MIT Technology Review on Where Orwell Went Wrong 667
nakhla writes "MIT's Technology Review is running an interesting article entitled Who's Afraid of 1984? The article talks about Orwell's famous work, and examines how Orwell's view of technology's impact on freedom and democracy was flawed. The article points out that, in fact, freedom and democracy were strengthened by technological innovations, and addresses its affect on Stalinism and Nazism. An interestng read for those who are worried about technology's impact on our generation and beyond."
wrong? (Score:2, Interesting)
joke If HDTV ever catches on, I'm not buying one... I don't want their camera looking back at me.
Radio on a chip?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hidden near the end, for those that can't/won't read the article:
Radios have become so inexpensive that Intel is now planning to engrave a miniature one on the corner of every silicon microchip, at no extra cost.
It links to a subscriber-only article, so there really aren't any further details. Hell, I think something like this deserves a Slashdot story all to itself! This has gotta be the coolest hack I've heard all year.
Orwell Wasn't Wrong.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are some other things that HAVE come to pass
1. Many Police units have their own paramilitary force
2. Camera Camera everywhere, and more on the way
3. Reading certain books can and will get you put on a "watch list"
4. Members of certain political parties are actively discriminated against (not all presidential canidates will face each other in a debate)
5. Loosening controls on wiretaps and eavesdropping (more so in Europe than here)
This article didn't convince me that our freedoms aren't under attack. It just reminded me how many sheep there are in the world
cluge
Literal translation is not the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Kafka's `The Trial' (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:2008 headline - MIT Optimistic, Orwell Right (Score:5, Interesting)
The only mistake that orwell seemed to make was the timeline, and accounting for biotech. (how long untill genetic profiling?)
between TIPS [citizencorps.gov] (aka "The Party".. are you a member?)
DRM and the olagopoly of companies now being allowed to own the media, we are well on our way to being told "the big lie"
DRM requires no copying of digital media without permission. And soon we will be required to have all digital broadcast media.
Perhaps he should have also been more afraid of the private sector than the coporate sector.
We're ending up with the MAX HEADROOM future instead of the 1984 one.
Me on Where MIT Technology Review Went Wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure there is a good chance that in the west we may be able to avoid it but that doesn't erease the chance of it happening. I would argue that China is very much becoming 1984 as envisioned. As to fabrication of information just look at the Beijing newspaper's response to finding out The Onion story was false "'Some small American newspapers frequently fabricate offbeat news to trick people into noticing them, with the aim of making money,' the paper said. 'This is what the Onion does.'" Is that bending the truth enough? Add to that blocking certain content from being accessable over the internet, controlling the media, numerous human rights violations, indocternation, spreading false news about "enemies" (Falon Gong), they arn't that far away from reaching Orwell's vision.
Off the mark (Score:1, Interesting)
Revisited" are a much better preiction of the dangers we face.
The real threat is not technology but falure to advance our spiritual
side (note: "spiritual" != religious) and learn what healthy
competition is rather than trying to dominate
one another over personal ego.
Conclusions like this, one way or the other,
miss the point and are dangerous in that they
lull us into a since of secuity about how any
one of us is able to see the "bottom level"
reality of human nature and what history will
bring.
Re:More afraid of Socialism (Score:1, Interesting)
Capitalism is the only system that guarantees an individual's right to own property, regardless of whether that individual is a CEO or a worker. Government regulation, taxation, and socialist redistribution schemes are what result in people losing their property and control.
Socialism promises everything and delivers nothing, except to the elite in control. It's an inherently unequal system, inevitably tilted toward those in power. Capitalism is an inherently equal system, where any person can hold their own and even become successful purely by hard work and merit.
Technology has always liberated information (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure there are wobbles in the trend towards "information wants to be free", but the overall trend is unmistakeable and unstoppable: less centralized control of information means less centralized control of people.
David Brin wrote a book, The Transparent Society (I think), which considered what will happen as webcams shrink. Neal Stephenson (sp?) wrote The Diamond Age along the same lines. Scott McNealy is right: privacy is dying, get used to it. It will hurt the powerful more than the poor. Look what cheap videocams did for police brutality in the Rodney King case. Now lots of cop cars have cameras, more for self protection against false claims than for evidence of crime or for TV ratings. Imagine what will happen when ordinary people have access to floating dust mite webcams, ten to the dollar. What would you rather watch on the internet spy cams: someone getting banged in a trailer in Kansas, or back room deals at the White House? Well, maybe individuals will watch the Kansas coupling, but the press and volunteer watchdogs will opt for the White House every time.
The Technology of Killing (Score:2, Interesting)
What worries me? Do you know what worries me? It's the knowledge that there has been essentially 2 things that have kept the United States a democracy over the last 2 centuries:
1) The United States military has not attempted to overthrow the government.
2) If the military did overthrow the government, an armed and angry population would rise up against it.
