2011 is the new 1984

[Thank Me!]

You could call it a conspiracy, but its not. I think all conspiracies are bullshit. My favorite book is 1984 (spare me "oh how cliche") and the government isnt making it 1984, we are.

I went into my supermarket, and went up to a guy and asked for cheese at the deli. He pointed to a kiosk. I put in my deli order, and touched the buttons on the screen. It said "would you like to take a receipt and be paged when your order is ready or get a text message notification." I opted for the paging. People were walking around with hand held price scanners that they give to you, you scan your frequent shopper card, and it tells you what discount you get on everything.

Now there are big social networks. You feed all the information about yourself to facebook, your talents, your hopes, your dreams, your friends, your family, your relationships, why they didnt work out, what you are doing what you are eating, everything. Twitter lets you do it from your GPS enabled phone. Foursquare encourages you to tag where you are all day everyday. All the time you are worried about being under surveillance, but you are shouting to everyone where you are and what you are doing.

Cameras are all around you. Parking lots, registers, public walk ways, busses, airports, schools, libraries, movie theaters.

You dont use cash because of the advantages of plastic and accounts. You show every gas station you stop at, every kind of food you buy, every time you buy porn, every time you do anything.

I dont know how complicated those personal scanners are at the grocery store, but if you are even semi interested in something, and scan it out of curiosity, do you think that some day they would have a total record of your interests?

Now I know it is no where near 1984, but we are creating our own 1984. How long until the government says, we need to regulate this, we need to regulate that, we need to watch all social network sites for activities relating to terrorism, we need to see who is purchasing food that is meant to be kept for longer than 60 days, or who has a food supply that sends up a red flag that they may be trying to leave soon even though they have no airplane flight booked.

Im not telling you to stop doing anything, just dont come crying to me when you have a cage of rats infront of you.

[GoodbyeSoberDay]

I wish I could thank you.

[ergoat]

Originally Posted by Pope John Paul MCCCXXXVII

you buy porn

You must be from 1984.

And no, I don't do half that shit, please revise your pronoun usage. It's irritating. Sounds like you spend too much time shopping and social networking. If anything regimes of power are instituted much more insidiously than CCTV and facebook records. More like Brave New World.

[Thank Me!]

Originally Posted by Wood

You must be from 1984.

And no, I don't do half that shit, please revise your pronoun usage. It's irritating. Sounds like you spend too much time shopping and social networking. If anything regimes of power are instituted much more insidiously than CCTV and facebook records. More like Brave New World.

I think you are somewhat missing the point of what I am saying.

[Miaow]

You are getting 1984 mixed up with Brave New World.

[takedrugs_killpeople]

Yea that's not really what 1984 is about, lol @ it being your "favorite book"

[arleybob]

Well, the part about cameras everywhere is correct, both in today's society and the fictional book's society. Facebook has been used to convict "criminals", and is almost a foreshadow to the whole concept of Thought Police.

Even when I was waiting to speak to a detective just over a week ago, he was finishing up with some kid who had been busted over something to do with Facebook, at least that's what I gathered from the conversation. That's fucked up. The fact that everyone broadcasts their thoughts with this and Twitter, and the fact that those thoughts can fuck us over if there's anything illegal in those thoughts. That is pretty close to 1984, if you ask me.

There are a lot more similarities, but that's the main thing I can think of.

[poast-bortem!]

fuck the system

[Daily]

I heard like 1% of crimes have been solved because of CCTV in the UK. Cameras are there as an attempt to prevent crime, rather than solve crime, to make a nigga stop in his tracks and say "shit, fucking cameras. Fuck the rape/robbery/murder I was about to do."

[King of the world]

Originally Posted by Daily

I heard like 1% of crimes have been solved because of CCTV in the UK. Cameras are there as an attempt to prevent crime, rather than solve crime, to make a nigga stop in his tracks and say "shit, fucking cameras. Fuck the rape/robbery/murder I was about to do."

