Could we theoricitaly ever have, a government that keeps really close tabs on everyone, and brain washes those  who won't conform?

Or are we there, already?

???

George or who?

The British author who wrote 1984.

That'd be George Orwell then!  ;)

I am certain that we aren't there yet.  Some governments try to brain wash people but there are always some free-thinkers.

That'd be George Orwell then!   ;)

I am certain that we aren't there yet.  Some governments try to brain wash people but there are always some free-thinkers.


Like Winston Smith.

Like Winston Smith.


Free to know, as a free thinker, he's f**ked from the start.  Greeting from a dead man. 

Orwell was spot on.  Orwell foretold everything from the surveillance state to the military-industrial complex in "1984."

Oligarchical collectivism = corporatism.  Remember our boys on the Malabar front!

Those scatterbrained proles at the town halls are saying, in essence, slavery is freedom and ignorance is knowledge.

Oh yeah.  It's all there.

http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/11/brave.gif

Yep, North Korea.

Yep, North Korea.


Kim Jong Il is indeed a much more literal Big Brother figure than anything we've got here.

Clearly, one can draw lots of parallels to what Orwell predicted in 1984, and it is very scary.

I definitely see similarities to the surveillance parts.  There are cameras on every street traffic light, cameras in every ATM, GPS in every cell phone (which most people have nowadays (good luck in finding a working pay phone on the street)), OnStar Satellite tracks how fast you are driving and calls authorities if you are speeding. E-mail is monitored. 

Some of these technological developments have been used as plot devices in television shows and movies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDkHwOQoUFc  Dr. Who - The Sontaran Stratagem

and countless movies about people's identities being wiped out (their credit history, amongst other things)  The Net, Enemy of the State http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXtUjWkhbcw

Where Orwell got it wrong was he assumed that governments could be that good at things.. a necessary assumption for the book, I know, but compared to pretty much any real world government they were staggeringly efficient.

1984 wouldn't work if Big Brother was offline for software updates every ten minutes ;)

Could we theoricitaly ever have, a government that keeps really close tabs on everyone, and brain washes those  who won't conform?

Or are we there, already?


Keeps really close tabs on everyone?  Already done.  The network traffic that happens when I click "Post" is being monitored and likely stored by NSA.  Even if this post isn't archived, they know that in writing it, I looked up the machines that NSA uses to monitor network traffic, and a few minutes later, I looked up a docudrama about the culture of East Germany.  It's pretty easy - even if all you have is those two URLs and my IP address - to figure out where my political opinion on the subject lies.

Brainwashes those who don't conform?  Waste of resources.  Unpersons don't need to be cured of their sickness.  They're unpersons.  You can only cure people.  You can't cure unpeople, because unpeople never existed, and could never have been sick.

The Soviet Union was the alpha test.  They failed.  East Germany was the canonical example of the failure mode - one in three people were working part-time for STASI (MiniLuv), but they had to use pen and paper to keep track of everything.  The state collapsed under the weight of its own surveillance bureaucracy.  Recommended viewing: The Lives of Others, 2006.

China was the beta test.  It's worked reasonably well, but requires that the surveillance be visible to the populace; hence, the Great Firewall, and a bunch of snarky Chinese kids making coded linguistic jokes (that are actually pretty funny if you can find a Chinese person to explain the idioms to you :) about how ineffective it is.  But reality control does work -- those very same Chinese kids think that the Tienanmen Square massacre was something blown completely out of proportion by the West.  The infrastructure of the modern Chinese surveillance state is supplied by US hardware vendors like CSCO, cooperation from US web service providers such as YHOO, and of course, the various Chinese Internet stocks like BIDU and company.

The West is the production model.  Narus boxen in locked rooms in every major US telco hub.  We're not cleared to know what NSA does with that data.  It's widely speculated that it's primarily used for profiling.  99.99999999999% of it is never seen by anything other than supercomputers.  I doubt I'm worthy of a profile, but if I was, I'd be scored as "Cynical bastard, but ultimately harmless.  Push comes to shove, he'd sell everyone out for a glimpse of our datacenter, even if the deal was we'd shoot him after showing him our cool toys."

The production model does have its benefits.  In the Alpha and Beta test states, it's pretty clear to most of the citizens what's going on, and they tend to chafe under the yoke of the State.  The production model aims to solve the problem -- in the negative, we don't hate our thoughtcriminals, we just make fun of them.  (cf. Nicole Kidman: "It's more effective that way.")  In the positive, nuts who qualify as "harmless" can carry guns to political rallies without fear of being shot, and crypto/aero/techno geeks can walk up to (but not over :) the borders of some the most secure sites on Earth and feel completely safe.

Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning.  Unfortunately, he chose to do it by writing something that is also an excellent functional specification. 

