8 ms·

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Bi

by pg 15y ago

There is something chillingly unconvincing about their attempts at informality. Big Brother jokey is a lot more frightening than Big Brother bureaucratic or Big Brother bombastic. Too bad this insight wasn't available to Orwell or he could have made 1984 even scarier.

jfoutz 15y ago
That's because Huxley was right. (http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...)
- armandososa 15y ago
  I think the current reality is more of a mix between "A Brave New World" and "Farenheit 451". Bradbury deserves a mention there.
  - spiritomb 15y ago
    trending towards THX-1138
  - mindcrime 15y ago
    I think the current reality is more of a mix between "A Brave New World" and "Farenheit 451". Bradbury deserves a mention there. Funny you would say that... I agree, although I wasn't thinking about Fahrenheit 451 when I mentioned another "mix" scenario in another thread[1] that touched on Nineteen Eighty-Four. My thought then was: Interestingly, I think reality is converging towards something like a hybrid of the two worlds described by Orwell and Huxley. Well, in the case of Huxley not so much the literal use of hypnosis and psycho-analysis, but if you treat that stuff as a metaphor, then you can see the connection. TV, pop music, Fox News, and so much other low-value content has become the "sedative for the masses" at the same time that the government assumes more and more power and control... "Of course," you might say, "we're nowhere close to Orwell's world with his Minitru, etc ." But if you substitute "We are at war with the USSR and the Taliban are our allies and have always been our allies" and "We are at war with the Taliban and the Russians are our allies and have always been our allies" for certain bits of Orwell's work, you might notice some eerie parallels and scary possibilities. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671843 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671843
- chimeracoder 15y ago
  Aside from the fact that that comic misrepresents the argument behind 1984, they're not really at odds with one another the way the comic makes it seem. Orwell was writing within the context of his time - the late 1940s. So if he were writing today, it's not too hard to imagine him writing about banning websites (ie, SOPA), or the similar actions that are going on today. If Orwell were writing today, I imagine 1984 might look more like Cory Doctrow's 'Scroogled' > http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html (The one main difference between the two that Orwell may have gotten 'wrong' is that it is the corporations, not the strictly the government, that serve as Big Brother in Doctrow's case - or rather, a coalition of corporations and the government. Then again, in Neal Stephenson, the corporations eventually become the government, so that's not as significant a difference as it really might seem.)
- stock_toaster 15y ago
  I think it depends on the culture, and geopolitical region. Huxley might have been more right for many places (certainly seems so for 'the west'), but Orwell seems to have been pretty dead on about some of the more oppressive regimes of the world - North Korea for instance?
yuhong 15y ago
That is when "not every press is good press" is a good thing.
Natsu 15y ago
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off if 1984 and the like had never been written. It feels like people have been using them as a how-to manual.
- sounds 15y ago
  The idea of a dystopian state was already old in 1949 (when the book was first published). Wikipedia lists literature back to 1835, though I think ancient Romans would have been able to write awesome dystopian literature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
- pyre 15y ago
  Unfortunately, the idea that there is a controlling mastermind using 1984 as a guide book is only nice insofar as it makes the dynamics of large groups of people and emergent behaviors seem controllable (or at least fixable) without long painful attempts to reshape the fabric of culture/society. The reality is that books like 1984 are commenting on human tendencies. Tendencies that would exist regardless of the existence of the commentary.
- jff 15y ago
  Well, at the very least we wouldn't have to hear it referenced every time a government or company does something, so that's a plus.
nagrom 15y ago
The tone is a little similar to GlaDOS in the portal games. "Friendly sinister". I don't believe the dismissive message, either. I cannot imagine a scenario where the TSA becomes 'popular' now; where the populace as a whole gets respect back for them. I half expect the US government to perform a rebranding exercise within the next 5 years and hope that a change in the letterheads and badges resets the clock on an ever-more resentful populace.
temphn 15y ago
