![]() ![]() Only last month, a prominent UK newspaper reported behind its paywall, that ‘emotion recognition is the latest thing in surveillance,’ and that systems designed for this form of monitoring have been installed in the Chinese province of Xinjiang to ‘identify signs of aggression and nervousness as well as stress levels …’. ![]() On the page before that scene, he turns back from the window where he has been reflecting on the malign, barbed wire-clad Ministry of Love and, on his way to his kitchen, ‘set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen,’ on which Big Brother could be watching him. In the novel’s opening pages, when its protagonist Winston Smith starts a diary in a blank notebook - an out-of-date and semi-illicit ‘compromising possession’ - he can carefully seat himself in his living room outside the field of the spying telescreen that is capable of receiving and transmitting simultaneously: ‘Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it.’ Extrapolating from today’s ‘ internet of things,’ there will soon be nowhere for a Winston Smith or any of us to hide, as any number of networked ordinary household objects could be doing the telescreen’s job. ![]() Why? Because of its underestimations of the nastiest possibilities of intimate Big Brother surveillance, for one thing and because we have no believable protection from its deployment by either governments or oversized corporations. It has become too alarming and depressing to re-read voluntarily. Through a glass, darkly: dystopian anxiety casts a pall of dread over the most innocent scenes, these daysĪ question for everyone ready to scream from the tedium of seeing George Orwell’s name coupled yet again with dystopia: yes, yes, but have you tried re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Fourlately? If for instance you, like the writer of this pG entry, last immersed yourself in it decades ago, aged about fourteen, shouting with laughter as you read out to your mother passages that struck you as fiendishly funny, which nearly always mentioned Big Brother, an outlandish caricature you couldn’t conceive of as connected in any way to your own rather boring life?Īt the start of 2020, there is not much to laugh about in Nineteen Eighty-Four. ![]()
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