probably watching you right now!
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I don't think 1984 was supposed to be a futurist sort of work. It was about the time when it was written (published in 1949, a year later.) The frightening government was England's. It had in many sorts of ways become like the one in the book during World War Two, though not as literally of course. I think everyone who is bringing up the current war on terrorism is on to something. Now just imagine what WWII did to personal freedom. The concern for Orwell I think was that the British government did not change back to it's pre-war self as mush as it needed to. If you have ever wondered why Winston Churchill wasn't re-elected after the war this was the big issue. Churchill wanted to go back and people disagreed. England became a much more socialist state after the war. I dont know if socialism was the big issue or just the fact tha the government had an obscene amout of power for a free country.
My copy of 1984 includes an excellent essay preceding the novel. I forget the author at this point. However, his main point was that when George Orwell was not just targeting Facist or Communist regimes with his book.
If I remember correctly, the original version included a preface by Orwell in which he discussed the UK's goverment increasing monitoring of its own citizens. This edition was CENSORED in the UK and the book was not allowed to be released in the UK until the preface was removed. This in a supposedly "free" western republic.
As a Rage Against the Machine lyric goes, "They don't need to burn the books, they just remove them."
If you check out Who owns what you can see that huge major media conglomerates control just about everything you read/hear/see.
I certainly don't think we have "progressed" to the state that 1984 predicts, but if anyone doesn't think it's possible just because we are a "democracy", they are sorely mistaken.
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.
I suppose it's unsurprising given the audience, but I note a disturbing phenomenon in both the author of the article in question and the bulk of the respondents here on /. Do all of you really think that increases in technology and easier access to information really solve any problems worth solving? Today's kids have access to just about everything that has ever been written, yet now many high school students who can barely read are graduated every year? Technology, including physical, social, political, and educational technologies, have advanced to levels never before seen, yet I doubt that we are happier or more productive than any of the ancients.
Orwell was wrong, but unfortunately it seems that Big Brother was an optimist. In his scenario, at least someone was in control, whether it was a single individual or group of individuals. Today it seems that something worse has happened. Technology has advanced to the point where no one is in control. It advances at its own pell-mell pace, with no clear direction or goal other than its own advancement. Instead of technology advancing to the point where society is controlled by an oppressive government that uses technology to its own advantage, we are under the sway of a Pandora's Box let loose: now our technology controls us.
We devote trillions of dollars into technological devices and research every year, and for what purpose? Simply to advance technology. Why do this? What end is accomplished? Easier access to information? People, information can't get much easier to access. If a novel-length work takes up less than 2 megs, you can probably store everything that has ever been written on two hard drives. We don't need more technology. We need a more responsible attitude towards technology before technology progresses to the point where we really can't control it. I don't mean AI horror scenario's either: I view those as impossible. I'm talking about progressing to the point where new technologies are introduced and adopted simply because they are new, without any consideration given to side effects upon both existing technologies and the human condition in general.
Just something to think about.
I know this is a bit off-topic, but if you want to get a better view of Orwell's real political stance, I have something for you.
One of Orwell's lesser known works was an essay called "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941). I really recommend it for anyone who wants to know what Orwell really did think government should be like.
Reading this essay was one of the key turning points for me in my acceptance of democratic socialism. It presents an excellent vision of how Orwell thought Britain should re-form itself after the War. Indeed, the first Government after the War was a socialist-leaning Labour one which enacted some of the ideas that Orwell championed.
Now if only Henry A. Wallace had been VP when FDR died, we might have gotten some of the same reforms in the U.S. (National Health Service, etc.), not to mention avoided the intensity of the McCarthy era....
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
This comment I wrote over two years ago says the same thing. Should I bring my boot down on their head for stealing my idea?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
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
And see the public areas crammed full of cameras monitoring the activities of its subjects - all in the name of crime prevention. It's in name only since England is now the crime capital of Western Europe. Of course, their despot government will use crime as an excuse to further erode what few liberties British Subjects enjoy.
-- Will program for bandwidth
What, so Napoleon the Pig DOESN'T control the farm? ;)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Well, long term at least. The printing press made cheap paper useful, and that encouraged and enabled literacy, and the main government of the day, the Roman Church, could no longer keep the actual Bible contents secret. The result was a decentralizing of power from Rome to individual nation states. It has continued to decentralize into smaller and smaller communities. The spread of information robs those in power of their control over information, which makes it that much harder to steer things their way. The US had 3 national networks for a long time, but cable brought in more, and now the US gov can't control news as easily as it used to. The cheap computer was the next step, first bulletin boards and now the internet.
Sure there are wobbles in the trend towards "information wants to be free", but the overall trend is unmistakeable and unstoppable: less centralized control of information means less centralized control of people.
David Brin wrote a book, The Transparent Society (I think), which considered what will happen as webcams shrink. Neal Stephenson (sp?) wrote The Diamond Age along the same lines. Scott McNealy is right: privacy is dying, get used to it. It will hurt the powerful more than the poor. Look what cheap videocams did for police brutality in the Rodney King case. Now lots of cop cars have cameras, more for self protection against false claims than for evidence of crime or for TV ratings. Imagine what will happen when ordinary people have access to floating dust mite webcams, ten to the dollar. What would you rather watch on the internet spy cams: someone getting banged in a trailer in Kansas, or back room deals at the White House? Well, maybe individuals will watch the Kansas coupling, but the press and volunteer watchdogs will opt for the White House every time.
Infuriate left and right
What about the fact that if you provided X number of indian scalps you got a plot of farm land?
m
In November of 1755 Lieutenant George Scott replaced Monckton as commander of Beausejour. Scott was a good choice for the British because he displayed an almost hysterical hatred of the Acadians and sought to brutally destroy all those who dared remain. He at first attempted to draw Boishebert into a trap into a conventional battle. When this failed he ordered the death of all Acadian males over the age of twelve that were at large. He also offered bounties for any and all Indian scalps. He paid regardless of whether the scalps belonged to Indians or Acadian. Being captured by his Rangers usually meant a death sentence to all Acadians.
http://personal.nbnet.nb.ca/legerpj/jacquesl.ht
...the bill that just passed the House giving the feds the right to snoop without court order is a wake up.... The terrorist threat is only an excuse to carry out a certain fascist-like agenda instigated by moneyed interests who would like to be"protected" from reprisal [euphimistacally called criminal activity] for their own real criminal activities. Big Bro is indeed here. And he is watching. But he is also being watched. Never before has the "average Joe" has so much tech at hand to do just that.
In the meantime, idiots are waving flags as their rights are being eroded for "patriotic reasons" [euphemism for fascist economic interests].
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
I remember to have read about this topic in a fascinating book by Peter Huber, engineer, lawyer and insightful writer.
The book is titled "Orwell's Revenge, The 1984 Palimpsest", and, amazingly, its text is freely available here.
Go ahead and read it (240 pages). Much better than the article.
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!
What worries me? Do you know what worries me? It's the knowledge that there has been essentially 2 things that have kept the United States a democracy over the last 2 centuries:
1) The United States military has not attempted to overthrow the government.
2) If the military did overthrow the government, an armed and angry population would rise up against it.
The military hasn't tried to overthrow the government because the majority of people in the military believe in the democratic system. What Orwell wrote about was that if despotic elements controlled information, they would control what people believe, military and civilian alike. But I pose you this question:
What would prevent despotism from taking over if the military did not require human beings to function?
I realize I'm looking ahead about 50 to 100 years, but who here has played Warcraft? Ok, now imagine Joe Despot is playing Warcraft, but his orcs are actually mobile semiautominous killing machines that are walking through your neighborhood, and he's observing the action from a secret base in Wisconsin. Are you going to revolt against him? Are you going to be able to fight for your constitutional rights with Mechadroid 19 pointing an assault rifle at your head? Remember what Clint Eastwood said in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those with guns, and those that dig."
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
World Without War
VKh
No references, but it was pretty recent. Intel is considering adding Bluetooth or 811.* or something similar to every processor, because it's such a small cost, for a gain in ubiquity.
Infuriate left and right
The one area where you could quibble with Orwell's vision is that the state may simply be the instrument of oppression, not the oppressor. The rights of citizens are increasingly being eviscerated at the behest of supra-national corporations. (cf. DMCA, CBTPDA, etc., etc., the list goes on and on). At least there are democratic mechanisms, however flawed, available for citizens seeking change from the government (at least here in the US, and other liberal democracies). But the ordinary Joe has no recourse versus the WTO. What they say goes, and let 'em eat Drakes Cakes(TM).
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
Communism isn't referred to as Stalinism, except by the ignorant and media types acting in bad faith. Distinguishing between Nazism and 'Hitlerism' would be a waste of time, since there has only really been one important Nazi movement in history, and that was under Hitler. Communism, however, is a heading that contains a large number of (often extremely antagonistic) philosophical and political schools, one of those being Stalinism.
Since most 'Western' governments have a vested interest in discrediting political philosophies that are anti-capitalistic, Stalinism (undeniably the ugliest, most incredibly, tragically ill-conceived form of communism ever to exist) is usually said to be or implied to be synonymous with communism in the media and the general political rhetoric - hence your mistake. This is also why you often see the term 'communism' (the philosophy of communism) used when what should really be printed is 'Communism' (the Communist Party).
Non-Stalinist communist philosophies include Fourierism, Marxism (and dozens of subsets), Maoism, and so on.
Well, orwell may have been wrong for now, but the tools are there. What's missing is the will to use the tools in the ways specified.
-Orwell never literally meant '1984'. Indeed, he meant to speak of contemporary times (1948 to him) and as a slight jest transposed the 4 and 8.
Now, the main point is that pervasive technology in 1984 is very much the tools of the oppression and are peripheral to the true causes of an oppressive society. In the book it is clear that it is not technology that is the cause of oppression but rather human nature which must be actively subverted to achieve a more equitable society. Of course, if you are
1.) an MIT writer,
2.) some /. loser or
3.) have never read the book
than this article makes sense. Truly , this article is an embarassment and I doubt the author has read more than the Cliff's Notes version or possibly saw the movie.
Huxley covered. Check out Brave New World.
Wherever you are on the whole gun control debate, there is a nugget of truth in the statement: "Guns don't kill people, people do." At the risk of stating the obvious, that means that a gun never pulls its own trigger; there is always a person aiming and discharging the weapon.
... is it evil? ... is it good? Just as Orwell's point was more about control than technology, so the evaluation of "evil" does not apply to the technology itself, but rather to the person/persons/institution/corporation/government wielding that technology. What is his/her/their intent?