The spelling and grammatical errors tell you within 5 seconds that this person is not very intelligent. For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail, however TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out to the entire field. This is a run-on sentence. Imaging technology has been extremely effective in the field and has found things artfully concealed on passengers as large as a gun or nonmetallic weapons, on down to a tiny pill or tiny baggies of drugs. "on down" is faulty parallelism. It’s one of the best tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as… you know… things that go BOOM. Two ellipses in one sentence? Leave aside the "BOOM". With all that said, it is one layer of our 20 layers of security (Behavior Detection, Explosives Detection Canines, Federal Air Marshals, , etc.) Extra comma and the capitalization feels bizarre. and is not a machine that has all the tools we need in one handy device. We’ve never claimed it’s the end all be all. The phrase is "the be all and end all" or "the be-all and end-all". One can go on, but almost every sentence here displays this person's low level of intelligence. Leaving aside the content, it's just poorly written. The punchline is that the TSA's budget is double that of Facebook's $3.7 billion in revenue. $8.1 billion in tax dollars for a gang of complete morons.
- kzrdude 15y ago
  Uneducated. "That's, like, uniquely american!" -G. W. Bush.
- corin_ 15y ago
  Thinking that you can judge someone's intelligence by their spelling and grammar is so incredibly wrong. And I don't mean wrong in a moral "don't be that guy" way (though that too), I mean wrong as in technically inaccurate.
  - c1sc0 15y ago
    Can you elaborate on how this is technically inaccurate? Is there something like a Flesch-Kincaid test for intelligence?
shin_lao 15y ago
I don't think there is any attempt at anything. It's just written by someone not very intelligent supervised by someone of similar intelligence swimming in a sea of mediocrity.
- ktizo 15y ago
  ...wallowing in an ocean of despair, on a planet of delusion. ;)
- betterth 15y ago
  Exactly. Someone got assigned to "blog duty" at the TSA, of which TSA management has no idea what a blog is, or why it is important, but there is a regulation somewhere, or a rule, that says the TSA must maintain a blog. So someone maintains a blog. This is my estimation of the situation. A Hanlon's Razor moment: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  - fluidcruft 15y ago
    I think there's probably an element of: "Bob, we need you to write something now about this video everyone is emailing each other" and Bob not having any authority, information or resources to actually address anything.
  - zyeljanee 15y ago
    But if you read carefully its like there is some truth in it. Nowadays people are doing crazy things without thinkig about the consequences.
  - jakejake 15y ago
    Or it could have been carefully written for a specific target audience (of which HN readers are not a part). Mind control!
    - betterth 15y ago
      Switch razors to Occam's Razor: all other things being equal, the idea that makes the fewest assumptions is better. Either the government is engaging in a disinformation campaign that is so broad and so pervasive that even the blogs at the TSA are involved... Or it's some idiot at an ineffective government organization who screwed up.
joshz 15y ago
Just a way to make you feel good about not having a say.
tobinfricke 15y ago
"A video is making its way around the interwebs this morning from some guy claiming he figured out a way to beat our body scanners (imaging technology)." I couldn't read any further.
- stfu 15y ago
  I have the slight suspicion that the TSA is going to remember the name of "some guy" very well when it comes to letting him board a plane anytime soon.
  - RandallBrown 15y ago
    I doubt it. The TSA only sees your name when they check your ID and boarding pass when you enter security. TSA agents probably don't care enough to memorize the guys name and then hassle him.
khafra 15y ago
Alignment: Affable Evil
DanBC 15y ago
If people haven't read 1984 recently they should give it another go. > But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. This appears to describe behaviour of a small[1] number of border guards and customs agents seen in a number of recent HN threads. > If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. At least Big Brother worked. I don't know what's worse about the jokey incompetence of the blog post: the fact that it hopelessly missed the mark for correct tone; or the thought that maybe they actually believed it; or that most people will just shrug their shoulders and think "meh, so what?" and do nothing more about it. [1] for various values of small, possibly including "most of them".
- bootstampface 15y ago
  > most people will just shrug their shoulders and think "meh, so what?" AKA, Ipad3 is out, let's go shopping!
tomkin 15y ago
> It’s one of the best tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as… you know… things that go BOOM. This is uncharacteristic - for a national security organization - even as a blog post. When people question authority, and the emperor has no clothes: resort to fear-mongering and keywords that incite panic? Check. This blog post is going to be archived and referenced for the next decade. I'd say some restructuring is about to be pushed down TSA's throats. BOOM indeed.
charlieok 15y ago
One of the best images I can recall that capture "big brother jokey" http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091026215221/harrypotter/images/8/8d/Dolores_Umbridge_headshot.jpg http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091026215221/harrypo...
shalmanese 15y ago
That would be Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
wtvanhest 15y ago
This person's quote from the comments about sums it up. "This was such a carefully worded blog post that one can safely conclude that the vulnerability described in the video is true. I especially like your use of phrases like "some guy" and "crude attempt" in an attempt to discredit the allegations without actually addressing the allegations themselves."