The military hasn't tried to overthrow the government because the majority of people in the military believe in the democratic system. What Orwell wrote about was that if despotic elements controlled information, they would control what people believe, military and civilian alike. But I pose you this question:
What would prevent despotism from taking over if the military did not require human beings to function?
I realize I'm looking ahead about 50 to 100 years, but who here has played Warcraft? Ok, now imagine Joe Despot is playing Warcraft, but his orcs are actually mobile semiautominous killing machines that are walking through your neighborhood, and he's observing the action from a secret base in Wisconsin. Are you going to revolt against him? Are you going to be able to fight for your constitutional rights with Mechadroid 19 pointing an assault rifle at your head? Remember what Clint Eastwood said in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, "There are two kinds of people in the world, those with guns, and those that dig."
Speaking of Orwell (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, the ones that basically promise to keep your developers in line through increased task monitoring? I'm all for source code control, bug tracking, etc, but the crux of these ads seem to be "your developers (especially those overseas ones..foreign bastards!) are probably fucking off, why not monitor them with Sourceforge?"....
Some even directly use the "unblinking eye" motif!
Who is the advertising genius that came up with that shit?
The reason why it has been good so far... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two things, closely related, that could can cause the 1984-style world. One of them, as the article correctly pointed out, would be if technology was too expensive to be within reach of the common citizen; having this would make it so that only large, wealthy organizations such as the government could get their hands on the stuff. This, it seems, we don't have to worry about too much; the free-market Western philosophies seem have to helped keep prices down.
The second, more ominous road to 1984 is centralization. The more things become centralized, the fewer powerful entities are needed to collude and walk us down that road. For the most part, so far, this hasn't been a worry, because we have many competing manufacturers of technology, few large multi-state-government cooperations, and a significant, dispersed group of well-educated, free-thinking geeks.
However, with the collapsing of information technology into a couple of roles (you're well out of the norm if you use the internet for anything than HTTP, HTTPS, POP, IMAP, and SMTP over their standard ports), it becomes easy to pass broad, encompassing laws which attempt to lay control over these few avenues. Even the fact that there is one Internet which everyone is expected to be connected to helps make it easier for many software companies to centrally control their dispersed, previously independent products, by having them talk back to central command in real-time (for operations such as registration, remote-disabling, etc). Furthermore, we have single-authority systems such as DNS, overruled by ICANN, providing another source of woes.
In order to be stalwart against falling down this trap, controlled technological homogeny needs to be resisted, and diverse, competing, preferably open technologies (because they promote diversity and competition by their very nature) need to be promoted. What does this mean practically? In the software world, for instance, it means de-facto assumptions such as everyone having MS Word and Windows. It also means resisting efforts that approach the idea of allowing someone to control, from production to consumer sensory inputs, every step of a media feed.
So yes, it's been quite nice so far, and looking at it the right way, you might think it's going to stay that way. But growing centralization and the existance of large, power, multi-national corporations and corporation-conglomerates makes me wonder if it's really going to be that rosy if we just lean back put our feet up.
For more information, I recommend reading Lawrence Lessig's excellent "The Future of Ideas".
Re:More afraid of Socialism (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh, bullshit.
Take some social science classes, moron.
90% of the developed world including countries voted by the UN as the best places to live are Socialist.
This includes Canada, Japan, and most of western Europe.
Are you suggesting that these countries are all totalitarian?
If so, you need to open up a newspaper.. (one that DOESN'T have headlines like "Three headed alien eats baby in Midwest")
There's always big brother (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean look at the world today. Who do you think decides what is good and what is bad in the world today? Look at international diplomacy
Look at economics...What we buy is decided by the marketing budgets of giant conglomerates who can trivially crush any small scale competition in the market simply on the basis of the depth of their war chest.
The same goes for morality and education -- the culture in control of the world forces its own version of history and morality down our throats, and we have no choice but to accept their rhetoric simply because our voices are drowned out by their overwhelming media presence.
It may sound strange to someone living in the 'first world' -- but for someone like me, this is an everyday reality.
They may be MIT, but these guys don't know what they are talking about. They don't know how heavily the odds are stacked against anyone in the world who refuses to conform to what Big Brother ordains.
You see, the beauty of 1984 was that while to a detached reader, the system seemed brutal and repressive, to someone absorbed by the system, it was the only way of life they could possibly dream of.
The fact that these guys seem so convinced of their own infallibility only portends that perhaps, we are letting down our guard and letting propoganda get the better of us.
Vigilance is the order of the day my friends! Let technology be your friend, but don't let it lull you into false complacency...