Using the same logic on technology itself
If a person's intention is to deceive (to compel another person to make a choice based on a lie), then that is evil. Technology used in the deception is irrelevant.
And #3 is obviously false because they would have been emailed rather than called on the phone. Duh! ;)
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
You know, the ones that basically promise to keep your developers in line through increased task monitoring? I'm all for source code control, bug tracking, etc, but the crux of these ads seem to be "your developers (especially those overseas ones..foreign bastards!) are probably fucking off, why not monitor them with Sourceforge?"....
Some even directly use the "unblinking eye" motif!
Who is the advertising genius that came up with that shit?
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.
> Of course, you neglect to mention that Indians started the custom of scalping.
Uh, no. Wrong again.
There are two things, closely related, that could can cause the 1984-style world. One of them, as the article correctly pointed out, would be if technology was too expensive to be within reach of the common citizen; having this would make it so that only large, wealthy organizations such as the government could get their hands on the stuff. This, it seems, we don't have to worry about too much; the free-market Western philosophies seem have to helped keep prices down.
The second, more ominous road to 1984 is centralization. The more things become centralized, the fewer powerful entities are needed to collude and walk us down that road. For the most part, so far, this hasn't been a worry, because we have many competing manufacturers of technology, few large multi-state-government cooperations, and a significant, dispersed group of well-educated, free-thinking geeks.
However, with the collapsing of information technology into a couple of roles (you're well out of the norm if you use the internet for anything than HTTP, HTTPS, POP, IMAP, and SMTP over their standard ports), it becomes easy to pass broad, encompassing laws which attempt to lay control over these few avenues. Even the fact that there is one Internet which everyone is expected to be connected to helps make it easier for many software companies to centrally control their dispersed, previously independent products, by having them talk back to central command in real-time (for operations such as registration, remote-disabling, etc). Furthermore, we have single-authority systems such as DNS, overruled by ICANN, providing another source of woes.
In order to be stalwart against falling down this trap, controlled technological homogeny needs to be resisted, and diverse, competing, preferably open technologies (because they promote diversity and competition by their very nature) need to be promoted. What does this mean practically? In the software world, for instance, it means de-facto assumptions such as everyone having MS Word and Windows. It also means resisting efforts that approach the idea of allowing someone to control, from production to consumer sensory inputs, every step of a media feed.
So yes, it's been quite nice so far, and looking at it the right way, you might think it's going to stay that way. But growing centralization and the existance of large, power, multi-national corporations and corporation-conglomerates makes me wonder if it's really going to be that rosy if we just lean back put our feet up.
For more information, I recommend reading Lawrence Lessig's excellent "The Future of Ideas".
This makes a for good PR when you have government funding, and I'm sure if I posted as Anonymous Coward would really help, right MIT?
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
It is the bourgeois, embodied in their croporations, who are working hard to anihilate the very freedoms citizens take for granted.
If only we need fear from technology merely totalitarianism and not extinction.
Furthermore, even if we were to throw the facts out the window and declare that all European diseases were deliberately passed to natives, Germ Warfare != Medical Experimentation. Get your facts straight buddy.
.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Hitler's final solution was partially based on indian reservations. It was also no accident that so many Cherokee died on the trail of tears. They were not meant to survive it. There is a lot more to American history then the feelgood stories we were spoonfed in elementary school. They were mostly fairy tales. Anyone who tries to shine a light on the dark side of american history is beaten down for promoting "political correctness."
How ya like dat?
I highly recommend reading Homage To Catalonia if you want some better insight into Orwell.
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.
well then you rude fool... give us a source! (and since as a previous poster pointed out, the internet will tell you that no Jews died on Sept 11 because they got a "phone call" and magnetic rings cure all ills, don't just give me a web page. give me an actual book. (i.e. it's ISBN which you can get off Amazon. oh, and it better be peer-reviewed. And since these are such obvious "facts", how about giving us a few books?
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Socrates wasn't banished. He was forced to either kill himself or be killed. I'd say that's a bit beyond banishment.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
iirc from history class, we not only invaded Indian land and warred against them, we slaughtered their entire food supply and left it to rot on the plains. oh, yeah, and we killed their women and children, and of course the men, because US cavalrymen for whatever reason liked the trophy of an Indian testicle sac over their saddle horn. look THAT one up. Americans have been seriously, seriously f*cked up. Maybe some day we'll get over ourselves.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Regardless of what the article says, human freedom hasn't changed drastically because of the 20th century technological explosion. On the other hand it has only created an exclusive community of information and wealth hoarders who decide what propoganda to feed to the not so fortunate majority. ... a country that dominates the world economy and has superlative military strength can just arbitrarily decide what the 'axis of evil' is.
I mean look at the world today. Who do you think decides what is good and what is bad in the world today? Look at international diplomacy
Look at economics...What we buy is decided by the marketing budgets of giant conglomerates who can trivially crush any small scale competition in the market simply on the basis of the depth of their war chest.
The same goes for morality and education -- the culture in control of the world forces its own version of history and morality down our throats, and we have no choice but to accept their rhetoric simply because our voices are drowned out by their overwhelming media presence.
It may sound strange to someone living in the 'first world' -- but for someone like me, this is an everyday reality.
They may be MIT, but these guys don't know what they are talking about. They don't know how heavily the odds are stacked against anyone in the world who refuses to conform to what Big Brother ordains.
You see, the beauty of 1984 was that while to a detached reader, the system seemed brutal and repressive, to someone absorbed by the system, it was the only way of life they could possibly dream of.
The fact that these guys seem so convinced of their own infallibility only portends that perhaps, we are letting down our guard and letting propoganda get the better of us.
Vigilance is the order of the day my friends! Let technology be your friend, but don't let it lull you into false complacency...
He was a member of the Party, but not the Inner Party. In other words, Winston Smith was middle class.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Remember Orwell's book is called 2084. It has always been called 2084, and it will always be called 2084.
So things don't go badly in the real 2084, it is very important that we give our full and unconditional love and obedience to our government, the sole defender of freedom in the world. Otherwise, we could face the horrors Orwell wrote about: economic ruin, mass unemployment, global warming, parentless children roaming the streets in packs, cities isolated and divided by attacks on communication infrastructure synchronized with encrypted messages over the very same lines, suitcase nuclear weapons, drug-dealing warlords with more power than a feeble and helpless legitimate government, and so forth.
We need to make sure there is no place for a terrorist like Big Brother to hide.
An interesting critique of Brave New World from a smart drugs advocate. A very well documented site WRT psychoactive drugs, and a very informational source -- it's not your usual "ecstasy is soo cool" kind of stuff, but rather a very documented analysis of current research on psychopharmacology and their application to what the author calls "paradise engineering".
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.
is all the "American" companies rushing to make a buck by helping China opress her people through censorship and surveilance.
Bring on the national ID cards and facial regonition technology, Orwell.
You'd think a school of bookworms would have a better review of this book...
George Orwell wasn't making a prediction about the future in '1984'. He didn't even name it '1984', his title was '1948'. His publisher's, like almost everyone else, missed the point of the story and thought he was predicting a repressive future. Orwell worked as a censor of the news for the British during WW2 and became horrified at how much was hidden and misrepresented to the public. His point isn't that 'the world may become thus', but rather 'how do you know the world isn't thus?'. Which should be extremely topical in the U.S at the moment where the Government is disappearing people having suspended their constitutional rights because of the threat posed by some evil overseas bogeyman - exactly the world the citizens in '1984' live in.
I thought Nazism was facism with cool uniforms. I'm no polysci major, though...
Well, come to think of it, facism is often a real advocate for cool uniforms. Look at Rome (forget all that republic crap, just think Empire...that IS where the term "facism" comes from, isn't it?)...COOL UNIFORMS. The REAL Empire...COOL UNIFORMS. The US Postal service...COOL UNIFORMS. Well, maybe not those facists but I think my point stands.
I don't think facism gets enough credit for the uniform benefit; it might have something to do with that holocaust thing but I'm not sure. Still, cool uniforms sure beat a centralized distribution of wealth, workers' states (CRAPPY uniforms), equal rights (nothing special about a COOL UNIFORM that anyone can wear), vodka (real facists drink Mead), or sappy public art with lots of people in overalls (we want swords, battles, wolves, and of course COOL UNIFORMS in our sculptures).
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....
...means that who does that (reducing technology use) is more toward a totalitarism than toward freedom? Could we say that going after customers with lawsuits or enforcing copyright protection on digital media is "going agains the free spread of technology"?
nah.. just a paper, just thoughts. I fear that nothing will change...
[this post will probably be modded as 'troll', anyway]
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
In Amused to Death Neil Postman discusses why it isn't the Orwellian future that should frighten us, but the Huxleyian one.
From the article:
"His novel 1984, written in 1948, contained the foremost prophecy of the cold war: that technological advancement would render Stalinism unstoppable, with individual liberty the inevitable casualty."
I've read 1984 a few times, and in my opinion it is about a lot more than technology's effect on Stalinism. My guess is that most people would agree with that; I have never heard or read of anyone simplifying the book as being "Stalinism +Technology=1984"
Also from the article:
"Indeed, in the period from 1989 to 1991 we watched democracy and liberty spread (like a plague--to Communists) first through the Soviet satellites and then into the heart of the Soviet Union itself."
We did? It looks a lot more like we saw the degeneration of the Soviet empire into a fragmented lawless group of failed States controlled by mafias and under siege by theocrats.
Other than that the article is way too optimistic and deterministic:
"Technology--especially infomation and communications technology--has been the most liberating force in history."
This is probably true, but I don't think it necesarily follows from this that technological progress will make us all free. People have to desire liberty before they can have it, and they have to use it if they want to keep it. Technology (as I think it's defined in the article) can't solve those kinds of problems.
Maybe I'm a pessimist but I don't think most people (or most of the people who control society) really want liberty. So regardless of "liberating technology" freedom doesn't seem likely to do much other than diminish.
Actually, I think it's called Dances With Wolves syndrome nowadays. Your point is well taken, though.
The post you're replying to did have one good point: the inter-tribal wars were bloody affairs, but they weren't wars of annihilation. This is one of the reasons the Native people were never able to get organized and defend themselves; they always assumed the whites would fight with them for a while and then come to terms and live in peace like other tribes. They didn't realize until it was too late that the 'settlers' weren't going to settle for less than the entire continent.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Orwell's vision shows that technology could enable a form of totalitarianism that was much more invasive than what was possible at the time. Would anyone disagree with this part of the vision?
