How To
How do we present a 1984 society from developing in the modern day? I don't think that there is a way to stop it short of bombing ourselves back to the stone age. With the technology we have today and in the near future it is becoming more and more trivial to track the every movement of every person on earth. We already see a social credit system in place in China, where they are using facial recognition to doc the social credit of people seen littering. In my mind, there is no doubt that every major government is doing the same level of tracking of their own citizens, they just haven't given people a score yet.
People simply don't value their privacy very much at all. When Google automatically recognizes the people in your photos and labels them we think "cool" and not "creepy". People gladly put trackers in their car to save money on car insurance. As a society we don't value privacy nearly as much as convenience and so we will keep building an every more convenient society without regard for our privacy.
It's interesting that you brought up the Social Credit system as well. A lot of people seem to be complacent about these sorts of issues before it's too late, and you made an interesting argument of framing it against convenience.
ReplyDeleteAh yes the Hong Kong littering. I still think that some big event will have to happen for our society to go downhill towards the world of 1984. As you said, people value CONVENIENCE, but there is none of that in 1984. The Party is specifically depriving people of comfort to stay in power. At some point, there will have to be a major turning point for people to once again begin giving up their comforts to the powers that be.
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