by pg 15y ago

jfoutz 15y ago

That's because Huxley was right. (http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourselves-to-Death.html http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...)

armandososa 15y ago
I think the current reality is more of a mix between "A Brave New World" and "Farenheit 451". Bradbury deserves a mention there.
- spiritomb 15y ago
  trending towards THX-1138
- mindcrime 15y ago
  I think the current reality is more of a mix between "A Brave New World" and "Farenheit 451". Bradbury deserves a mention there. Funny you would say that... I agree, although I wasn't thinking about Fahrenheit 451 when I mentioned another "mix" scenario in another thread[1] that touched on Nineteen Eighty-Four. My thought then was: Interestingly, I think reality is converging towards something like a hybrid of the two worlds described by Orwell and Huxley. Well, in the case of Huxley not so much the literal use of hypnosis and psycho-analysis, but if you treat that stuff as a metaphor, then you can see the connection. TV, pop music, Fox News, and so much other low-value content has become the "sedative for the masses" at the same time that the government assumes more and more power and control... "Of course," you might say, "we're nowhere close to Orwell's world with his Minitru, etc ." But if you substitute "We are at war with the USSR and the Taliban are our allies and have always been our allies" and "We are at war with the Taliban and the Russians are our allies and have always been our allies" for certain bits of Orwell's work, you might notice some eerie parallels and scary possibilities. [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671843 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3671843
chimeracoder 15y ago
Aside from the fact that that comic misrepresents the argument behind 1984, they're not really at odds with one another the way the comic makes it seem. Orwell was writing within the context of his time - the late 1940s. So if he were writing today, it's not too hard to imagine him writing about banning websites (ie, SOPA), or the similar actions that are going on today. If Orwell were writing today, I imagine 1984 might look more like Cory Doctrow's 'Scroogled' > http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html (The one main difference between the two that Orwell may have gotten 'wrong' is that it is the corporations, not the strictly the government, that serve as Big Brother in Doctrow's case - or rather, a coalition of corporations and the government. Then again, in Neal Stephenson, the corporations eventually become the government, so that's not as significant a difference as it really might seem.)
stock_toaster 15y ago
I think it depends on the culture, and geopolitical region. Huxley might have been more right for many places (certainly seems so for 'the west'), but Orwell seems to have been pretty dead on about some of the more oppressive regimes of the world - North Korea for instance?

yuhong 15y ago

That is when "not every press is good press" is a good thing.

Natsu 15y ago

Sometimes I wonder if we would be better off if 1984 and the like had never been written. It feels like people have been using them as a how-to manual.

sounds 15y ago
The idea of a dystopian state was already old in 1949 (when the book was first published). Wikipedia lists literature back to 1835, though I think ancient Romans would have been able to write awesome dystopian literature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature
pyre 15y ago
Unfortunately, the idea that there is a controlling mastermind using 1984 as a guide book is only nice insofar as it makes the dynamics of large groups of people and emergent behaviors seem controllable (or at least fixable) without long painful attempts to reshape the fabric of culture/society. The reality is that books like 1984 are commenting on human tendencies. Tendencies that would exist regardless of the existence of the commentary.
jff 15y ago
Well, at the very least we wouldn't have to hear it referenced every time a government or company does something, so that's a plus.

nagrom 15y ago

The tone is a little similar to GlaDOS in the portal games. "Friendly sinister". I don't believe the dismissive message, either. I cannot imagine a scenario where the TSA becomes 'popular' now; where the populace as a whole gets respect back for them. I half expect the US government to perform a rebranding exercise within the next 5 years and hope that a change in the letterheads and badges resets the clock on an ever-more resentful populace.

temphn 15y ago

The spelling and grammatical errors tell you within 5 seconds that this person is not very intelligent. For obvious security reasons, we can’t discuss our technology's detection capability in detail, however TSA conducts extensive testing of all screening technologies in the laboratory and at airports prior to rolling them out to the entire field. This is a run-on sentence. Imaging technology has been extremely effective in the field and has found things artfully concealed on passengers as large as a gun or nonmetallic weapons, on down to a tiny pill or tiny baggies of drugs. "on down" is faulty parallelism. It’s one of the best tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as… you know… things that go BOOM. Two ellipses in one sentence? Leave aside the "BOOM". With all that said, it is one layer of our 20 layers of security (Behavior Detection, Explosives Detection Canines, Federal Air Marshals, , etc.) Extra comma and the capitalization feels bizarre. and is not a machine that has all the tools we need in one handy device. We’ve never claimed it’s the end all be all. The phrase is "the be all and end all" or "the be-all and end-all". One can go on, but almost every sentence here displays this person's low level of intelligence. Leaving aside the content, it's just poorly written. The punchline is that the TSA's budget is double that of Facebook's $3.7 billion in revenue. $8.1 billion in tax dollars for a gang of complete morons.