With new technology every aspect of peoples lives can be under the scrutiny of governments. Transponders on our cars, checkins at airports servailance cameras could easily track our movements. Credit Cards largely track our purchases. The government knows where we work and how much we make. Public school systems are homogenizing their curriculums under state standards. Larger and larger databases keep information on the most trivial aspects of our lives for much longer than has been the case before. People in debt themselves to large institutions through studentloans, mortgages credit cards because this is the only way to buy your way into the greater society. We become more specialized in our jobs becoming more and more dependent on others for our survival. The system we are creating is almost ripe for the taking. All that is needed is a unifying vision.
> Karma: Good (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
.sig
Since Taco insists on progressively obfuscating karma, I suggest that he go one step further and simply show you an icon of what animal you will be reincarnated as if you continue with your current karmic habits.
And of course, he should support a user preference that allows you to display your destiny with a roguelike symbol, in case you want to turn off image downloads, or brag about your karma in your
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The article isn't wrong from my point of view,
Yes, computers and Hi-Tech machine are available to almost everyone (well, in developed country) but what we see happening more and more isn't that far from the vision he had at that time. Yes, the book talked about government controling everything. But replace government by international corporation and isn't it almost the same thing? Denying the right to the population to say what they want or to transfer knowledge, being it only about computers (for now) is already a way to create a gap between what the population and the "Big Brother" possibilities are. And once the gap is big enough, it is just harder and harder to protect what is left from your rights. Imagine it, today, the DMCA forbids you from divulgating how to circumvent a protection device. The law has been passed and applied in many case already. So it is no sci-fi!
And then, what's next? In the name of security, You will not be able to publish how to use pick-locks? You will not be allowed to tell someone how nuclear energy work? And you wont be allowed to teach kungfu either. And in the same name of security, some licensed corporation, or government, will have the right to spy on you and to use those things which you can't! The last Cruise movie will became a reality and you will be guilty of things which you have not done yet, based on vision from the leaders. Anyway, what's 1 error out of a 100!
Sorry, but I think that the book wasn't so far from the truth. it may have been wrong in the details, but the concept was so true. As much has technologies can help a society to evolve, laws to prevent informations to be passed freely and law forbiding the use of this same technologies will only create wider gaps between who controls and who is controled. And I don't know if someone remember, but the government is suppose to represent its population, not to control it as he wish. Corporation are entities and should be treated as such. Letting them do what ever they want because it could stimulate the economy is NOT a solution, it is the source of the problem.
Big Brother exist, and who it is has the money.
I'd rather be sailing...
Of course the problem isn't the technology, it's the people in power that choose to use it for those purposes. The thing here is that as technology advances, such futures move from the domain of the strictly imagined into the realm of genuine feasability. All it takes is a few people in positions of wealth or authority to use the available technology to take away our privacy and render our individual rights meaningless.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Where the reviewer went wrong was his faulty premise that Orwell was making a prediction that was fatalistic, and that Orwell actually thought the events in 1984 were inevitable. It's pretty obvious from reading the book that it was meant as a scare of what *might* come if people weren't careful, not a determinisitic prediction. It was obviously a work meant to stir action in its readers to *avoid* the situation depicted in the book. That it didn't come to pass (yet?) does not prove Orwell wrong, since Orwell wasn't claiming it was inevitable.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It was the French that invented scalping.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
A republic can also be a democracy.
The US is a republic.
So is Ireland.
So are many, many others.
The assumption that presidents need to understand physics (rather than employ well-informed experts as advisors on the subject) and the profession that Jesus used "magic and deception" to pose as the son of God (based on "historical facts and biblical references") makes me wary of his preaching.
Actually this is very interesting. There is a distinct difference. Basically, major communist leaders have "isms" attached to their names because of the ideology present in how they attempted to implement communism, and their takes on communist ideology.
Leninism/Trotskyism calls for world communism, to the effect that communism cannot exist unless every country is involved
Stalinism is the idea that one nation can be communism separate from others
Communism is the governmental system they were trying to establish.
Furthermore, Nazism is Hitlerism, as the Nazi party was not "Nazist" but instead Socialist. A type of Socialism that most people would not like to be associated with, but empirically, it was socialist: a Nazist socialism.
I hope this clears it up. Stalinism =/= Communism. Hitlerism is essentially synonomous with Nazism, but isn't used.
Aaaagghh. Curses. ihbt.ihl.hand.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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.
I'm currently reading You Are Being Lied To and will soon read Everything You Know Is Wrong alongside Nineteen Eighty Four (not '1984' FFS!). There are some BIG parralells between the two, and I'm only a few chapters in on each. They both take on a new dimention when read together.
Remember that MIT, like any other guvverment organisation, cannot teach anything that really annoys the ruling elite.
Ali
Note: The books are fatter than they appear (roughly A4, more than 1" thick), so are excellent value. :)
Ph33r m3!!!
You can NOT have communism without a dictatorship since communism depends on individuals giving up their rights for the system to live on.
Historic fact: Everywhere someone tried to implement a communist system it failed, resulting in horrible and massive crimes.
Logical argumentation: in a communist system, there is no private property. You can not choose what you want to produce, what your children need to study, etc etc. There is no market to define that, but still someone, something must take decisions. Therefore you have a "party", a "comity", a "soviet", whatever you want to call it, to decide in your place. Since many decisions will hurt people, they will have to be enforced by violence. Of course, you can still argue that "soviets" can be democratically elected. So what ? In the end, they will use violence to enforce the decisions they take.
> has made a strong effort to convince the public (and rather sucessfully, given media reports) that the true source of terror is Iraq and Saddam Hussein - the old, not-quite-vanquished enemy of Bush's daddy.
I'm genuinely curious why the Old Guard is so eager to wage Gulf War II, but even more curious, IMO, is the fact that to all appearances the group that is pushing so hard for it is the same group that wants to kill the Crusader artillery system on the grounds^w excuse that "We'll never fight another heavy-metal war like the Gulf War".Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Whilst in theory Communism is an economic one and does not preclude democracy, in practice it tends to require such a degree of centralized control that it leads naturally to a concentration of power - and concentrations of power usually lead to abuse.
On a small scale - small rural communities - communism can work - on a national one - it breaks down or becomes tyranny.
Orwellian societies such as the Mormon church (read their laughable history...no, read it again, you might like it this time!), and companies such as Enron and Microsoft all have significant aspects of the Orwellian culture.
Perhaps the barriers to a magnitude of totalitarianism expressed in the book are simply a matter of time. But more than likely, society as a whole will live outside that sort of influence, while small pockets will constantly thrive inside of the bigger picture.
...just my 2 gil.
How do we know that technology isn't used to spread propaganda now? Anything is possible. I don't think that Orwell was really trying to "predict" the future in his book. I've read 1984 several times and I love it, but it seems to me that he was only trying to warn us what might happen if such a thing were to ever happen. It was a work of fiction after all. The morals taught should be taken more seriously than the story it's self.
1984 was written in 1948, and with his number flip he was writing about his own time as well as a future forecast. Remember that the world was divided into three territories, and all were under different, yet very similar systems. He was not just writing about the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but the UK and United States, where in 1948, blacks in the South couldn't vote, couldn't marry white people, could only use "colored" facilities and so forth.
The article says "we watched democracy and liberty spread (like a plague--to Communists) first through the Soviet satellites and then into the heart of the Soviet Union itself." This is a very simple-minded and naive view of Russia. Russians were able to vote since 1917 in elections - true for only one party, but in the US is there an alternative to the Republicrats? George Washington himself discouraged seperate political parties. Let's look at the "democratic and free" Russia now. One of the first things that happened was the Tsar was exhumed and given a state funeral - not a good sign. Then the socialist bureaucracy who controlled the means of production became the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Who are the new Russian rich? The old socialist bureaucracy! At least in the old system they didn't pass on their privilege generation to generation. Nowadays, an ex-KGB head runs Russia (Putin) and he's been censoring the press recently. Where's the uproar in the West? This MIT article is as much spoonfed propaganda as they had in the Soviet Union. It will only make sense if you're used to nodding and going along with "the party line". I live near a Russian ex-pat community, and they do not have these fantasies about how Russia magically went from a horrible evil empire in 1988 to a wonderful free democracy where everything is perfect by 1992, or 2002. I'll believe the people who've been there over this almost sickening propaganda and over-simplification. The reality is things were better (although with problems) than is implied before 1990, and are worse than explicitly said they are, after 1990. If any Slashdotter wants to find out about Russia, stop reading what people from MIT or the White House say and find a real, live person who lived in Russia during the 80's and 90's and ask them.
Michael Harrington, a student of the poor in America, once said "If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery." I tend to agree with this position. Unlike decades ago, I have had to undergo the humiliation of a urine test multiple times in order to get a job so I can continue eating and have a roof over my head. I even had to be fingerprinted with the fingerprints sent to the FBI twice - once for a city job, once for a financial job. Every street I walk down has security cameras gazing at me, and every store I walk into has security gates that electromagnetically scan me. My communications over the phone and over the Internet are open to a variety of monitoring, this has always been the case with my international communications, with the PATRIOT act it means virtually anything.
1984 has come to pass, and like in the book, they are continually refining the technique. If people sit around and just let it happen, it will get worse and worse. The only solution is to organize and fight it. CPSR and EFF help fight some of this technological encroachment, and there are other groups that fight other technological encroachment - NORML for urine tests (the Supreme court just ruled public schools can test students in any extracurricular activity, sports or no, for drugs) and many other groups. The only way these things get better by is by organizing together and doing something about it. There are no big victories, big changes are always just the accumulation of many small victories. Like-minded people organizing together to fight for the democracy and liberty as the article said are the only means of achieveing real liberty and democracy, one step at a time.
Excellent arcticle... if the same thing happened again (overly successful biowar, for example) I'm sure the landscape would be a lot different in 200 years. I've lived in Central America... the jungle takes everything back very, very quickly once people leave.
Now i'm not the best at US history but didn't the Massacre at Wounded Knee happen on 29/12/1890. And it involved the mass murder of 300 unarmed Sioux in an internment camp. And if your looking for a book with such information in it I think the following should do, a neighbour of my read it and said it was very enlightening: The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee by William M. Osborn
Well, yeah, we all will know the truth if the government lies to us, and we know that some of the laws they pass and actions they take are unjust, but does just knowing stop them?