Why do you say that? (Score:5, Interesting)
So things don't go badly in the real 2084, it is very important that we give our full and unconditional love and obedience to our government, the sole defender of freedom in the world. Otherwise, we could face the horrors Orwell wrote about: economic ruin, mass unemployment, global warming, parentless children roaming the streets in packs, cities isolated and divided by attacks on communication infrastructure synchronized with encrypted messages over the very same lines, suitcase nuclear weapons, drug-dealing warlords with more power than a feeble and helpless legitimate government, and so forth.
We need to make sure there is no place for a terrorist like Big Brother to hide.
Re:wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)
Keep in mind that everyone either does things, or has characteristics that others might consider "deviant", and you probably don't know what those things are because they seem normal to you because you take your privacy for granted. Also keep in mind that things that are "normal" now might be "deviant" in the future.
People aren't afraid of the legitimate use of their information. They are afraid of the abuse of priveledged information- and the only way to keep that from happening is to keep it hidden.
I would say that you are delusional to think that you have nothing that could be used against you in the right context.
What '1984' was about (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Exactly! (Score:3, Interesting)
> Sure, the idea of telescreens in every home was scary, but it was just one facet of 1984. How about constant warfare to keep production levels high and boost GNP?
One of my favorite amusements these days is watching the Administration's juggling act, trying to terrify the public so it will support a very vague "war" effort and an accelerated erosion of civil liberties, and simultaneously to reassure the public that everything is A-OK, in order to drive the stock market back up. (Recent corporate scandal news has obfuscated this conflict somewhat, but it's still there if you look.)
> Keeping a high prison population is also a good waste product that boosts GNP. In the U.S. the prison population has gone from 200,000 in early 1970's to over 2 million in 2002. The majority of that is due to nonviolent drug offenders.
I wonder sometimes whether that is partly aimed at reducing the (reported) unemployment.
> Yet prison construction and technology is one of the highest growth industries in the U.S., and it's basically corporate welfare.
In some states they are going further, contracting out the administration of prison facilities to privately held corporations, as well as the construction.
It is also interesting to compare the cost of sending a citizen to college vs. incarcerating a citizen for four years, yet the public seems to be much more enthusiastic about funding prisons than they are about funding education.
Not to be paranoid, but (Score:2, Interesting)
Writer is naive about Russia, other things (Score:3, Interesting)
The article says "we watched democracy and liberty spread (like a plague--to Communists) first through the Soviet satellites and then into the heart of the Soviet Union itself." This is a very simple-minded and naive view of Russia. Russians were able to vote since 1917 in elections - true for only one party, but in the US is there an alternative to the Republicrats? George Washington himself discouraged seperate political parties. Let's look at the "democratic and free" Russia now. One of the first things that happened was the Tsar was exhumed and given a state funeral - not a good sign. Then the socialist bureaucracy who controlled the means of production became the capitalists who controlled the means of production. Who are the new Russian rich? The old socialist bureaucracy! At least in the old system they didn't pass on their privilege generation to generation. Nowadays, an ex-KGB head runs Russia (Putin) and he's been censoring the press recently. Where's the uproar in the West? This MIT article is as much spoonfed propaganda as they had in the Soviet Union. It will only make sense if you're used to nodding and going along with "the party line". I live near a Russian ex-pat community, and they do not have these fantasies about how Russia magically went from a horrible evil empire in 1988 to a wonderful free democracy where everything is perfect by 1992, or 2002. I'll believe the people who've been there over this almost sickening propaganda and over-simplification. The reality is things were better (although with problems) than is implied before 1990, and are worse than explicitly said they are, after 1990. If any Slashdotter wants to find out about Russia, stop reading what people from MIT or the White House say and find a real, live person who lived in Russia during the 80's and 90's and ask them.
Michael Harrington, a student of the poor in America, once said "If there is a technological advance without a social advance, there is, almost automatically, an increase in human misery." I tend to agree with this position. Unlike decades ago, I have had to undergo the humiliation of a urine test multiple times in order to get a job so I can continue eating and have a roof over my head. I even had to be fingerprinted with the fingerprints sent to the FBI twice - once for a city job, once for a financial job. Every street I walk down has security cameras gazing at me, and every store I walk into has security gates that electromagnetically scan me. My communications over the phone and over the Internet are open to a variety of monitoring, this has always been the case with my international communications, with the PATRIOT act it means virtually anything.
1984 has come to pass, and like in the book, they are continually refining the technique. If people sit around and just let it happen, it will get worse and worse. The only solution is to organize and fight it. CPSR and EFF help fight some of this technological encroachment, and there are other groups that fight other technological encroachment - NORML for urine tests (the Supreme court just ruled public schools can test students in any extracurricular activity, sports or no, for drugs) and many other groups. The only way these things get better by is by organizing together and doing something about it. There are no big victories, big changes are always just the accumulation of many small victories. Like-minded people organizing together to fight for the democracy and liberty as the article said are the only means of achieveing real liberty and democracy, one step at a time.
