Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
the thing 1984 got wrong is that people are willingly buying their own (multiple) telescreens and happily submitting their entire life to the party
We didn’t see how we got to 1984. We just see one person living with consequences of what society has become. We’re building our own 1984 right now!
This is why Fahrenheit 451 (and not 1984) is my go-to analogy for today’s plight: Bradbury correctly predicted that people would willingly walk themselves into an oppressive technocracy for the sake of entertainment and convenience.
i mean we could say we’re living through 1984, brave new world, Fahrenheit 451, handmaid’s tale, maybe lolita–i haven’t read that one, but heard it’s a bit child-rapey
whatever it is, no one source has really encapsulated the hell of actual reality today
I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t read it, what’s not dystopian about it?
The first thing Wikipedia says about it is “Brave New World is a dystopian novel” 😅
Maybe you not finding it especially dystopian says more about the state of the world right now than the book… 😅
Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.
In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.
In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.
Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.
Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.
So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.
From the view of John the Savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement
In the lower three classes, people are cloned in order to produce up to 96 identical “twins.” Identity is also achieved by teaching everyone to conform, so that someone who has or feels more than a minimum of individuality is made to feel different, odd, almost an outcast.
https://www.huxley.net/studyaid/bnwbarron.html
I’d argue that intentionally cloning people with limited abilities and then raising them to stay in thier lane is an artificial barrier…
From the view of the savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
1984 and brave new world ass world
relevant webcomic contrasting 1984 and brave new world, which is insightful, but doesn’t include the reality that we’re literally living in both novels’ universes
Give me brave new world all day - it would be vastly preferable to whatever this shit is.
Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.
It seems Brave new world is the global north/middle class, 1984 is the global south/working class… With class experience varying by county and over time with a tend towards 1984 experience as the majorities wealth gets extracted by the upper class.
Don’t forget Amazon and Google also have smart speakers with microphones…
Big Brother doesn’t just watch, he listens too.
I’m not allowed to have a smart speaker of any kind in my home office (work from home requirement), but especially Alexa. All my homies are required to hate Amazon.
Amazon owns Ring, so it makes sense
As a working dad with kids, I like my doorbell cam. My self hosted, non-cloud, local only doorbell cam that is.
My f’ing camera feeds are mine.
But what if some stranger loses their dog? You could have helped, but NOoOOOOooooo you had to be selfish with your privacy you MONSTER.
Got any tips on a good model to get? I want one that i can access remotely via my phone. I have to relevant tools to make it remotely accessible but the cameras need to be able to speak to my software. I have a raspberry pi that i can use as a server.
Well, cross the wrong street once and now you’re in somebody else’s neatly AI analyzed, uploaded to remote corporate servers and then handed to the government camera feeds…
The world is a joke. Everyone is “entitled” to their privacy, but it isn’t massively illegal to just have a camera running somewhere 24/7 or even recording in public with a phone.
or even recording in public with a phone
Fuck that, we should be able to record ice and the cops
Correct. My database of my neighbors faces and biometric data are MINE. I am its rightful guardian
I don’t use anything cloud based and much of my shit isn’t even allowed out to the internet.
It’s a drop in the ocean, for too many say “But it’s sooooo convenient and I’ve got nothing to hide” and open up all they got. Share camera’s with amazon, email address book with facebook etc. not realizing nor caring I make an appearance in their instances too and I DO mind.
I was looking for a new TV last month, the salesman said it was “sacrilege” when I told him I had no intention of connecting the TV to the internet or using its online functions since I will have a media PC connected to it. I was just interested in the quality of the screen.
I had to revert the firmware on a TV because it effectively bricked itself when the software was no longer supported. I don’t connect these things to the Internet. They will simply display what I tell them to.
What a twat
I was looking for a phone that didn’t have a camera. I told him I already have a camera that is NOT a phone.
He was aghast.
They definitely make them, but it’s mostly for the government. I don’t know if you can get and use one outside of their contract.
Did you find one?
Well, sort of. I’m now using Google Voice as a land-line.
For portability I have a personal Hot-Spot and an old iPad that is NOT chipped for phones. I can use the iPad’s browser, with my Hot-Spot, to get to my Google Voice account.
I can get voice and pictures and text but for the most part it’s at HOME.
For portability I think I would use an older android phone loaded with your OS choice.