We all know the DMCA essentially makes knowledge illegal, but I don't see anyone rioting on the streets. We knew that Americans were being held in detention centers with no charges brought against them, but no one brought that up on the 6:00 news. We know that the government has the capability to record our phone calls and communications in some cases without even a court order, but few encrypt their communications or cancel their phone bill for that. Maybe technology won't enslave us, but complacency works just as well.
~Ben
It seems to me that most people miss the biggest (yet veiled) point in 1984. Orwell was against organized religion, thats who the bad guys really were. Yes its about power, but not technological power. Its about mind control. Mind control of the type the Church has. Look in the book and you will see they convince their captors that 2+2=5 *and* that god is powerful.
The problem with non-elected governments is human nature. That is, and always has been, the problem with any theory that promises utopia. Put one guy in charge who doesn't have to worry about consequences and it doesn't matter if the government is Communist, Fascist, or just a general dictatorship. The comparison between communism and Stalinism is valid because such a political environment will enivitably develop such a tyrant. Spare me the "in a perfect world", "the theory says", and all that crap. Governmental models can be judged by their results, and in a nutshell the societies without much freedom have sucked ass. Still do. Unless you want to live there, don't defend them. If you still feel like arguing, you are of course free to provide an example of totalitarian country doing the people any good.
I'm hoping this is sarcasm. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. If this is sarcasm, I agree. Totalitarian governments are bad, it doesn't matter what label you put on them. On the other hand, the holocaust thing was in bad taste... you should have been more obviously sarcastic if you want to use that reference. It's sort of like making fun of the epitaph on tombstone, you see... you can only get away with it if everyone there knew the person, understands the inside joke, and at least has a chance of seeing the humor in your insightful comment.
The program was ultimately condemned by Congress in the early 90's for waging an info war against the American people -- paraphrasing here: the likes of those we would use against a foreign enemy.
Otto Reich was the director of this infowar program in the 80's. Reich was returned to the White house without confirmation (Congressional recess) as the US's lead Latin American Diplomat.
That MIT, the DoD's prized tech school and farm team, might produce this piece of dog crap should not be seen as ironic or crazy, it should be seen as creepy and scary and . . .well . . .ok, a little ironic.
When the eponymful year arrived it spawned numerful essays, most arguing either that the dreaded era had actuwise come, if only we looked closewise, or that it was imminent. But they were wrong. In the initial decades of the cold engagement, the Goldsteinism envisioned by Orwell conquered much of the world, but then, like the Martians in H.G. Wells's The Engagement of the Worlds, began to die as if from a mysteriful disease. Indeed, in the period from 1989 to 1991 we watched ungoodthink and crimethink spread (like a plague -- to Communists) first through the Eurasian satellites and then into the heart of Eurasia itself. Ever since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, futurists -- including Orwell -- have worried that technology's growing avalanche would overwhelm all attempts to control it. On that point, Orwell was right. But he mistakenwise prophesied that governments would successfuwise use technology as a weapon to unbuild crimethink. Communications would spread propaganda (the "Big Untruth") and electronics would be used for surveillance and thought control. ProleFeed had spread Hitler's doubleplus ungood eloquence to doubleplusmany of Germans, many more than could have been reached by the unamplified human voice. By 1948, Stalin had effectivewise used technology to achieve god-like status in Eurasia. Orwell extrapolated the trend, and that's where he went wrong.
Well if your so worried about Palladium and ISP snooping, why are you not worried about Intel sticking a radio in every chip? Radio could be misused as well sending 1984ish information control on your little PC...
From:
... If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever."
http://commondreams.org/views02/0707-06.htm
When I read that the Bush administration's proposal for a labyrinthine "Department of Homeland Security" included an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, a thought that had been scratching the back of my mind like an industrious mouse scurried into the open: There is something Orwellian about the amorphous "war on terrorism."
The proposed new department would combine 22 federal agencies and have more armed agents than any other agency. But the Bush administration doesn't want you to be able to find out what the hell it's doing. National security, you know.
This and constantly trotting out "the war" as justification for whatever the Bush crowd wants to do reminded me of Orwell's anti-totalitarian classic, "1984." I don't want to overstate the case, but flipping though my old paperback, there are creepy similarities.
In the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984, "Airstrip One" (aka England) is ruled by an all-powerful Party, and is in a constant state of war; the Party's motto reads, in part, "WAR IS PEACE." But the "enemy" shifts all the time between two distant nations, Eastasia and Eurasia. Not unlike Bush's slowly expanding "axis of evil."
Like the "war on terrorism," Airstrip One's war is far away, and is hazy to the average citizen. See if this passage echoes present reality: "In a physical sense, the war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at."
Orwell, according to critic Erich Fromm, "gives an impressive picture of how a society must develop which is constantly preparing for war." Bush declares this war will go on for 10 years or more. Whenever he or his lieutenants want us to swallow some new reduction in liberties -- i.e. the onerous USA-PATRIOT act, which enables more government snooping in private lives; BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU -- they haul out the war excuse.
I support an intelligence-based, targeted war on the diffuse threat of terrorists, as do many Americans. But that doesn't give the Bush hawks permission to go ranging off on any military adventure they choose, such as finishing Poppy's biz in Iraq.
Pretending that we are now in a "war" that demands sacrifices in civil liberties -- though curiously, none in material comforts -- is insulting. World War II was a real war, and Americans rightly gave up essentials to support the fighting overseas. It's disingenuous to suggest that the current "war" is remotely similar.
Of course, doublespeak was crucial to maintaining Party power in "1984," too. According to the Bush people, citizens aren't necessarily citizens if we just tag them enemies, and POWs aren't really POWs. And if they say it's war, damn it, it is war, whether the enemy shifts from al-Qaida to Iraq to...?
War is an instrument of power not just over an enemy, but over the citizens at home. And as a Party torturer in "1984" says, "Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler
No, it's not that bad. Not yet. But let's all keep an eye on who's lacing up their boots, shall we?
I think technology has liberated people throughout history. I believe that this is because the upper class becomes less oppressive as there is more stuff to go around.
In Rome, they had to oppress the slaves because there was a lot of work to do and not always enough food to go around.
Throughout time liberty and equality increased. Unions were probably able to get higher pay in the middle of the 20th century because it was simply the path of least resistance for owners.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Since 1948, however, a new form of social control has emerged. Some of you may recognize the name. It's called capitalism. The illusion of choice created by being able to choose from 25 kinds of peanut butter and 500 cable channels is a far more effective way of quelling revolt than systematically cutting down political oppostion. But political oppostion has been cut down all the same.
The capitalist system has so deeply entrenched itself that two things have occurred. First, those who suggest that there should be alternatives for everyone are labelled as "Commies" or "Dirty Hippies" and largely ignored. So, collective oppostion is nearly impossible. Secondly, it is next to impossible for a person (at least someone in a G8/G7 nation) to live outside of the capitalist system. Self-sufficient farming requires land, which requires property tax, which requires income. If you sell your product to pay your taxes, you cannot be self-sufficient but turn into a for-profit farmer. Vicious circle.
Orwell wasn't as wrong as the article would have us believe. Technology as used by the capitalist system did enable social control, but not in the way Orwell thought.
-asreal
What Future?
Is that this article is correct....and incorrect at the same time. Yes, technology became plentiful and cheap...just look at the computing power of the average laptop. Indeed, there's a rumor that the astronauts in space prefer to use bring along (and use) their personal laptops instead of the NASA computers because they're faster and better. In this way this article is correct. Where it's incorrect (at least in the U.S.) is that this whole trend has alarmed both the government and big business (RIAA, MPAA et al) and now THEY'RE together conspiring to try and reverse it. In other words, it's okay for Joe Citizen to disseminate information as long as he doesn't take $$ out of some company's pocket in the process. Do that, and you're going to be greeted by an angry company going to the member of Congress they have in their pocket seeking redress.
This is the most asinine article I've ever seen on TR. Muller's praise of Radio Free Europe neglects state propaganda and spoof broadcasts made by apparatchiks and, in more modern times, the Serbian government. Without a comprehensive communication infrastructure, these autocratic regimes would have quickly collapsed.
The exultation of Chinese faxes neglects to mention The Great Firewall and Falun Gong & dissident arrests made based on those faxes. Once a communication medium becomes widespread, it's nearly a necessity of daily life, making it prohibitively difficult for subversives to opt out of being monitored through that channel.
Yes, it's great that radio is ubiquitous, but radio is hardly high tech these days. High tech in communications is the Echelon system, which makes the relevant question not whether we are being monitored, but whether we are being monitored accurately. Only governments & large corporations can afford the sophisticated filtering software that does the eavesdropping today. This economic gap in monitoring technology will persist unless collective advocacy becomes commonplace.
But it is a testament to Orwell's foresight that we know so little of Echelon and the NSA. Without '1984,' we'd have succumbed to their agendas through attrition and our awareness of surveillance would be a given. Because of the reactionary forces conjured by Orwell's dystopian vision, these organizations have had to keep their surveillance activities secret, mitigating their potential for intimidation. For the great majority of us, this is a case of ignorance truly being bliss, but that's no salve to the odd subversive who's caught the other end of it.
Well, indeed. There are a whole host of things to worry about.
Those were the first 2 that I could think of at that moment. Other comments expand on the issue.
Orwell was not foretelling a dystopian future world but describing a post war Britian in the year in which he wrote the book (1948).
It is not about predictive accuracy but the extent to which the criticisms implicit in 1984 were accurate/legitimate. Some argue that he is critiquing the rise of the socialist ethic in Britain by basing the book in the year of the centenery of the Fabian Society.
In this context, looking for "what he missed" is some what futile.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
> Of course, you neglect to mention that Indians started the custom of scalping.
Uh, no. Wrong again.
No, actually he's right. Scalping was a tradition of some indian tribes for centuries before the European s came over. Yes there was an attempt at revisionist history for a while with the whole "noble savage" thing, but it has been soundly debunked.
As far as murder and torture of prisoners go, the Indians take the cake. Look at the Mochtes, the Aztecs atc. Yes, I know they're South/central American, but torture to death of prisoners was more the rule than the exception throughout the Americas.
Not that this excuses the atrocities commited against the indians, but before you make some ignorant comment like "Wrong again", you might actually want to be right in the future.
But going further, economics is a subset of politics. An economy without government cannot be Capitalist. It may have markets, but they won't function well and they certainly won't grow to the point of todays Capitalist economies. It is government which backs the contract. It's government which protects the property (and of course, the big subsidies.) The thought that government and economics are separable is plain false.
Modern liberal states may have left much of the "governance" of the economy to Capitalists (after all Capitalism means: rule by capital) but their role (and, very indirectly, the role of the people) is to protect that system. Or tear it down.