Orwell's biggest point was about religion! (Score:3, Interesting)
Orwell's foresight drove surveillance underground (Score:2, Interesting)
The exultation of Chinese faxes neglects to mention The Great Firewall and Falun Gong & dissident arrests made based on those faxes. Once a communication medium becomes widespread, it's nearly a necessity of daily life, making it prohibitively difficult for subversives to opt out of being monitored through that channel.
Yes, it's great that radio is ubiquitous, but radio is hardly high tech these days. High tech in communications is the Echelon system, which makes the relevant question not whether we are being monitored, but whether we are being monitored accurately. Only governments & large corporations can afford the sophisticated filtering software that does the eavesdropping today. This economic gap in monitoring technology will persist unless collective advocacy becomes commonplace.
But it is a testament to Orwell's foresight that we know so little of Echelon and the NSA. Without '1984,' we'd have succumbed to their agendas through attrition and our awareness of surveillance would be a given. Because of the reactionary forces conjured by Orwell's dystopian vision, these organizations have had to keep their surveillance activities secret, mitigating their potential for intimidation. For the great majority of us, this is a case of ignorance truly being bliss, but that's no salve to the odd subversive who's caught the other end of it.
Re:an alternate view QWZX (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, no. Wrong again.
No, actually he's right. Scalping was a tradition of some indian tribes for centuries before the European s came over. Yes there was an attempt at revisionist history for a while with the whole "noble savage" thing, but it has been soundly debunked.
As far as murder and torture of prisoners go, the Indians take the cake. Look at the Mochtes, the Aztecs atc. Yes, I know they're South/central American, but torture to death of prisoners was more the rule than the exception throughout the Americas.
Not that this excuses the atrocities commited against the indians, but before you make some ignorant comment like "Wrong again", you might actually want to be right in the future.
no exception (Score:2, Interesting)
There is no exception for disposable technology. It is neither good or bad, simply an advance. It's effects on the environment are a consequence of it's (mis)use.
You make this point yourself when you say, "Our rampant consumerism may cause our downfall..." It's consumerism at fault, not technology.
Re:1984 == 1948 (Score:3, Interesting)
It is somewhat disappointing that a UC Prof. can write an essay on Orwell without apparently knowing this elementary fact.
Orwell was not making a prophecy, he thought that the USSR would eventually be beaten the same way the NAZI party was. The point of the book was to make people aware that 'Uncle Joe' as he was then called was not the nice guy who saved Britain from Hitler but a monster.
Other facts US authors commonly miss out when they write about Orwell is that he was a socialist, he wrote the 1945 Labor party manifesto. Endless fun can be had at parties getting a libertarian twit to go off on a rant and then tell him that.
Unaddressed: Databases, and Foucault's Theories (Score:4, Interesting)
The Mode of Information [amazon.com] By Mark Poster
The chapter on Foucault and Databases is the one that has struck me as the most telling on the subject of personal liberties.
The key concept is that of the Super-Panopticon. The Panopticon is a design for a prison. The prison is designed as an octagonal tower. The cells are all along the inside surface of the tower, guard posts in the center. Each cell is equipped with one-way glass allowing the guards to see in, but not allowing the prisoners to see out. Prisoner behavior is therefore controlled by the knowledge that they may be observed at any time without knowing whether they are being observed.
Poster points out that the information collected about each person in the high-tech age is all put into databases. Where they shop, what they buy, what books they read, what movies they see, what sites they surf on the web, etc, etc. The fact that all this information is available to the State if the State chooses to access it.
Thus, like the panopticon-prison, control is exerted by the State as each citizen knows that the information can be accessed but does not know if it is being accessed.
This is how totalitarianism creeps in thru today's technology. The Super-Panopticon is a passive control system for the masses, made possible by the availability of stored personal information.
In 1984 Orwell writes that one never knew if there was anyone watching at the other end of the telescreen, but it was always advisable to act as if there were.
Today the telescreen is invisible, but no less there for all of that. The original totalitarian states may be gone, but today's quasi-representative governments have gained the means to impose their own kind of control.
Re:wrong? (Score:1, Interesting)
When they came for the communists I said nothing
When they came for the socialists I said nothing
When they came for the jews I said nothing
When they came for me there was no-one left to say anything
(from memory -the full quote is a bit longer)
It basically means that if you close your eyes to "badness" because it does directly affect you eventually it will and there will be no-one to protect you
(Martin Niemolloer began as a supporter of Hitler - not a nazi but a supporter)
Re:Not technology, the application of technology (Score:3, Interesting)
IBM and the holocaust [amazon.com]
Also, please notice that statements like
There is nothing wrong with technology, there is no reason to be skeptical about technology.
are statements of opinion, not fact. Lines of research might be pursued for political reasons just as well as for any other kinds. While it may be true in theory that technology itself has no preferences, trying to apply such statements to the real world is splitting hairs at best, disingenious at worst.