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And 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,
by tremon 5y ago
And 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 5y agoEven worse, everything can be processed by efficient and reliable algorithms which reduces administrative load.
- Tozen 5y 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 5y agoThat's the point here. We are living in a post-1984 world. Already.
- RC_ITR 5y 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 5y 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 5y agoWell, as I understand it he literally was an anarchist, correct?
- foldr 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- zosima 5y agoNonsense. There was support for Soviet in parts of the intelligentsia, see e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five Orwell, had been or was still a convinced socialist, however he did not believe in soviet communism, and wrote the book as a warning, after having seen Stalins troops up close in Spain. Orwell's earlier book animal farm is much on the same theme.
- RC_ITR 4y ago> and the implication is that ongoing war produces totalitarianism. You think the Cambridge 5 supported the totalitarian aspects of the USSR and not the communist ideals?
- zosima 5y ago1984 is obviously anti-totalitarian and definitely a manifesto for not giving government too much unbridled power. It was inspired, just like Animal Farm, by George Orwell's years spent in the spanish civil war, and the corruption of socialism, as he saw it, by stalinism. I don't see a basis for claiming it's anything but an anti-totalitarian novel, explaining totalitarianism as it is: a boot stomping on a human face - for ever.
- _abox 5y agoI always thought it was written with the surveillance tendencies of the Soviet union and their vassal states in mind, in particular the DDR. After all, animal farm was also targeted at communism and how it corrupts itself.
- HWR_14 5y agoAssuming a human even watches it as opposed to some ML algorithm.
- Verdex 5y 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 5y agoYou could read O'Brian as non-human and Emanuel Goldstein as GAN.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoTrue, luckily the mind reading from the book has yet to be invented.