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" Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by the telescreen; moreover, so long as he remained within the field
by ng55QPSK 4y ago
" Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by the telescreen; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
"
— Part I, Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four
- tremon 4y agoAnd that is even less of a dystopia than what we're capable of now: there is no reason for any person to be plugging in to the telescreen to watch someone live, because it can all be recorded and then retroactively browsed at will.
- loufe 4y agoEven worse, everything can be processed by efficient and reliable algorithms which reduces administrative load.
- Tozen 4y agoThe great thing about using "the algorithm", is that when if fails or is wrong, you blame it and not the creators, administrators, and authorizers of it.
- ng55QPSK 4y agoThat's the point here. We are living in a post-1984 world. Already.
- RC_ITR 4y agoIt will never cease to amuse me that Orwell intended to write a book about geopolitics and the downsides of a fractionalized world, but instead accidentally wrote a book that everyone interprets as an anti-government manifesto.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y agoI'm glad we can all take away from literature something personal to us. Your view is no more or less wrong than anyone else's, and I'd like to hear more.
- scarecrowbob 4y agoWell, as I understand it he literally was an anarchist, correct?
- foldr 4y agoOrwell was not really an anarchist in his political views. You can get a fairly good overview of his political views from The Lion and the Unicorn: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
- pengaru 4y ago> everyone interprets as an anti-government manifesto It's been a while so maybe my memory is just flawed, but my feelings about 1984 are more that it's a cautionary tale of living in a dystopian surveillance state. That's not the same as anti-government. I actually expect my government to assist in preventing such outcomes considering there's obviously lucrative and powerful corporate interests pursuant to these machinations.
- smolder 4y ago1984 is not important because it's broadly anti-government. I think calling it anti-government is a mischaracterization, because it describes a very unhealthy and specific kind of government: one that wields its might to manage the minutia of everyone's lives as it sees fit, putting its own survival above their well-being. I just want to be clear that opposing authoritarian or totalitarian government is not opposition to government generally.
- RC_ITR 4y ago1984 is about the effects of permanent ongoing war between fractionalized states; and the implication is that ongoing war produces totalitarianism. He didn't set out to show totalitarianism was bad, because that was self evident in 1948.
- HWR_14 4y agoAssuming a human even watches it as opposed to some ML algorithm.
- Verdex 4y agoYeah, this was the part that also occurred to me. With 1984 the threat that someone could watch is chilling. With our tech level everyone could be constantly watched and evaluated in real time by some sort of AI. There are two directions the updated 1984 can now take. The AI is reporting you to the government. Or the AI just takes care of your punishment itself. Are you actually a dissident or did you just sneeze and the AI interpreted that as some code phrase? Doesn't matter.
- ng55QPSK 4y agoYou could read O'Brian as non-human and Emanuel Goldstein as GAN.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoTrue, luckily the mind reading from the book has yet to be invented.