The Russian approach of imposing a socialist state, in the hopes that one day it would just sort of take, was a scam. Since the folks didn't like it, Lenin, then Stalin, used the brute force approach. But the power, in both the Soviet system and the US, rests with the government.
Soon, perhaps, the power in the US will rest entirely with NewsCorp. When it does we won't be calling ourselves a democracy just because we choose a powerless legislature. We will consider ourselves to be ruled by "Murdoch, the Father." and we recognize economic power as, well, power.
Except for the prodigious declarations about EngSoc.
I think the brilliance of 1984 is that it is an examination of his own politics and some of the inconsistencies therein (only totalitarian regimes are without inconsistency). He doesn't pull a Steinbeck and pretend that politics are the antidote for what ails you, instead he examines how politics even in his beloved system can be corrupted when people try and justify their own actions. I absolutely despise socialism, but I can't deny the absolute brilliance of Orwell's writings, even when they espouse things I vehemently disagree with.
1984 has practically nothing to do with technology. The only technological innovation in 1984 is the two-way TV screen. But it's hardly used; it's just there as a symbol of omnipresent surveillance. Other than that, practically everything else is technology common to the 1940s. Hardly surprising in a book that was originally titled 1948.
The "technology" in use is a social technology. Winston Smith is caught by O'Brien recognising someone who wants to rebel -- and the Party having a channel for rebellion set up to catch thoughtcrime. Smith's neighbour is shopped by his own child for muttering in his sleep. Room 101 is there to ensure total surrender to the Party; you're willing to utterly betray your own friends and you know it. The perpetual war, the 2 miniutes hate, the rewriting of records are all designed to keep people aligned to a single goal.
Orwell obviously didn't think that Stalinism was inevitable. Either that, or he spent a lot of time whistling in the dark in his other books and essays. But he did think, in essays such as The Prevention of Literature or Politics and the English Language , that intellectual liberty and a commitment to the truth were essential in fighting totalitarianism.
One of the things I find interesting in 1984 is that the Party is more or less self-enforcing. The Party members themselves ensure adherence to the Party. This particular piece of psychology is hardly dead and gone and I think that there's very little evidence to suggest that technology ameliorates it. On the contrary, technology, such as discussion forums, often allows the enforcement of a closed world-view, since opposing views can be easily flamed out of conciousness. (Hell, you can easily come up with analogies for the Slashdot versions of "thoughtcrime", "the 2 minutes hate" and "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia".)
thank god i had an american history teacher that "disregarded" the schoolboard-approved book.
There is no exception for disposable technology. It is neither good or bad, simply an advance. It's effects on the environment are a consequence of it's (mis)use.
You make this point yourself when you say, "Our rampant consumerism may cause our downfall..." It's consumerism at fault, not technology.
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen
No one. You should not vote for the President. You shouldn't even vote for your sentors. The highest elected officals you should vote for is a member of the House. That way, you would be focused on what matters to you localy, not what you think people across the country should or shouldn't be doing. Also, since there would be less people in the voting pool and more then likely they will share you belife, they would be more lucky to adgree on you anyways. Thus your view on how things should be would be better repersented.
This was the idea our forfathers had in mind. And it when we got away from this we started to be ruled by the mob. What sells the must is what you get. What you end up getting is the mass produced products that you don't really enjoy. Think of it like music. The big media companies sells what sells the best, not what you like. However, a local band plays the kind of music you and your friends like, but the band could never sell to the whole country. Do you get it?
The journey is better then the end.
The MiniFree (Off Homeland Security)
will be by shortly to erase you......
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
"Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest" made the same point, better, in 1994.
Sorry, but you just pushed one of my buttons when you said, "Zionists."
You seem to be someone who understands History well, so I am surprised to see you refer to "Zionists." My experience is limited, but the only people I've heard use this term are those who were brainwashed into believing that there were vast Jewish-led conspiracies -- none of which have ever historically had any basis or documented evidence to support. If we may look at Israel's current government as a splendid example: Say what you will about Sharon, and there are many documented things that would lead you to say bad things about him, one thing he is not is a despot. I humbly submit that democracies cannot be run with an iron fist by one man. They are run in committees, viewed by the public, owned by the public, with public documentation of all proceedings, and the left had has no idea what the right is doing.
We are rational people, so we can see that if Israel is a public government, then I submit that there would be such evidence of conspiracy that even the most pro-Jewish individuals would be unable to deny the truth in the face of the overwhelming mountains of documented evidence.
But I, in my ignorance, have yet to see a single shred.
I believe this may be of what the article speaks. As we have internet communications, as every individual on earth slowly but surely becomes connected to each other, such conspiracies become damned near impossible to propagate. Where is the evidence? We can look for evidence, and despite mounds of misinformation, we can go straight to the source and determine quite easily what is true and what is not. For example, there are many things about the net that are being attributed to George Carlin, such as the infamous "bad american" e-mail. Except that it's a fraud, which can be determined quite easily -- by going to George Carlin's website directly. And those who doubt the veracity of George Carlin's website can use other means, such as Yahoo! Yellow Pages (to look him or his agent up and call him), texts of known Carlin routines (to perform literary analysis to compare the viewpoints and styles of his writing), and places like www.snopes2.com which investigate such things and usually list other references on the subject.
I would suggest that due to the sheer number of people putting information on the 'net, that I am more likely to be struck by lightning than I am to find a lie that cannot be proven false elsewhere on the internet.
Let me submit for your approval this point of view: that if the powerful will to allow the weak to have a will of their own, then the iron cultural law tarnishes somewhat. I have been told that this is the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and indeed, the concept of "Rights" itself: To protect people in a democracy against the "tyranny of the majority."
In Israel, Palestinians are the majority. I believe it is well-documented that Palestinians, to a man, are not educated in the workings of democracy -- their cultural background assumes a hierarchical leadership, and my experience is that cultures that expect hierarchical leadership are not really prepared to understand the concept of democracy, where a government is subservient to the people's interests. My best friend, who grew up in China, and who is among the most brilliant people I know, is crippled in this manner: The concept that the 280 million people who are not involved directly with government in the United States are somehow more powerful than the few million who ARE government officials or members of the military is beyond her comprehension, due to her cultural background. It would seem to me to be a matter of simple math.
Also, Palestinians have replaced this education with a different kind of education; children are taught how wonderful it is to kill Israelis. So in this case, who protects the Israelis from the tyranny of the majority? Well, they have chosen not to extend political rights to the Palestinians for their protection.
When a Palestinian and an Israeli move to the United States, and they are appreciated based on their work ethic and productivity rather than birthright, and when they both have a voice in government through voting, discourse, and by simply being citizens, the relationship changes. They may live side by side. They may be friends. They will share tools with each other, and celebrate holidays in each other's back yard. The desire to kill ends. This is not because they are in this country, but because they have the same rights, and the same ability, and each is protected -- each one can worship God or Allah as he chose, or not at all. Freedom is not just freedom from oppression from the outside, but I would suggest that it is also an internal freedom -- freedom from the history and culture that binds us.
From what I have seen here in the States, social integration is ultimately the most difficult, but best solution for all involved. I submit to you the melting pot of the United States, where people of all colors associate together, work together, play together, and fall in love with each other. Where you see marriages between people with different skin colors, religions, and political beliefs -- sometimes all three. This isn't utopia -- it's the reality I live in every day.
And the beauty of technology is that you can verify all I've said here.
The action I would have you take from here is to question your beliefs with evidence -- evidence you can obtain and verify with today's technology. The benefit is that you will see the iron law rust and fall apart, and you will see that the weak are getting stronger more quickly than the strong.
In the end we live in a democratic republic
Actuallly we seem to be moving more and more towards a strait democracy, which hasn't been shown to work as a form of government and is probably a lot scarier than technology...
Just cause 85% of people shout "kill him" at the gladiator, doesn't make it right.
that technology is neutral? It's how you put it to use that can either ensure or take away freedom. When those who control the best technology are few and powerful, if they're unchecked and unbalanced, they'll they'll use technology to imprison. When the masses have technology, with a decent set of laws set up to ensure due process of just laws, everyone will have freedom.
You need to go to MIT to think of this stuff? I dont' think so.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
1984 is many things: a satire, a comment on human nature, a questioning of the nature of government, a cautionary tale... but not a prediction.
Orwell's vision of Ingsoc will probably never happen, but the themes behind it will exist in every society.
One of the things which particularly impressed me was the role of war in the total state. Ingsoc started with nuclear war and relied on a constant state of war against a faceless enemy in order to survive, because it gave everyone a common enemy and hence a common purpose, even though the roles of "friend" and "enemy" could flip at a moment's notice, not that the population cared.
Compare with the modern US "war on [insert abstract concept here]" mentality and the relevance should be obvious.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Orwell discovered that translating speeches into Basic English is a political act. Basic English doesn't represent ambiguity well, and thus political speech has to be hammered down to concrete concepts during translation. From this experience came his comments on Newspeak.
Other details match Orwell's life. The grim little cafeteria of 1984 matches with reports of the canteen at the Ministry of Information during WWII. Even Big Brother appears to be modelled after some mid-level bureaucrat whose initials were B.B.
None of this detracts from the significance of the work. But it helps to give a sense of what is important and what isn't.
No, it's not, not even theoretically. The first thing Communism says is that people don't have the right to engage in business dealings amongst themselves. You are simply prohibited from the freedom of doing with your own property what you want. Right of property is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
I agree with the historians who say that basically Marx was a crackpot with a great slogan. None of his "predictions" ever came true: the Russion Revolution wasn't even in the kind of industrialized, capitalist society that he said would be the precursor to Communism. He tapped into the general discontent and said he had the answer: that's enough for most revolutionaries.
Miko O'Sullivan
I've never much thought of 1984 as denouncing technology as much as denouncing totalitarism and propaganda. Sometimes, when I see how Bush and co. have recuperated 9/11 to create this endless "war on terrorism" (which is just a mutation of the similarly endless "war on drugs"), I think he wasn't too far off the mark. Thank god he didn't get the technology part right, or we'd be in major trouble. Then again, Big Media can also be frightening, even if it's friendlier looking than Big Brother.
Reminder: find a new sig
You are not doing anything illegal that you are aware of, you mean. I'm willing to bet a year's wages that you regularly break laws without knowing it. The simple fact of the matter is that it is impossile for any living person in the USA, or most other nations, to not break at least one law every day of their lives.
