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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

> I'm simply pointing out that there are genuine policy reasons to endorse this and if you oppose this it would be wise to find other ways of solving the concerns people like Kutcher are raising.

If I propose putting an unobstructed streaming camera in every room of every house, that would also solve a lot of problems. That does not mean people who oppose my solution need to come up with alternatives. They can simply oppose cameras in every room due to the problems of cameras in every room.

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" Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by the telescreen; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. " — Part I, Chapter 1, Nineteen Eighty-Four

And that is even less of a dystopia than what we're capable of now: there is no reason for any person to be plugging in to the telescreen to watch someone live, because it can all be recorded and then retroactively browsed at will.

That's the point here. We are living in a post-1984 world. Already.

It will never cease to amuse me that Orwell intended to write a book about geopolitics and the downsides of a fractionalized world, but instead accidentally wrote a book that everyone interprets as an anti-government manifesto.

I'm glad we can all take away from literature something personal to us. Your view is no more or less wrong than anyone else's, and I'd like to hear more.

Well, as I understand it he literally was an anarchist, correct?

Orwell was not really an anarchist in his political views. You can get a fairly good overview of his political views from The Lion and the Unicorn:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

> everyone interprets as an anti-government manifesto

It's been a while so maybe my memory is just flawed, but my feelings about 1984 are more that it's a cautionary tale of living in a dystopian surveillance state.

That's not the same as anti-government. I actually expect my government to assist in preventing such outcomes considering there's obviously lucrative and powerful corporate interests pursuant to these machinations.

1984 is not important because it's broadly anti-government. I think calling it anti-government is a mischaracterization, because it describes a very unhealthy and specific kind of government: one that wields its might to manage the minutia of everyone's lives as it sees fit, putting its own survival above their well-being. I just want to be clear that opposing authoritarian or totalitarian government is not opposition to government generally.

1984 is about the effects of permanent ongoing war between fractionalized states; and the implication is that ongoing war produces totalitarianism.

He didn't set out to show totalitarianism was bad, because that was self evident in 1948.

Nonsense. There was support for Soviet in parts of the intelligentsia, see e.g.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five

Orwell, had been or was still a convinced socialist, however he did not believe in soviet communism, and wrote the book as a warning, after having seen Stalins troops up close in Spain.

Orwell's earlier book animal farm is much on the same theme.

> and the implication is that ongoing war produces totalitarianism.

You think the Cambridge 5 supported the totalitarian aspects of the USSR and not the communist ideals?

1984 is obviously anti-totalitarian and definitely a manifesto for not giving government too much unbridled power.

It was inspired, just like Animal Farm, by George Orwell's years spent in the spanish civil war, and the corruption of socialism, as he saw it, by stalinism.

I don't see a basis for claiming it's anything but an anti-totalitarian novel, explaining totalitarianism as it is: a boot stomping on a human face - for ever.

I always thought it was written with the surveillance tendencies of the Soviet union and their vassal states in mind, in particular the DDR.

After all, animal farm was also targeted at communism and how it corrupts itself.

Assuming a human even watches it as opposed to some ML algorithm.

Yeah, this was the part that also occurred to me. With 1984 the threat that someone could watch is chilling. With our tech level everyone could be constantly watched and evaluated in real time by some sort of AI.

There are two directions the updated 1984 can now take. The AI is reporting you to the government. Or the AI just takes care of your punishment itself. Are you actually a dissident or did you just sneeze and the AI interpreted that as some code phrase? Doesn't matter.

You could read O'Brian as non-human and Emanuel Goldstein as GAN.

Even worse, everything can be processed by efficient and reliable algorithms which reduces administrative load.

The great thing about using "the algorithm", is that when if fails or is wrong, you blame it and not the creators, administrators, and authorizers of it.

True, luckily the mind reading from the book has yet to be invented.

What you're missing is, at best, the tech to achieve this without actually needing the camera placed inside the room, will exist at scale in this century. At worst, it is already deployed in "hot" areas (areas significant to national security, experimental areas).

The question becomes how to control the inevitable proliferation of commoditized mass survelliance.

Privacy in the future will require a level of defense not available via common residential/commercial construction methods. Hell, even a SCIF eventually won't help..

I propose this to politicians homes since they are the greatest risk vector for nations. It sounds justified.

> If I propose putting an unobstructed streaming camera in every room of every house, that would also solve a lot of problems.

This line of rhetoric doesn't help the conversation.

What does line of rhetoric mean? The example was to show the poor logic of “you should have an alternative solution if you oppose this solution”. One can simply prefer the downsides of the status quo rather than different downsides of a change.

So you prefer your perceived absolute privacy (how sure are you that the NSA doesnt have a backdoor in the baseband?) over the enslavement of over 10,000’s of people world wide each year?

That's not the comparison you can make. You're going to have to sell us a bit harder on how fully breaking the commoner's privacy is going to ensure those enslavements won't happen. Until then, it's all assumptions.

More reasonable is you're going to make things maybe a little safer for kids to do stupid things you could educate them on, at the cost of trading any potential privacy on the internet. You'd even have to cover private channels, as the mere threat of blackmail would be enough to cause problems.

You make the assumption that the commoner’s privacy will actually be broken, make it so that using the backdoor requires a warrant, and can only be used legally on suspected traffickers.

Rapists and slavers shouldn’t have access to military grade encryption, full stop.

>You make the assumption that the commoner’s privacy will actually be broken

Because it already has been proven to have been broken, repeatedly. We have the Snowden documents, PRISM wiretapping, FISA courts, Guantanamo Bay, multiple CIA programs violating human rights', police misconduct that goes unpunished even with hard proof, prosecutors that withhold evidence and are not punished (even protected), and the list goes on and on and on and on.

That's my point though, you can't break something that's already broken. We don't have privacy from the USG, and we should stop acting like we do. If you accept that the USG can already snoop on you as they like, why wouldn't you want to make it so that they can go after human traffickers?

https://newamericadotorg.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/Coalitio...

Arguing by using absurdist hypothetical situations. It encourages reasoning by analogy and straw man fallacies.

really? I found it quite illustrative as another example of what results from a "means justify the ends" philosophy

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