1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap

1984 is extremely naive.

It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.

So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.

It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.

One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.

Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.

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amiga386 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without.

You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?

Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?

	▲	juleiie 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it. Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false. Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics. Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack

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IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What an original thought.

https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...

Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!

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aniviacat 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Times would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.

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taneq 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> What an original thought.

Novel analysis here by IshKebab. :P

	▲	tylerchilds an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This take is doubleplus good