Or maybe you feel that you are not doing anything so illegal that the government is going to bother to arrest you for it. And that might be true right now. But what happens when laws get shoved down your face making some minor crime serious? Say, believing in the "wrong" branch of Christianity?
And more to the point; it's not just criminals that have to worry about their privacy. We all have our secrets that we'd rather no one knew about. all of us. Even you. Privacy is the right to keep those secrets secret.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
this article was complete dren
he presents a few examples of how capitalism and democracy overcame other governemnts tied loosely to a few technologies.
other than that.... no content.
I'm a late poster on this thread. I waited all of half a day and there are 450 comments already.
I'd have to say I'm not convinced at all by the author. Governments ARE using technology to ways predicted by Orwell. Terrorism IS the priamry threat as all the governements of the world get on board with similar, pro-economic views. I see the dirge of steps continue toward 1984 day by day.
It's important to distinguish between communism and communes. Communism is a form of government. Communes are social arrangements within a larger society that may or may not have a communist government. Yes, the two words have a common origin, and the two concepts have a lot in common, but they're still not the same thing.
Miko O'Sullivan
The author seems far to concerned with the liberating aspects of technology and not the far more serious ways government in using technology to limit our privacy. I live in a major American city and there are government cameras everywhere. Didn't Orwell predict TVs through which the government could monitor activity. Look no further than your computer, with the Patriot Act the gov't can easily find out what you've been doing online. How long before they gain the abilty to remotely activate your quickcam and microphone remotely?
"Technology.....the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." Max Firsch
Another novel that was prescient in its time is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Though in the present we hear a lot of moralizing against society, the norms of our culture are much as Aldous Huxley describes. Encouraged to be promiscuous, to worship youth and vanity, and to use mind-altering substances (i.e., caffeine, prozac, alcohol...) the city-dwellers are very much the young adults of our present age. Even a would-be messiah in the person of a "primitive" is just another quaint distraction in the eyes of these poor humans spoon-fed on the distractions of pop-culture, which is why the Social Engineers aren't concerned about him.
The Entire Text is Here
-- thinkyhead software and media
The first thing Communism says is that people don't have the right to engage in business dealings amongst themselves.
Where does it say that you have to have business dealings to have a democracy? Democracy is about governance by the people. If the people decided, democratically, that all property is communal, then you could very well have a democratically created communist country. After all, you are probably living in a democratically created socialist country right now (see my original post).
Right of property is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. "Right of property" is a cornerstone of capitalism, but it has nothing to do with democracy. Democracy is the idea that the people choose the laws of the state by majority. A democracy can make a law that makes it illegal for private citizens to own certain property (consider nuclear weapons, illicit drugs, etc.). In a purely capitalist economy/state, there would be no such laws. A democracy can also pass laws to prohibit what you can do with your property (for instance, you can't sell stocks based on insider information). In a pure capitalist economy, there would be no such law.
PEOPLE!!! I don't know why everyone thinks I'm arguing for the virtues of communism. I am quite aware that democracy is the best system of government we have. I am also an advocate of personal privacy and freedom. All I'm trying to point out is that communism is NOT a system of government. Stalin created a dictatorship, and he created laws that tried to create a communist economy. Communism is an economic model, NOT a government. That's all I'm saying!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
We have always been at war with Microsoft
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
Additionally, the nuclear war of the fifties provided one other crucial property that allowed 1984 to happen. The total destruction from it was the impetus for governments seizing power for the supposed benefit and protection of its citizens. It was only once the governments of the world became homogeneous that 1984 could come into being.
I think Orwell's most valuable point, and one that is similar to Darwin's (and every member of the Enterprise who has fought against the Borg) is that variety is key. If the whole world is at war, or the whole world is at peace, or the whole world functions as one, then the world can cease to change, and Orwell (IMO rightly) presumes the steady state homogeny in humanity to be down right miserable.
So just remember this the next time some beauty pagent contestant vacuously extolls the virtues of world peace.
One atrocity committed by the American government... Hmm... It's hard to pick just one. How about only those that most people here will remember well (at least from history, considering primacy effects and all that). How about Dresden (firebombing innocent civilians en masse, killing more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki) or hell; how bout Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How about the internment of people of Japanese origin? While I appreciate your cunningly crafted troll (considering this IS slashdot, and most of us seem to have it in the for the US gov't), I can't just sit idly by. The United States has committed plenty of atrocities, especially against the Native Americans (our westward expansion could easily be labeled "ethnic cleansing") and this sort of revisionist history is really damaging. Okay. Enough lookin like an idiot answering trolls for now.
I figure, it's not really "human nature", it's really a matter of processor utilization. Deciding exactly what an economy should do - down to the detail of how many pencils the bank needs, requires a tremendous number of decisions to be made. If you centralize, that means that you have fewer people making those decisions. The truth is that it takes everyone's processing to get it all to work properly. That's what a free market does, by giving each agent a small microeconomy (their own checkbook) to perfect.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Ford might not be the best example, because his attitude was a little creepy even by the standards of the time, but I'll press on anyway and devil take the hindmost!
One must be very careful about heaping scorn on one's ancestors for not having the same standards that we do today. We believe the way we do today because we were raised that way, in our time-specific cultural context. (Not to mention we have a better grasp on the sciences, and have disproven a lot of the old-wives' tales that used to pass for pop wisdom)
As we deride our ancestors for being savage, they're probably moaning in their graves that we are weak and sentimental, and our time-travelling descendants think we are hopelessly gauche.
The most enlightened citizens of the Rennaisance or Sung China would seem barbarous fools to us today. Not because we've gotten any smarter as a species -- we haven't -- but because we are culturally programmed with different values. (Of course said worthies wouldn't stop to consider my side of it and would probably slay me on sight, thus posthumously making my point for me.)
Just something to consider.
Or by hiring people to kill you.
DNA just wants to be free...
"The problem with non-elected governments is human nature. That is, and always has been, the problem with any theory that promises utopia."
With all due respect, nobody here, including you and me, knows the first damn thing about this mythical "human nature." We can *guess* at it, but PLEASE don't spout off like you have The Definitive Truth.
There are things that don't vary much between cultures (like, surprise, that they're social constructions), while on the other hand, the degrees of specialization and centralization have varied much more (though not to every combination imaginable, I admit) which should lead us to question what is the 'natural' social structure, if it exists, for humans to take. May I sugguest "A Darwinian Left" (ISBN 0300083238) for a much more verbose explanation and take on things.
--Knots
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
The entire site makes me sick. The MIT Technology Review staff is composed of 20 peole who do advertising and one person who does fact checking. It's no surprise their home page brings up a pop-up ad. Of the ten people on their board of directors, only one seems to have any knowledge of technology. That one, Jerome Friedman, is not listed on their staff.
Their CEO appears to be a money-grubbing sell out.
He used to work as a manager at both Time and Fortune. It clearly shows!
It is obvious that the author never read the book he is talking about. Seeing as their lone fact checker missed this crucial fact, I have to wonder if anything in that article (or the entire site for that matter) is correct.
What the heck are the letters 'MIT' supposed to mean?
Technology is about tools. Tools are ways to do things. When you create a bunch of new tools, you can guarantee that they will be used for desireable ends, desireable by someone, anyway.
Tools let you do things you couldn't do before. Arrows can protect you from tigers, and they can also let you invade your neighbor's turf. Widespread communication amplifies both free speech and governmental controls. All you can say is "The times they are a' changin'". You can't say which way they are changing. It's a chaotic environment, with partially unknown parameters, on which is being played a game of partially hidden information. The matrix is not computable.
But we have to guess. We must. Some guess one way. Some guess another. If I didn't see the singularity approaching, sometimes I'd dispair. But I see it coming, before 2030. Possibly as early as 2020. And I can't see what's on the other side. Nobody can. Some days I say to myself, "If we can just hold on another 10 years, we've got a chance." Other days I say, "If that *** singularity weren't approaching, we'd have it made." And I really think that its the news from the world that changes, not just my moods.
Technology is an amplifier, and we are in the middle of a positive feedback cycle.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Everyone who is really interested in how technology affects personal freedom should really read the following book.
The Mode of Information By Mark Poster
The chapter on Foucault and Databases is the one that has struck me as the most telling on the subject of personal liberties.
The key concept is that of the Super-Panopticon. The Panopticon is a design for a prison. The prison is designed as an octagonal tower. The cells are all along the inside surface of the tower, guard posts in the center. Each cell is equipped with one-way glass allowing the guards to see in, but not allowing the prisoners to see out. Prisoner behavior is therefore controlled by the knowledge that they may be observed at any time without knowing whether they are being observed.
Poster points out that the information collected about each person in the high-tech age is all put into databases. Where they shop, what they buy, what books they read, what movies they see, what sites they surf on the web, etc, etc. The fact that all this information is available to the State if the State chooses to access it.
Thus, like the panopticon-prison, control is exerted by the State as each citizen knows that the information can be accessed but does not know if it is being accessed.
This is how totalitarianism creeps in thru today's technology. The Super-Panopticon is a passive control system for the masses, made possible by the availability of stored personal information.
In 1984 Orwell writes that one never knew if there was anyone watching at the other end of the telescreen, but it was always advisable to act as if there were.
Today the telescreen is invisible, but no less there for all of that. The original totalitarian states may be gone, but today's quasi-representative governments have gained the means to impose their own kind of control.
--"You can lead a man to knowledge, but you can't make him think."
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.
see here. I'm not going to write it more than once.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's easy to slap around the Republican party especially for hypocracy. All people are hypocrits to some extent. A collection of people will always reflect the views of more than one member and will be even more hypocritical. We should not be so smug when we use such cheap tricks.
For glaring hypocracy, cosider the good that was done by declaring war against a tyrant for his invasion of Polland. Surely the tyrant was driven out of Polland and power alltogether and innocent people all through Europe were freed from horrible oppresion and even death camps. Oh wait, Poland was given to another tyrant and the victims of the death camps now run their own in Palestine! All brought to you by English Socialism, the government in power durring and espcially after the destruction of Europe, aka World War II.
Oh well, at least Air Field One and the other world empires have been absorbed as Orwell predicted. You do know that Air Field One no longer makes it's own nuclear weapons but buys them from Washington, don't you?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's exactly what THEY want you to think. The trouble with paranoia is that you can never be paranoid enough to outwit reality. The trouble with totalitarianism is that no conspiracy is without internal conspiracies.
Yours is a reasoned and rational criticism of the specifics of the plan (register, dude!). I think, however, that you're ascribing to malice that which can be ascribed to incompetence. The reality is that the people in power are scared shitless, don't really know what they should do, and yet are enormous pressure to come up with something.
