Has Orwell's '1984' Come 22 Years Later?

gabec asks: "This weekend my mother bought a grille lighter, something like this butane lighter. The self-scanner at Kroger's locked itself up and paged a clerk, who had to enter our drivers license numbers into her kiosk before we could continue. Last week my girlfriend bought four peaches. An alert came up stating that peaches were a restricted item and she had to identify herself before being able to purchase such a decidedly high quantity of the dangerous fruit. My video games spy on me, reporting the applications I run, the websites I visit, the accounts of the people I IM. My ISP is being strong-armed into a two-year archive of each action I take online under the guise of catching pedophiles, the companies I trust to free information are my enemies, the people looking out for me are being watched. As if that weren't enough, my own computer spies on me daily, my bank has been compromised, my phone is tapped--has been for years--and my phone company is A-OK with it. What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?" The sad state of affairs is that Big Brother probably became a quiet part of our lives a lot earlier. The big question now is: how much worse can it get? Am I just accustomed to old ways? Does the new generation, born with these restrictions, feel the weight of these bonds and recoil from my fears as paranoia? What can I, a person with no political interests--a person that would really rather think that the people in office are there because they're looking out for us, our rights, and our freedoms and not because their short-sightedness is creating a police state--do to stem the tide?"

Comments

Re:It may be too late...

[Moofie]

The interests of the top of the Fortune 500 are utterly irrelevant to me. The only concern I have is that my freedom as a citizen is not impeded by their pursuit of profit.

Yes, individual citizens are free, and encouraged, to pursue profit. But NOT at the expense of other peoples' freedom.

Free market does not mean that corporate actors should be able to do as they wish to corner markets and raise prices. It means that purchasers have much fredom to choose between sellers (and vice versa), thereby encouraging optimal economic exchanges.