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Jul. 14th, 2004 02:38 pmHey, Chicagoites - any thoughts on Barack Obama?
Jul. 14th, 2004
I went looking in my bookshelf today for a copy of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and didn't find it, an omission I must rectify some day soon. Instead, I tracked down my father's old, tattered, paperback copy of the book, and started to read.
I only got about five chapters or so in (I still think the beginning line "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" is very, very striking), partly because I could feel the book beginning to disintegrate in my hands from age, partly because I couldn't bear to read much more in a sitting. I read this book in high school, skimming through the first time, then making more detailed passes at it, as is my habit when reading. This time, though, I couldn't get past the preliminaries.
When I read Nineteen Eighty-Four back in school, it was a horror novel to me, but it seemed somehow ... remote. Irony of ironies, I read the book cover-to-cover for the first time in 1984, I think, and was thankful that things hadn't turned out in the way Orwell warned against.
Twenty years later, I think my relief was misplaced. I read about government studies censored, I read about the FBI deciding retroactively to classify material that had already been publicized - and the lies.
People say one thing that gets shown up by an inconvenient fact, and then they flat-out deny they ever said it. And they can get away with it, too, except for one thing: their words are archived, by the press, by videotape and digital recorder, by people with a pencil and a steno book. If that changes? Anything is possible. Witness politicians who assert a lie as truth right up until the moment they are confronted with the hard evidence of their lies.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, you see, Winston Smith's job was to alter the archives of the Ministry of Truth - the sole repository of records of the past - to erase evidence of failed predictions, to wipe out any traces of the unpersons who had been disappeared (sometimes "disintegrated") by the Party ... to change the past to conform to the ideologues' present.
Is that so far-fetched anymore? Today, a theoretically independent press is supposed to counter that, by retaining custody of the archives, of the record of true history, but in a day and age when inconvenient reporting can be equated with treason, how safe is that?
It's not just governments with the power to do that, either. Look at your LJ controls, and you can view - and edit - your history. Innocent enough when applied to an individual blog, but take that up to the level of a newspaper, and it's not a far stretch from there to ... say ... editing Big Brother's pledge that there would be no reduction in the chocolate ration, to say instead that there might be a need to reduce the chocolate ration sometime in April ... in order to conform to the rationing that had already taken place.
On some of the blogs, they call it "the memory hole". Written with loathing and derision, railing against the attempts to alter or delete inconvenient parts of history. It's also written, often, with a sense of scorn and irony, because there is something else at work.
Thankfully.
The Internet, you see, is decentralized. The information that one may seek to destroy may have an official home ... but often, it'll have several other places it resides as well. Archives. (Look at Google for examples.)
Mirrors.
After I put down Nineteen Eighty-Four, I decided to download the latest distribution of Mandrake Linux, to experiment with. I got to the download page, and was presented with a list of sites holding the relevant CD images ... a list that overflows a 20" monitor. Mirror sites in nineteen nations.
If the information that records our history can be kept in a similar manner, then it is safe from the clutches of a would-be Ministry of Truth. But ... the information must be kept safe.
I called Nineteen Eighty-Four a horror story earlier in this post. When I first read it, in 1984, I would have said it was a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or a movie like that - one which gave a creepy, unsettling feeling, but which could be dismissed as fiction (even though one had to acknowledge that in Orwell's day, it was a real fear).
Now, Nineteen Eighty-Four reads less like that, and more like watching The Day After - fictional, yes, but not remote anymore. Literature, and warning.
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells me, now more than ever, this may yet be our fate.
Down with Big Brother.
Down with Big Brother.
Down with Big Brother...
I only got about five chapters or so in (I still think the beginning line "It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" is very, very striking), partly because I could feel the book beginning to disintegrate in my hands from age, partly because I couldn't bear to read much more in a sitting. I read this book in high school, skimming through the first time, then making more detailed passes at it, as is my habit when reading. This time, though, I couldn't get past the preliminaries.
When I read Nineteen Eighty-Four back in school, it was a horror novel to me, but it seemed somehow ... remote. Irony of ironies, I read the book cover-to-cover for the first time in 1984, I think, and was thankful that things hadn't turned out in the way Orwell warned against.
Twenty years later, I think my relief was misplaced. I read about government studies censored, I read about the FBI deciding retroactively to classify material that had already been publicized - and the lies.
People say one thing that gets shown up by an inconvenient fact, and then they flat-out deny they ever said it. And they can get away with it, too, except for one thing: their words are archived, by the press, by videotape and digital recorder, by people with a pencil and a steno book. If that changes? Anything is possible. Witness politicians who assert a lie as truth right up until the moment they are confronted with the hard evidence of their lies.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, you see, Winston Smith's job was to alter the archives of the Ministry of Truth - the sole repository of records of the past - to erase evidence of failed predictions, to wipe out any traces of the unpersons who had been disappeared (sometimes "disintegrated") by the Party ... to change the past to conform to the ideologues' present.
Is that so far-fetched anymore? Today, a theoretically independent press is supposed to counter that, by retaining custody of the archives, of the record of true history, but in a day and age when inconvenient reporting can be equated with treason, how safe is that?
It's not just governments with the power to do that, either. Look at your LJ controls, and you can view - and edit - your history. Innocent enough when applied to an individual blog, but take that up to the level of a newspaper, and it's not a far stretch from there to ... say ... editing Big Brother's pledge that there would be no reduction in the chocolate ration, to say instead that there might be a need to reduce the chocolate ration sometime in April ... in order to conform to the rationing that had already taken place.
On some of the blogs, they call it "the memory hole". Written with loathing and derision, railing against the attempts to alter or delete inconvenient parts of history. It's also written, often, with a sense of scorn and irony, because there is something else at work.
Thankfully.
The Internet, you see, is decentralized. The information that one may seek to destroy may have an official home ... but often, it'll have several other places it resides as well. Archives. (Look at Google for examples.)
Mirrors.
After I put down Nineteen Eighty-Four, I decided to download the latest distribution of Mandrake Linux, to experiment with. I got to the download page, and was presented with a list of sites holding the relevant CD images ... a list that overflows a 20" monitor. Mirror sites in nineteen nations.
If the information that records our history can be kept in a similar manner, then it is safe from the clutches of a would-be Ministry of Truth. But ... the information must be kept safe.
I called Nineteen Eighty-Four a horror story earlier in this post. When I first read it, in 1984, I would have said it was a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or a movie like that - one which gave a creepy, unsettling feeling, but which could be dismissed as fiction (even though one had to acknowledge that in Orwell's day, it was a real fear).
Now, Nineteen Eighty-Four reads less like that, and more like watching The Day After - fictional, yes, but not remote anymore. Literature, and warning.
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells me, now more than ever, this may yet be our fate.
Down with Big Brother.
Down with Big Brother.
Down with Big Brother...
In view of Farscape's return
Jul. 14th, 2004 07:51 pmSeeing as how Scorpius is coming back, I may need to restock my Villain Obliteration Kit. Time to make a shopping list.
- Eight square feet of sandpaper, extra-coarse
- Three pounds nitroglycerin paste, medical quality
- One insect-repellant coil
- One used Cuisinhart
- One long bent thing with a sort of lump on the end
I know I'm missing some critical things from that list. Suggestions?
- Eight square feet of sandpaper, extra-coarse
- Three pounds nitroglycerin paste, medical quality
- One insect-repellant coil
- One used Cuisinhart
- One long bent thing with a sort of lump on the end
I know I'm missing some critical things from that list. Suggestions?