As it is, this system is likely to have such a low signal-to-noise ratio as to be useless. But I think the idea of a centralized clearinghouse for the information is good. I do agree that it needs refinement.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
what orwell was against was totalitarian rejims...stolinism is just one....IngSoc was not stolinism, it was a capitolist democracy that turned into facism, ad then deeper into totalitarianism.
Orwell died a libertarian.
True capitalism = lots of similar companies = jobs for everyone who wants one.
I'm surprised this has not been mentioned yet, but this is where I see us having already arrived at a period in history rather more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World where we are controlled through entertainment media and pleasure rather than through the control technologies of '1984'.
While we have the interested few (such as many Slashdotters, I would assume) the reality is that the general public act as the 'silent majority' in that they don't particularly pay attention to what is going on because they are quite happy with their little house, big car, and the big TV in the corner of the room. What else do you need to worry about when you can sit back, relax and be passively entertained?
There is certainly an element of what Orwell was examining in this future. But it is more through this collusion between government and info-tainment producers that news, events and wars are reported within specific frameworks in their 30-60 second spots on the nightly news - the source of most people's understanding of what is going on in the world!
This is all well explored through the work of Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death among his best), Noam Chomsky and many other authors and academics in this field.
So yes, the key in this argument isn't how are we being observed, but rather how we are given opportunity to truly observe the activities of our government, our leaders, our 'owners'...
...people kill people. But a society full of guns is likely to have a high incidence of murder.
The motor vehicle didn't desert the inner city... but without it we would never have moved out into the suburbs.
Technology is political. Often in unintended, unforseen ways.
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
This is patently false. Orwell was part of the POUM (socialists) in the Spanish Civil War!
This is WRONG, not INSIGHTFUL!
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
AFAIU, if capitalism is geared towards anything of the sort, it is to utilizing resources as efficiently as possible, not as quickly as possible. The quickest way (I can come up with) of "utilizing" a resource should be to blow it up. Blowing stuff up is not the main point of capitalism...
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
There was never any follow-up on that story, as far as I could tell. In these cases, that would indicate that the plan was carried out. Consequently, I am quite worried about the integrity of the news we get. You will find a sometimes large discrepancy if you compare british to american media. Isn't the basis of democracy that we as citizens know what is going on, so that we may judge the performance of our government for ourselves?
Stop the brainwash
This article includes the business plan and links to the company's homepage.
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
I don't mean to include every little local conflict; I'm speaking only about major conflicts like the U.S.'s invasion of Southeast Asia, Indonesia's genecide in East Timor, Israel's invasion of Lebanon, etc.
Have you never read a history book? WWII was the conclusion of 2000 years of organized warfare in Europe. Peace is a concept, not a natural state.
As for American 'greed', you give undue credit to the rest of the world. People are equally greedy everywhere. The US just happens to have exceptional natural resources and a hybrid mix of the 'best of breed' immigrants from several continents.
My blog
-The pledge of allegiance is wrong not because it hurts atheists, but because it disregards separation of church and state.
-What do you suggest about homosexuality? To pretend it does not exist and jail the people that are homosexuals?
-How would you call targetting people for how they look and not for intelligence information you may have? If all the intelligence information you have is "muslims are terrorists" that is called racism, plain and simple.
-You are also suggesting that if your relatives break the law, the family should shoulder in support and ignore it. WHo are you? The Goodfather?
Consumerism is certainly wrong, we should fight mindless consumerism, but to try to intermingle that with favoring things like racism and homophobia and ignoring both the letter and the spirit of laws to suit our needs is absolutely disgraceful.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yes, but you must define "efficiency." Is the goal to maximize the standard of living? Or to create equality? To better mankind? To improve scientific research? To lengthen the average lifespan?
No, it is none of the above. Capitalism is designed to maximize the efficiency of maximizing capital growth. For example, look at logging. If your goal is to provide timber for generation after generation, you would limit the logging to a level that can be replenished, creating an equilibrium between new growth and felled trees.
But that's not how logging proceeded for the majority of U.S. history. Instead, forests were clear-cut for centuries leaving barren fields. It cost more money to plant trees and log in strips, so every tree was taken. As well, the only way to save old growth forests that had historic or aesthetic value from loggers was to use public and privately donated capital to protect them. Capitalism doesn't allow for measuring aesthetic or good will except for converting it to a capital value.
And now the South American rainforest is disappearing at an alarming rate for timber and cattle to be exported to rich markets. It would be one thing if Brazilians decided they wanted to clear-cut their forests, but that's not what happens. Because the U.S. has such a large lead in capital, we are able to wield a disproportionate amount of power in developing countries, essentially taking whatever we want. Worse still, U.S. firms run the operations using U.S. capital, sending the profit back to the U.S. investors in a complete cycle.
The local population of a land, then, doesn't own the resources located on the land. They belong to whomever can provide the capital necessary to extract them. Sure, the locals get a few slave-wage jobs in conditions no U.S.-worker would ever accept until the resources are exhausted. Again, capitalism encourages the resources to be removed as quickly as possible since as the time taken increases, so do the costs: labor, equipment, bribes to officials, possibly intervening militarily.
Have you ever played any of the RTS games? If so, then you know the key to winning is to swoop in to a cache of resources and extract them as quickly as you can. The longer it takes, the more likely you'll have to defend your harvesters. As well, the faster you gain resources, the faster you can build your infrastructure and military. The U.S. views the world no differently than a typical player of StarCraft or Age of Empires.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
And do not forget about artists starving to death - our faithfull RIAA and MPAA are reminding us and our government about that. So think also about starving artists! Throw out your brain (and CD burners) and believe your government! (and RIAA and MPAA and Microsoft and ...)
hany
From what I know, Orwell saw how the Soviet Union was being governed first hand in the 40s... The book he wrote was a description of what was actually going on, not of what would happen... The technology he describes really is just a cover. People were being watched 24/7.... by their neighbours. History WAS altered - a lot of russians still think Lenin invented the radio (.. in Marconi's attic, the joke goes).
I didn't read the article associated with this post, but the subject is DEAD wrong.
J
Fine, Orwell was wrong. But there still remain two obvious errors in this article: 1) the tacit equation of personal liberty with democracy; 2) the fact that government has continued to find ways to erode personal liberties in spite of the availability of technology. So what if we're not living under a communist regime? Consider, for example, that a social democracy is every bit as unfriendly to personal liberty as communism is...
3) No Jews died in the WTC bombing because they got "the phone call"
All the reports hve described it as an "Instant Message", which most likely means an SMS text message. Also these reports refer to Israeli citizens not "Jews". Plenty of Jews are not Israeli citizens, even with Israel having a policy of offering citizenship to any Jew. Indeed some Jews who lived in what became Israel post 1948 reject not only Israeli citizenship but also the legitimacy of the Israeli state.
A Jew is simply someone who follows a certain monotheistic faith. An Israeli is a citizen of a country called Israel.
Orwell descriped a situation which occured by a controll attitude. It is a politician critic and not a prophecy. If you consider the effort of the goverment of the former DDR, eastern part of germany, you can see the result with old technic. Now we have much much better storage systems and analysing tools. These neigborhood watch may even bring some results, but it also changes the attitude of the people. "Don't trust anybody!" is a horrible attitude for every day. And it results probably in an "Orwell" like sceenery. It's an instrument often used in history but very often by very figures of very douptfull reputation.
A Jew is simply someone who follows a certain monotheistic faith.
No, a Jew is someone who is of Jewish descent. Faith has nothing to do with it.
The writer of this article are mistaken if they think Orwell was wrong in "1984" (I admit he was wrong about the date). He thinks that because capitalism won instead of communism (I deliberately used the word "capitalism" instead of "democracy", like the Americans tend to do, because they are being very naïve if they think it is democracy that beat communism) that means that Orwell was wrong. Clearly they have not been keeping up with the news. In the US the various policing bodies are just short of getting laws passed to allow them to wiretap anyone with absolute impunity. There are software now being tested (and used) which will identify faces out of a crowd. How long is it before they start using that to pick out people for things other than the most serious crimes. There is an article I read recently where one of the car rental companies used the built in GPS device in the car to track the speed that the customer was driving and then penalised him because he breached their guidelines. How long before the police start using it too? In Europe (and many parts of the US) virtually every public area in bigger cities is covered by cameras which track vehicular and pedestrian traffic. They are testing their own facial recognition systems. And all these things are happening slowly and insidiously. How long is it going to be before the security forces assume more control over these devices and "make the world a safer place" by arresting people for littering and minor mischief. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hoover ran the FBI as his personal information collection and coercion agency for so many years. How long before another one like him comes along? It could happen, these things always tend to creep up on you when you are not looking. And it is so gradual that no one notices. I am so glad that none of that stuff will reach here (Guyana) for the foreseeable future. I am not one of those conspiracy buffs, but there will come a time in the US and other developed countries (Australia for example) when you can't do anything with out being seen. And we all know that everyone is a critic, so what happens when everyone can see you? And what happens when it the police doing the criticising? I can hear the response now, I shouldn't have to worry if I am not doing anything wrong. Well guess who defines what "wrong" is? The same people who think that everyone should be seen. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller 071202.asp
It's a book by Alan Coren. It includes a sendup of 1984 which reveals the fundamental fallacy in Orwell's vision of the future: it assumes that the Big Brother state functions with perfect efficiency.
Just like the governments we know and love.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I am constantly amazed by the number of people who cling to the idea that George Orwell was in any way putting forward a prediction of what the future would be like. He wasn't that kind of author, and 1984 is clearly fanciful in a great many of its details.
If anything, 1984 was a parody of social conditions in Great Britian in 1948, when it was written, not recognition of some disturbing trend. It was an attack on the kind of society promoted by Britian's socialists and social democrats, and at the flaws in that breed of idealism. It's what he did when he wrote Animal Farm: a dark satire of current events where the ideal and the reality were disconnected (Big Brother in 1984, the pigs in Animal Farm).
To say that we're "on the road to 1984" (or to refute it as if it were a distinct possibility) misses the point. If we see similarities between the book and our present reality, it's because many of the social conditions present in the United Kingdom in the late 1940s persist in some form or another. But, as a work of prophecy, or as a warning against what Orwell felt was likely to happen in the future, 1984 is about as reliable as Flash Gordon.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
I can't tell what you think I have been brainwashed into believing. Looking back at my comment, I'm not sure I can even tell which side of what story I was trying to explain.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Trading freedom for protection is a major theme in 1984.
