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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."
So far, the only thing we know for certain that Orwell was wrong about was the year.
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.
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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.
[Redacted by Homeland Security Autofilter]
They did not use technology to make totalitarianism unstoppable, they did it through doublethink. You imprisoned yourself. In fact they never killed anyone who did not wish to be killed for the crimes they did against the state.
The whole idea of doublethink and the ability to hold 2 contradictory ideas at once as truth is a powerful tool of control. It requires zero technology. The MIT guys totally missed the boat. In the end if you remember Smith wished to die for his sins.
I wish I could say our society was doublethink free, sadly everyday I see more evidence of its growing existence. Orwell may have been off a few decades, but he was right on the ball.
The point of 1984 was not so much that there would be technology sufficient to implement totalitarianism (which as others have pointed out, we have today). The main thing was that "whoever controls the past controls the future".
That's why I fear Big Media aggregation. When news, history and other public information gets disseminated from fewer and fewer sources, it's going to be more and more tempting for those sources to use that information power to their own ends. Consider the term "Disneyfication." Also:
Ketchup is a vegetable.
Global warming? It's not true, and besides, there's nothing you can do about it.
Corporations are not bound by the pesky constitutions that kept governments from doing what Orwell predicted.
The article's premise that Orwell was a "futurist" is flawed.
Even a cursory examination of 1984 reveals it to be not a prediction of the future of technology, or any, future, for that matter. It is a heavy-handed condemnation of totalitarian states, whether they be "communist" or "capitalist". One could also view it as the "dark" Animal Farm, but that would be glossing over targets: AF *was* about communism; 1984 was about statism in general.
Excluding the lugubrious prose, 1984 is still a pretty effective argument against the total state, and its message is all the more germaine in this day of Homeland Security and PATRIOT acts. Remember that Winston Smith was an English bloke, one of the "good guys", but he still wound up eye-to-eye with ravenous rats.....
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Orwell was afraid of Totalitarianism, and both 1984 and Animal Farm should be viewed as a declaration against tyrants, not an endorsement of conservative values.
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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.
This attitude is probably one of the most dangerous things out there. The assumption that your being sufficiently uninteresting will keep you from being put under the microscope is short sighted at best. Privacy is not something to be taken lightly. Lots of people have things they would like to hide from prying eyes- especially when those eyes have no legitimate business with them. Would you like things like that nasty, embarassing problem you saw the doctor for last week to be known by anyone that didn't have a need-to-know? What about your screwed up family, and that incident when you were 5 that you still see a counselor for? What about that nasty little habit you have -yes, that one- does the frequency of that need to be known to anyone who thinks they have a need? What about your non-pc views (no, not the ones you talk about - the other ones) that could really cost you in the wrong situation?
Keep in mind that everyone either does things, or has characteristics that others might consider "deviant", and you probably don't know what those things are because they seem normal to you because you take your privacy for granted. Also keep in mind that things that are "normal" now might be "deviant" in the future.
People aren't afraid of the legitimate use of their information. They are afraid of the abuse of priveledged information- and the only way to keep that from happening is to keep it hidden.
I would say that you are delusional to think that you have nothing that could be used against you in the right context.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
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.
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> Karma: Good (mostly affected by moderation done to your comments)
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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 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.
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.