kzrdude 15y ago
Uneducated. "That's, like, uniquely american!" -G. W. Bush.
corin_ 15y ago
Thinking that you can judge someone's intelligence by their spelling and grammar is so incredibly wrong. And I don't mean wrong in a moral "don't be that guy" way (though that too), I mean wrong as in technically inaccurate.
- c1sc0 15y ago
  Can you elaborate on how this is technically inaccurate? Is there something like a Flesch-Kincaid test for intelligence?

shin_lao 15y ago

I don't think there is any attempt at anything. It's just written by someone not very intelligent supervised by someone of similar intelligence swimming in a sea of mediocrity.

ktizo 15y ago
...wallowing in an ocean of despair, on a planet of delusion. ;)
betterth 15y ago
Exactly. Someone got assigned to "blog duty" at the TSA, of which TSA management has no idea what a blog is, or why it is important, but there is a regulation somewhere, or a rule, that says the TSA must maintain a blog. So someone maintains a blog. This is my estimation of the situation. A Hanlon's Razor moment: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- fluidcruft 15y ago
  I think there's probably an element of: "Bob, we need you to write something now about this video everyone is emailing each other" and Bob not having any authority, information or resources to actually address anything.
- zyeljanee 15y ago
  But if you read carefully its like there is some truth in it. Nowadays people are doing crazy things without thinkig about the consequences.
- jakejake 15y ago
  Or it could have been carefully written for a specific target audience (of which HN readers are not a part). Mind control!
  - betterth 15y ago
    Switch razors to Occam's Razor: all other things being equal, the idea that makes the fewest assumptions is better. Either the government is engaging in a disinformation campaign that is so broad and so pervasive that even the blogs at the TSA are involved... Or it's some idiot at an ineffective government organization who screwed up.

joshz 15y ago

Just a way to make you feel good about not having a say.

tobinfricke 15y ago

"A video is making its way around the interwebs this morning from some guy claiming he figured out a way to beat our body scanners (imaging technology)." I couldn't read any further.

stfu 15y ago
I have the slight suspicion that the TSA is going to remember the name of "some guy" very well when it comes to letting him board a plane anytime soon.
- RandallBrown 15y ago
  I doubt it. The TSA only sees your name when they check your ID and boarding pass when you enter security. TSA agents probably don't care enough to memorize the guys name and then hassle him.

khafra 15y ago

Alignment: Affable Evil

DanBC 15y ago

If people haven't read 1984 recently they should give it another go. > But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. This appears to describe behaviour of a small[1] number of border guards and customs agents seen in a number of recent HN threads. > If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever. At least Big Brother worked. I don't know what's worse about the jokey incompetence of the blog post: the fact that it hopelessly missed the mark for correct tone; or the thought that maybe they actually believed it; or that most people will just shrug their shoulders and think "meh, so what?" and do nothing more about it. [1] for various values of small, possibly including "most of them".

bootstampface 15y ago
> most people will just shrug their shoulders and think "meh, so what?" AKA, Ipad3 is out, let's go shopping!

tomkin 15y ago

> It’s one of the best tools available to detect metallic and non-metallic items, such as… you know… things that go BOOM. This is uncharacteristic - for a national security organization - even as a blog post. When people question authority, and the emperor has no clothes: resort to fear-mongering and keywords that incite panic? Check. This blog post is going to be archived and referenced for the next decade. I'd say some restructuring is about to be pushed down TSA's throats. BOOM indeed.

charlieok 15y ago

One of the best images I can recall that capture "big brother jokey" http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091026215221/harrypotter/images/8/8d/Dolores_Umbridge_headshot.jpg http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091026215221/harrypo...

shalmanese 15y ago

That would be Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

wtvanhest 15y ago

This person's quote from the comments about sums it up. "This was such a carefully worded blog post that one can safely conclude that the vulnerability described in the video is true. I especially like your use of phrases like "some guy" and "crude attempt" in an attempt to discredit the allegations without actually addressing the allegations themselves."