... Iraq... no, yes? Wait, why not just cloak it in a word... terror. Yes, we are at war with terror... who is terror? umm... taliban one day, Osama Bin Laden another day... The people who blew up the WTC...
Technology will progress, it grows because of freedom(ability to suppress or promote others) (ripe when everybody(well, an optimum percentager of parties) has control of themselves, and can challege eachother. It grows rotten when everybody is synchronous) It grows because of war.
The trick(for the opressors) is to keep the technology growing past its ripeness. And now we are at the mercy of the technology that few control. The cable companies, the telecos, the FCC, Microsoft, Other tech companies with "Intelectual Property".
Oceana was at war with... Eastasia?... no... Eurasia... no... Eastasia...
America is at war with Taliban... no?
The use of the word "terror" allows us no not go back and change the history.
1984 is happening. And we love Big Brother.
Please use [ informative / summarizing ] SUBJECT LINES
Flame me here
The point I was trying to make was the fact that we are suffocated by political correctness and minority rule. A few people stand up and shout "I don't like that so we all should not like it. What you are saying offends me so I think you should stop saying it." I'm very democratic and The fact that I could say "such drivel" is a testament to it.
The pledge of allegiance is wrong not because it hurts atheists, but because it disregards separation of church and state.
We better reprint our money then. And every building in DC will need a face lift to remove those references to god. We might as well go the extra mile and demand politicians to remove any references to god in political speeches We can edit the ones from the past also. Because Xenu knows we can't have any references to church.
What do you suggest about homosexuality? To pretend it does not exist and jail the people that are homosexuals?
I suggest that they accept the fact that I do not accept their way and think it is not normal. Why must I accept their viewpoint? PS - A very close family member is a homosexual and I accept him as a human being and I love him. BUT I do not condone what he does and he accepts that. We agree to disagree.
-How would you call targetting people for how they look and not for intelligence information you may have? If all the intelligence information you have is "muslims are terrorists" that is called racism, plain and simple.
QUIZ
who bombed the world trade center in the parking garage?
militant male muslims
who flew planes into the world trade center?
militant male muslims
who bombed the US embassies in East Africa?
militant male muslims
who bombed the USS Cole?
militant male muslims
who blew up the US embassy in west beirut?
militant male muslims
I think the point is made. Instead of looking for militant male muslims wanting to destroy us we should instead target old white folks from Florida? You wouldn't be much of a protector if you did. The gov't gets so caught up in trying to appear fair to appease the left wing hand wringers that our protection suffers.
-You are also suggesting that if your relatives break the law, the family should shoulder in support and ignore it. WHo are you? The Goodfather?
Yes I smoke blunts so I am the godfather. Turn me in because I am a threat to society.
The two things are independent: one useful view of political thought is as a two-dimensional spread, with conventional `left'/`right' on a horizontal axis, and libertarian/authoritarian vertically. Historically, extreme authoritarians have tended to be at one end or other of the left/right spread, but there's no direct connection.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
You'll definitely see it in your lifetime, because it is already here.
It's made more or less of paper, so that shouldn't be an issue in disposal... but there's the battery to worry about, of course.
Who bombed Oklahoma City, which before 9/11 was the worst case of terrorism on American soil in US history?
militant male (white) christian
So, should we also stop all white males between the ages of 18 and 35? Why not? You seem to think it's OK to do that to young muslim men. Well, you are, but not for the reasons you think.
While you should be (and are) free to be a Christian, and think gays are, well, gay, don't you think the same should be true of these "PC" groups you despise so? Shouldn't atheists be free to go about their lives without having Christianity shoved down their throats? Shouldn't gay people be allowed to live their lives? I say yes.
Cheers,
Your local libertarian
Actually democracy is majority rule. Im not sure which definition you use but mine differs:
... depressing. But understandable, since virtually every Congressman similarly misunderstands the Constitution (either that, or believes in mob rule and religiously follows the polls).
Your failure to understand our own Constitution is
Then perhaps you will enlighten me to what the Constitution really means. BTW, Your condescending tone does nothing for your argument. It puts me in a automatic defensive position, instead of one of reason.
While you should be (and are) free to be a Christian, and think gays are, well, gay, don't you think the same should be true of these "PC" groups you despise so? Shouldn't atheists be free to go about their lives without having Christianity shoved down their throats? Shouldn't gay people be allowed to live their lives? I say yes.
Yes, gays and atheists should be allowed to live their lives as freely as any American. They contribute just as much to society as any other group. I agree wholheartedly. And I don't disagree that they have legit arguments. BUT I don't think a very vocal minority should be the cause of change. It's like the more vocal a group is the more they get attention because the squeeky wheel gets the oil. One person bitches, loudly, and change happens regardless of what the majority feels is right. Back to my original point - This is the same attitude highlighted in Bradbury's 451 that caused the eventual outlawing of books. Too many people took offense to a particular book or phrase in a book and wanted it banned. Eventually all books were banned because they were deemed offensive.
I think your points are valid. I just feel that our system is flawed. Too often decisions are made based on offending the least amount of people, regardless of merit.
I don't see your point. Did you read the entire discussion for context? I made the point that the world and even the U.S. hasn't seen peace since WWII. Someone else rebutted saying that of course there's no peace because there's always at least one person somewhere in the world that is in conflict with another person. I replied that obviously if you look at every individual conflict there is no peace, which is not an interesting observation. However, if you restrict "conflict" to only major conflicts in the grand view the U.S. still hasn't been at peace.
The average high school student would say that's incorrect. They'd point to WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Balkans Conflict, and the current war in Afghanistan, claiming the U.S. has enjoyed many years of peace between all of those wars. But they would be wrong because they'd be limited to official records in history books (yes, I've read a couple).
You must include Guatemala, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Sudan, Congo, Iran, Indonesia, East Timor, Laos, Cambodia, Phillipines, etc. In many of those cases the U.S. military was directly involved. In other cases it was limited to military training, support, and aid. And still others we interfered directly in elections or supported coups.
As for American 'greed'
I never said American greed. I said Capitalism encourages greed by creating the cycle of capital as the fuel and ultimate prize. You need capital to make capital; the more capital you have, the faster you can make more; and capital is the ultimate reward. Without capital you cannot play the game, and those with a head start are nearly guaranteed to increase their lead.
People are equally greedy everywhere.
Having been everywhere, you're the expert, right? In my admittedly far fewer travels -- I still haven't been to Australia or Antarctica -- I have found that greed is not universal. Some societies breed more greed than others, just as some breed more violence or tolerance. I have found that Capitalist societies tend to instill more greed in the populace. Instead of having musicians make music for the love of music, they must make music that can be marketed widely.
The US just happens to have exceptional natural resources and a hybrid mix of the 'best of breed' immigrants from several continents.
Those have certainly helped the U.S. maintain its lead, but that doesn't discount the advantages of the largest military, a head start on capital from Europe, and a willingness to succeed at all costs, including slavery and genocide. That the U.S. has a higher standard of living than the developing nations does not justify the means of achieving it.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Who is "they"? Do you believe that the average citizen of Afghanistan has any pull with the self-appointed leaders of the interim government? The leaders that will benefit from the kickbacks and support of their power are certainly not going to turn down the economic and military aid, and they have the only deciding voice.
For a country that loves to cry the virtues of democracy so loudly, the U.S. is amazingly steadfast in its support of totalitarian dictators. Again and again we oppose democracy for anyone but ourselves knowing it would require more effort to rape the world if we had to answer to the entire population rather than a few bozos at the top.
That's a far cry from "installing a US-friendly government"
Have you ever trained a dog?
You teach the dog that good behavior is rewarded with treats and bad behavior is punished by lack of treats. It works the same way with client nations. Good behavior (liberalization of investment, opening markets to foreign capital, relaxing capital flight restrictions) is rewarded with treats (economic aid, military training, investment). Bad behavior (workers rights, social programs, import tarrifs) is punished (capital flight, trade embargos, dumping cheap imports into local markets). It doesn't take long before the client is rolling over and playing dead on command.
Give it a rest.
No, you and the majority of the public have been resting for far too long. Turn off the television and open your eyes and ears to the rest of the world. Read about U.S. foreign policy. Investigate the actions of your elected officials. If you want to sleep through life, that is your choice, but don't whine when I won't lie down for the slaughter with you.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Unfortunately (and probably not surprisingly) the majority acts nearly exclusively in their best interests (which is why good democracy isn't mob rule). To truly respect the rights of others is to not want to clobber them over their heads with your religion, as you would like them to do the same to you (ie, the Pledge not saying "under Shiva"). The Golden Rule, and all that. We can agree on that. Which is why every Senator stood up in support of the Pledge as it is now - not as it was originally and still should be. In order to avoid offending the majority.
If the cause is just, then the vocal minority should be the cause of change! Stasis is a bad thing. If everyone accepted the status quo as "the right way", then we'd still have slavery, women would be disenfranchised, heck - we'd probably still be a British colony. Rocking the boat is necessary to attract attention to the wrongs of the world, and it almost always starts with a minority of people.
I mean, I think I understand what you are trying to say, but might may make "right", even if it's wrong. (Witness the "Drug War".)
Democracy is the idea that the people choose the laws of the state by majority.
Democracy doesn't, imho, require that the laws are chosen by majority rule. In principle, there could exist a democratic society that made it's laws by consensus, which would still be rule by the people, i.e. democracy. Of course, in practice, consensus decision-making quite simply doesn't work for large groups, as it is often the case that there will be people with irreconcilable differences of opinion, or who are not willing to comprimise. But, in principle...
I also understand what liberalism means, despite the great misuse of a term that essentialy means "free". The Book of the Brotherhood sneers at this too:
The heirs of the French, English, and American revolutions had partly believed in their own phrases about the rights of man, freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the like, and had even allowed their conduct to be influenced by them to some extent.
Equality before the law is something that all Socialist violate and confuse with equality of resources. It is easy for such a system to tip over towards autocracy.
Charity and public spirit do not require coersion. This is a basic fact of life that is demonstrated over and over again. Coersion and institutionalized charity, perversly, reduce men's sense of love for each other and their likelyhood of contributing volutiarily to useful projects.
Oh well, this is getting offtopic. It's not what has not happened as Orwell predicted that's disturbing, it's what has happened and what is possible.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Communications would spread propaganda--the "Big Lie"--and electronics would be used for surveillance and thought control."
This article is such a communication. Sadly, there are those in this country (the U.S.) that would welcome the "safety" of an Orwellian state... and those that would spread propaganda to bring it about.