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Comment by latch | Hacker News Reader

I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims.

However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in the far more prescient Brave New World.

This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things).

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Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.

Correct. It's best modeled by neither 1984 or Brave New World---It's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas."

People get the basics that there are breakdowns in the system of safeguards and a non-zero chance that they'll be the victim of a crime or injustice facilitated by ubiquitous observation. But relative to the benefits, the odds they'll be the one locked in the dungeon suffering are so low that they'll readily shoulder that risk for the observed, immediate, and obvious benefits.

This looks like a fascinating read. Thank you for bringing it to our attention!

I know few people who can do mental calculus, fewer who can perform the cost benefit analysis you describe and none who have the right to make that decision for everyone else, but that's exactly what happens

...which is why you have some privacy minded people using gmail anyway, or getting biometric passports.

In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.

... so ... soma?

> "This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things)."

The People aren't getting honest and consistent news about such things. The Snowden revelations were met with what relatively amounted to crickets.

Should people be more aware? Yes. Absolutely. However, the mainstream media driven system is designed to make that close to impossible for most people. Editorial: I don't think that's an accident.

It's allowed to persist because they've self-medicated and conditioned to not care. It was started because of fear ... so I agree that Brave New World is absolutely a more appropriate context in which we can frame ourselves.

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