This is true, it really doesn't prevent crime much either. It's a waste of money.

[King of the world]

Lol, wrong thread.

[Mr.Happy]

Originally Posted by Wood

And no, I don't do half that shit, please revise your pronoun usage. It's irritating. Sounds like you spend too much time shopping and social networking. If anything regimes of power are instituted much more insidiously than CCTV and facebook records. More like Brave New World.

Give it 20 years. Our generation (I assume you're around my age) didn't grow up with this. Nobody really had a mobile phone until 2000, and suddenly everyone had one. Old-style handsets are being universally replaced by smartphones, too. Nobody really used social networks until... what, 2003? 2004? And now most people have them. Nobody used the Internet until the early '90s, and now everybody uses it.

The people who don't use these things tend to have grown up without them, at least in part. You and I remember when everybody our age didn't have a social network, and didn't need one. I have a Facebook now and it's useful, but some others my age don't. Many older people don't use them. By contrast, practically everyone under the age of 18 I know or know of has one; it's just a part of life. If you don't live without it, you don't question it. What's rejected today is accepted tomorrow; it's hard to imagine more than a tiny minority people of our age saying "no I don't use smartphones, no I don't use social networks" in 20 years.

We're not creating a totalitarian 1984 or a Brave New World - I agree, the latter is a better comparison for the OP - but we're definitely putting in place the mechanism whereby it's possible for one to emerge. More and more of what we do is traceable... more and more of what we do generates data. We're caught on camera all the time. Our spending habits can be tracked, and our Internet browsing habits. Our movements can be tracked. Who we associate with can be tracked. The extent to which this is true depends on your habits; a user of social networks and smartphones will leave a bigger trail than somebody who doesn't use these services, but everybody in a Western country leaves data behind and everybody's data trail will keep expanding. It's difficult to prevent these things if they are considered progress by governments, because a government's job is to bring about progress.

This all has upsides and downsides. Hopefully the upsides will continue to outweigh the downsides. For all that you'd say "there has to be a line somewhere," people have always said things like that and we've never reached it. I'm sure the level of surveillance in our society today would shock the shit out of Orwell or Huxley, and they wrote dystopian fiction.

Have you heard of the concept of augmented reality? It's already moving beyond clunky, protrusive hardware like headsets and goggles... see smartphones. You can already hold a smartphone up to a piece of art or a sculpture and have it identify it and bring up information for you. You've long been able to see exactly where you are and get directions with GPS trackers, and now you can also see what services and buildings are nearby, get reviews, get prices, place orders... how long before it moves beyond traditional smartphones? Is it so unrealistic to think that we'll be able to integrate this stuff with a normal pair of glasses in ten years time? How much data will that generate? And how long before it would become the norm?

[King of the world]

I just can't until we make an artificial womb so we can exterminate all women.

[arleybob]

Originally Posted by Negrophobe

I just can't until we make an artificial womb so we can exterminate all women.

we already have the flesh light

[Turd_Smasher]

Class of 1984 was a good movie. That punk rocker chick was hot.

[Thank Me!]

Originally Posted by Lovecraft <3

You are getting 1984 mixed up with Brave New World.

never read brave new world, and im not saying its exactly like 1984, its a comparison.

[Mr.Happy]

Originally Posted by Pope John Paul MCCCXXXVII

never read brave new world, and im not saying its exactly like 1984, its a comparison.

Oh man, you have to read Brave New World. I like 1984 and all, it's a good book, but it's kind of heavy-handed and simplistic (although I imagine it seemed somewhat less so at the time it was written, the themes it deals with are just dealt with everywhere now so it's become a bit of a cliché). Brave New World is a lot fresher, and IMO more clever and engagingly written (Orwell had brilliant ideas but you wouldn't call him the world's greatest writer... kinda like Asimov in that regard). And it's more plausible, too, thinking long-term; subjugating people through totalitarian oppression is hard to manage and sustain, but... well, I won't ruin it. Just go read it.