SESH.sxQuarters @ Quartyard - 02 Apr feat. Quarters, Charlie Burg, Telescreens
DoomsdaysCW#Orwell already knew in 1984: We willingly buy the ‘telescreens’ that are used against us.
1984’s “telescreens” may not have been pocket-sized or connected to social networks. But they tell us a lot about the risks of life in 2018.
By Henry Cowles, July 2018
"#Snowden was right. Re-reading 1984 in 2018, one is struck by the 'TVs that watch us,' which Orwell called telescreens. The #telescreen is one of the first objects we encounter: 'The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.' It is omnipresent, in every private room and public space, right up until the end of the book, when it is 'still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter' even after Smith has resigned himself to its rule.
"What’s most striking about the telescreen’s ubiquity is how right and how wrong Orwell was about our technological present. Screens are not just a part of life today: they are our lives. We interact digitally so often and in such depth that it’s hard for many of us to imagine (or remember) what life used to be like. And now, all that interaction is recorded. Snowden was not the first to point out how far smartphones and social media are from what Orwell imagined. He couldn’t have known how eager we’d be to shrink down our telescreens and carry them with us everywhere we go, or how readily we’d sign over the data we produce to companies that fuel our need to connect. We are at once surrounded by telescreens and so far past them that Orwell couldn’t have seen our world coming.
"Or could he? Orwell gives us a couple of clues about where telescreens came from, clues that point toward a surprising origin for the totalitarian state that 1984 describes. Taking them seriously means looking toward the corporate world rather than to our current governments as the likely source of freedom’s demise. If Orwell was right, #consumer choice–indeed, the ideology of choice itself–might be how the erosion of choice really starts.
"The first clue comes in the form of a technological absence. For the first time, Winston finds himself in a room without a telescreen:
'There’s no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow.'
"Though we learn to take the old man’s statements with a grain of salt, it seems that–at some point, for some people–the owning of a telescreen was a matter of choice.
"The second hint is dropped in a book within the book: a banned history of the rise of 'the Party' authored by one of its early architects who has since become 'the Enemy of the People.' The book credits technology with the destruction of privacy, and here we catch a glimpse of the world in which we live: 'With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.'
"What does the murky history of the telescreen tell us about the way we live now? The hints about an old man’s reluctance and television’s power suggest that totalitarian overreach might not start at the top–at least, not in the sense we often imagine. Unfettered access to our inner lives begins as a choice, a decision to sign up for a product because we 'feel the need of it.' When acting on our desires in the marketplace means signing over our data to corporate entities, the erosion of choice is revealed to be the consequence of choice—or at least, the consequence of celebrating choice."
#Orwell1984 #Smartphones #Telescreens #BigBrother #TechnologyAddiction
#GeorgeOrwell's 1984
Part 1, Chapter 8
"He was holdlng the lamp high up, so as to illuminate the whole room, and in the warm dim light the place looked curiously inviting. The thought flitted through Winston's mind that it would probably be quite easy to rent the room for a few dollars a week, if he dared to take the risk. It was a wild, impossible notion, to be abandoned as soon as thought of; but the room had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia, a sort of ancestral memory. It seemed to him that he knew exactly what it felt like to sit in a room like this, in an arm-chair beside an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob; utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you, no voice pursuing you, no sound except the singing of the kettle and the friendly ticking of the clock.
'There's no telescreen!' he could not help murmuring.
'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. Now that's a nice gateleg table in the corner there. Though of course you'd have to put new hinges on it if you wanted to use the flaps.'
"There was a small bookcase in the other corner, and Winston had already gravitated towards it. It contained nothing but rubbish. The hunting-down and destruction of books had been done with the same thoroughness in the prole quarters as everywhere else. It was very unlikely that there existed anywhere in Oceania a copy of a book printed earlier than 1960. The old man, still carrying the lamp, was standing in front of a picture in a rosewood frame which hung on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the bed."
feedFacebook to offer wide-angle videocall camera that tracks you as you move around your home https://boingboing.net/2018/10/08/facebook-to-offer-wide-angle-v.html #telescreens #Gadgets #privacy #Post