The iPad and phone both have cameras anyway just the phone is lighter. Keep it no sim and in airplane mode
Good advice, Thanks.
I did buy a used phone at the thrift store and put that in the car so I had a clock.
Mind you the issue here is that an old Android phone will likely have an outdated kernel. Even if there is a custom ROM for it. Leaving you vulnerable, which isn’t great.
Added plus of the cell phone is it can also still call 911 even without a sim as long as you take it off airplane.
Or at least it should be able to, changing the OS could impact that
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.
Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.
I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It’s plausible and that’s enough.
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it’s validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don’t agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
what’s crazy to me is the people who defend this type of stuff, are the ones that are also terrified of gun registration… because you know if one day a gun ban were put in place, having a list of where all the guns are would make confiscation easy and legal. But they don’t realize that it’s just as likely for them to hunt people who spoke out against the government, or were the wrong race… or hell, just possibly see that you have a gun because you took it home on a ring cam.
100%.
And today Germany still makes you register your religion. You’d think they would have learned…
You can clear your denomination from your file. I don’t know if it survives in a changelog, though.
“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won’t. Open bank app ask pin again. You won’t get that far.
Every time I hear that I always say the same thing.
It isn’t enough that you have nothing to hide.
All that’s required is that the general public think they have access to information that someone might want to hide.
Once the public thinks that data can exist or is accessible all that’s required is for them to lie or fabricate the required data.
“It would be very unfortunate if there was questionable content ‘found’ on your phone”
When I was a kid in the 90s, there used to small fringe groups talking about global warming and everyone else rolled their eyes. Now when it’s too late, people have started caring.
Privacy, security and anonymity are at that place now. Anyone talking about how fucked up it is that even your TV and fridge is mining all the data it can, is considered to be a fringe alarmist. People are going to wait till the world is on fire before taking this seriously. There was an uproar when WhatsApp changed its terms of service a couple of years ago and that died down and nothing changed. The uproar from this (and Discord) will also die down and nothing will change. Maybe one day people will see this as relevant to their lives and take it seriously.
people that tell me “they have nothing to hide” understand where I am coming from in terms of privacy when I ask them to write down their social security number on a piece of paper with their debit/credit card information
Assume either Trump will go after anybody saying anything critical about him and the party, or imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump. Without privacy, you’re f-ed either way.
imagine AOC takes over the government and going after anybody saying something positive about Trump.
Yeah that’s not gonna happen. I get what you mean, but she’s not some despotic arch-trump.
Only in Fox news reality, I know
If you have nothing to hide, would you please consider installing 4K cameras in every corner of your house that publicly livestream your every action and also remove your front door?
It may seem like a drop in the ocean now, but if things ever got to the point where we’re being divided up into groups, you might be oddly left out of every group. It’s not hard to de-Google, de-Meta, inconvenient at times, but maybe it pays dividends down the road.
The trouble with living in a panopticon is that becomes suspicious to not be on a list.
We’re already seeing that where people are suspicious when you don’t have Facebook or whatever.
Recent tv’s became thin client’s. Turn it on and it first need to download the app('s)
A state that should have been obvious to everyone FFS. The cameras are pointed at neighbourhoods, the audio is poly directional, which includes inside the home, and are hooked up to wifi to transmit the data. We have facial recognition, speech recognition, even gait recognition, AI object identification, license plate readers, audio filtering, all automated and analysed for review and every smart device has cameras and microphones.
Yall are fucking morons for embracing all this shit and normalizing a surveillance state that none of us have any control of and doesn’t benefit society at all. It’s been a slow moving car accident for 20 years that the masses are too fucking stupid and too arrogant to see until the wreck happens.
It is fascinating to me that the FBI desperately wanting to pretend that they’re relevant and doing actual investigative work in the Guthrie case stupidly confirmed that corporations are not only spying on us all, but feeding the data into federal databases for access without a warrant or any meaningful oversight.
Y’all, it’s wild that so much of what your dumbass, Infowars-obsessed grandparents told you is literally true and provable now.
A few people have said it, but I’m really glad my tech is always a few generations behind and I never bought into voice assistants or smart home technology. And I keep my phone in a faraday bag when not in use. That probably makes it somewhat harder for them to spy on me logistically.
