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1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
by robotswantdata 5mo ago
1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
- IndianAISupport 5mo ago[flagged]
- Forgeties79 5mo agoWhat?
- ChrisRR 5mo agoIt's a racism dogwhistle. Just ignore it
- Forgeties79 5mo agoIt was more incredulous than anything don’t worry
- IshKebab 5mo ago[flagged]
- aniviacat 5mo agoTimes would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.
- IshKebab 5mo agoTimes would definitely be better if people didn't repeat the same endless clichés.
- HerbManic 5mo agoThe internet would be a very quiet place and the publishing industry would go mostly broke if we had that requirement.
- devnullbrain 5mo agoOK. Is it a sensible thought? Did VPNs exist in 1949? No, it's trite and useless. You don't need to refer to popular literature to talk about authoritarianism, there are plenty of examples in real life.
- taneq 5mo ago> What an original thought. Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P
- tylerchilds 5mo agoThis take is doubleplus good
- juleiie 5mo ago1984 is extremely naive. It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check. So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment. It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud. One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them. Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.
- amiga386 5mo agoNineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country? Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
- tempodox 5mo agoReality has become indistinguishable from satire.