He wrote it in 1948, based on his experiences with the pre-alpha test sites.  What Orwell never anticipated is that computers would become cheap enough to actually implement his functional spec.  A government's only real goal is to remain in power.  (Note: governments and political parties have nothing to do with each other)  With the advent of cheap computing, surveillance infrastructures cease to be mind-numbing bureaucracies full of unreliable elements such as Winston Smith.  The only non-surveillance states remaining are third-world hell holes so impoverished that they can't even afford the most basic of surveillance networks.  Much as I'm ideologically opposed to the notion of the surveillance state, I'm willing to make that tradeoff.  Free states are no longer an option, but so what?  You buy your food, beer, and video games in the country you have, not the country you want.  Call me Faustus Bar, but if freedom's off the table, I'll take the gilded cage over the Soviet/Chinese prototypes any day.

Orwell thought there would have to be somebody watching YOU from the OTHER side of the screen in order for you to obey the message.  He gave people too much credit. 

You have your freedom of choice, see, so you can use the Internet to engage in cerebral discourse on fine site like this one, or you can go for gambling, sports scores, cookie recipes, and porn.  Where do the proles go?

::)

Here's the thing about IDEAS that guys in Orwell's generation didn't quite figure out -- though Orwell did allude to it when Winston goes to the prole pub -- you don't have to wast a lot of time and effort censoring ideas.  When you censor an idea, you just make it that much more desirable.  Here's what you do:  You make it so ideas don't matter.

You can ask for a parade permit in DC so you and 1000 of your closest friends can march on Lafayette Park and foment Communist Revolution.  The city bureaucrat will rubber stamp it and hand it back to you.  Nobody gives a rip. 

;D

Orwell thought there would have to be somebody watching YOU from the OTHER side of the screen in order for you to obey the message.  He gave people too much credit. 


Actually, he didn't.  The idea of the Panopticon dates back to the 18th century.  It's not that there's always someone watching you through the telescreen, it's the idea that there might be someone (or something, say, a computer that generates a report on you, where the report can have real-world repercussions against you) watching you, that keeps you in line.


You have your freedom of choice, see, so you can use the Internet to engage in cerebral discourse on fine site like this one, or you can go for gambling, sports scores, cookie recipes, and porn.  Where do the proles go?


Whrever they can get prolefeed!


Here's the thing about IDEAS that guys in Orwell's generation didn't quite figure out -- though Orwell did allude to it when Winston goes to the prole pub -- you don't have to wast a lot of time and effort censoring ideas.  When you censor an idea, you just make it that much more desirable.  Here's what you do:  You make it so ideas don't matter.

You can ask for a parade permit in DC so you and 1000 of your closest friends can march on Lafayette Park and foment Communist Revolution.  The city bureaucrat will rubber stamp it and hand it back to you.  Nobody gives a rip. 
;D


And in this, may lie real freedom.

Personally, I think David Brin's The Transparent Society is a pipe dream.  The Party will never let such a thing happen.  But it's a hell of a good non-fiction exploration of the concept and its implications, as is his 2002 hard SF companion piece, Kiln People.

But I also think Brin's Transparent Society would be a fantastic solution to the privacy issue.  When surveillance technology becomes cheap enough that everyone (and I mean everyone from the highest-ranking politician, to the most corrupt cop, to the drunken bum on the street, to the most twisted members of the *chans) has the ability to place live streaming audio/video bugs in anyone's car, bedroom, or office, we might just stop caring about whether Bill Clinton inhaled, Bush II was an alcoholic, or Obama tried crack.

Privacy is dead.  We're slowly getting over that. 

We're still at a stage where social networking is for the proles - your kids won't make it into politics, because their indiscretions, all logged permanently on  FarceBookSpace, will keep them from ever seeking public office.  The BookedInPlace of 2020 won't have pictures of half-naked Kennedy, Bush, or Clinton children doing unspeakable things in college, because Royalty doesn't do things like that when the cameras aren't around.  But when everything everyone does really is being recorded by countless omnipresent cameras and sensors, that'll no longer be an option, even for Royalty.  Short of holding their orgies in a Faraday Cage (whose own presence will be probable cause that something naughty's going on :), we as a society will have two options, and frankly, either one's fine.  Either people who vie for political power will actually have to live up to their standards, or people will realize that everyone does stupid stuff in college, and the so-called "standards" were all BS to begin with.

As I said, I think it's a pipe dream.  The technology will be built, but the Party will fight tooth and nail to make sure that only the Party has access to it.  The War on Sousveillance will be the next generation's War on Drugs.

Come to the UK, if you want to see the development of Orwellian police state. More CCTV cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world (1 for every 14 people), increasing erosion of civil liberties, more & more (sometimes non-governmental) organisations being given rights to monitor people. We even have micro-chipped bins(trashcans) in some areas to monitor the levels of refuse people are disposing of, in order to fine those who don't comply. Police Automated Number Plate Recognition systems on main roads to monitor the movements of people. I could go on, but it's agitating me just to think about it.
I think we should re-name George Orwell to George Saw-Well, as I feel he was indeed prophetic in several of his novels. AAAAARGH!