Internet & social control
pynchonoid
pynchonoid at yahoo.com
Mon Jun 30 15:03:10 CDT 2003
--- Malignd <malignd at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Forgive me if I persist in seing differences between
> the U.S. and Singapore, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia,
> the
> U.S. and Iran, the U.S. and China, etc. Also if I
> doubt the ability of these countries to succeed for
> long in their attempts.
Whether you're concerned about it or not, some
governments -- including the US, as Ashcroft and his
troops use the Internet in their investigations -- and
corporations are already using the Internet in ways
that alarm a lot of people because of their
abridgement of civil liberties. Pynchon's got it
right, and you've yet to mount an convincing argument
to the contrary, only fact-free insult.
[...] What has steadily, insidiously improved since
then, of course, making humanist arguments almost
irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too
distracted by the clunkiness of the means of
surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our"
1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less
than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive
next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003,
most notably the internet, a development that promises
social control on a scale those quaint old
20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could
only dream about. [...]
--Thomas Pynchon, Foreword to _1984_
=====
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