My dad rips his name out of junk mail and shreds it. He doesn’t want his name tied to his address, which is ironic in the first place, given that he’s already getting junk mail. He’s been worried about hiding his identity, address, cars, etc from some unknown surveillance entity based around Red Scare beliefs. Still, a few steps short of foil hat types.
Then he went and got cloud-based cameras. He’s clueless about smartphone privacy already. He resembles his friends in his cohort. They protested “leftist government surveillance” and then showed me that they’d will invite mystery surveillance in with the slightest promise of convenience.
Sounds about right. Boomers are adorable.
What’s also interesting to me about this is imagining how many crimes they know about that they simply allow to take place.
I mean why assume a boomer. Very easily a genx or millennial. Think about it millennials kids are around 20 now.
That’s fair. Gen Z and millenials are radicalized by their corporate social media feeds too. I just default to Boomer because, for so long, Boomers were emblematic of this kind of thinking.
Don’t have to force surveillance on people. They’ll literally pay money for it.
Imagine that 🤣
If anyone wonders why there are so many scams, it’s easy! The average consumer is in general are short sighted, gullible and naive. Of course there will be plenty who will to exploit that.
The conditions of capitalism make desperate people, or those after easy money, ripe for plunder. Ahh capitalism, you glorious old whore.
I loved that ad, it instantly brought the point I’ve been making for years home to the whole Super Bowl party.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
Even if they surveill they have no reason to hurt meAnd you’re absolutely certain they don’t sell the data back to US brokers or even authorities directly?
You could, idk, maybe not buy prepackaged surveillance camera that rely on someone else’s computer to work.
Well ya, obviously. And I do that. But for most people that’s not an option. They just gonna get what they have available from Amazon and works via wifi
If I have to choose between buying into a US run surveillance state or buying into a Chinese run surveillance state, I choose to buy neither.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
dude, buying people is illegal!
;-)
Renting is legal
That’s a very short-sighted and unimaginative position.
Lmao. Idgaf. I get 0 money from ring income. Maybe they should stop fing me first.
We need legislation with teeth before they manage to get this in every house. It’s going to happen. Your phone, TV, doorbell, car, crosswalks and street signs are all going to be recording and tracking you eventually. Just recognize that’s going to happen no matter what, and get real oversight and rules into place now. If we wait until it’s all locked, the ruling party will never let it end.
We need legislation with teeth
He said, while living under a dictatorship.
Never said it was an easy lift. There’s a long road between where we are and a functioning society. And currently most of Europe is in the lead.
The thing with privacy is nobody thinks about it until they need it, then it’s too late.
Sometimes stuff like this makes me at least a tiny bit happy to be living in a 3rd world shithole where the country isnt seen as prime-quality consumer habitat.
Just wanted to point out one oddly written passage:
Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program …
Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today
I was hoping to see that this story had gone national and wasn’t just a buzz in privacy centric circles, so my ears pricked up when they said “numerous media outlets.” But then the example they gave was a quote from was EFF, which I would not exactly call a “media outlet.”
Below they go on to say that “private citizens” also cried out, and then they use a quote from a USA Today article. USA Today - now that’s a media outlet. 🤷♂️
Next they say that even scum sucker fish are against all this, using a quote from JD Vance to back it up, and that part was all right.
My progressive-but-detached friends have suddenly noticed how creepy the services are. Not sure if it’s enough to get them to cancel whatever they have, but the combo of “Ring wants constant access” and “Google handed over inaccessible data” has at least gotten them to question their privacy.
Can’t speak for conservatives because I don’t have any of those left in my circle.
The contradictions in the US are crazy.
We’re living in this enormous Panopticon - a massive digital fishbowl - for tracking and harassing and arresting lawful citizens. But you can kidnap an Olympics announcer’s mom, live on camera, and no one can find you. No one can catch you. Even as Ring runs “Find My Dog With AI” commercials during the Super Bowl.
What someone did that?
Nancy Guthrie, 84-year-old mother of NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, was reportedly abducted from her Tucson, Arizona home on February 1, 2026,
What’s with that crude 2x4 protection assembly? You’re setting up a permanent camera fixture, and THAT’S what you use for protection? What’s it for, a junkyard? You couldn’t paint it, at least?
Planned Obsolescence, baby! You don’t make money running the Panopticon if your clients aren’t constantly paying 10x the asking price to endlessly repair and replace your shitty TEMU knock-off surveillance kits.
