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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

If you purchased a car without legal title they would absolutely send a repo man to take it back at your home or at your work. This actually happened to a buddy who bought a car from Canada. It was a lease and the title was fake. GM sent repo men to take the truck back and told him tough shit, sue the seller.

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While similar in principal that’s not the same at all in terms of cost or scale.

Based on what? In the case of the car it's a multi-million dollar repo industry for similar events.

For Amazon I'd imagine it would've been a massive lawsuit for copyright violation.

And they would not notify me in advance, simply take it. And if it was in my garage, the repo man would use his master key to break in. And they keep a list of all items everyone has purchased, from cars to things as small and cheap as books, to be taken without notice if any legal issues come up in the future. The surveillance is total, the law is absolute and inescapable, the devices you own are backdoored to betray you.

Compare this to buying a physical book, with cash.

If you don't find this Orwellian, I don't know what to say.

What do you think "Orwellian" means?

"It denotes an attitude and a brutal policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, disinformation, denial of truth (doublethink), and manipulation of the past" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian

Emphasis mine. Or are you trying to imply a single incident should encompass all those descriptors, before qualifying as Orwellian? If so, wouldn't that disqualify most incidents in 1984 itself?

I’m really not sure how trying to operate within the legal framework of a society is “surveillance” or “draconian control by propaganda” (the last two words you left unemphasized even though they change the meaning drastically). I guess surveillance is the closest, but this is likely just functionality in place to process returns, not some surveillance mechanism to make sure people don’t have banned books? If they remove someone’s book for no reason (or ideological/opposed to the book), then sure that would be “Orwellian”.

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