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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

My personal version of 1984 is someone smashing random quotes from 1984 into my face, forever. Has nobody seriously read another book in the last few decades?

And Microsoft's president even gives us a stereotypically shoddy reading of the book

>"You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time."

The actually interesting takeaway isn't "government does bad stuff with tech", it's that an atmosphere of reality inversion creates fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth, even when the lie is obvious. State surveillance doesn't require AI, the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.

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> the Stasi already had the capacity for that 40 years ago.

I disagree. I haven't lived under Stasi but I have lived through Martial Law in Poland in 80s.

Yes, when you have picked up a phone receiver you have been greeted with pre-recorded message that "your call could be recorded", there were tanks on the streets and secret police everywhere.

But more or less you realized that state capacity is quite limited - political police could not practically analyze every recorded phone call of every single citizen. Police could have messed with life or even kill some dissidents and beat or shoot at people during street protests but they were not able to identify every single participant thereafter. In mass of protesters you were safe.

Also you could just leave the system, go into the mountains, find some job and live simple life without being bothered by the state.

This is not an option nowadays. Even democratic state has an abbility to trace every movement of every citizen. You could be traced and fined for every minor offence like traffic, your conversations, your movements are constantly recorded. You are tracked not just by the state but also by private surveilance economy.

And most important it is much harder to just leave a system. Your biometric ID, your banking apps, your credit score, your vaccination proof, your health records, your smartphone will follow you to the most remote in the country.

> But more or less you realized that state capacity is quite limited

From what I remember (it's been a while) this was actually also the case in the book. It's not like Big Brother watched you every time, and most of the time he didn't. But he could be watching anytime. That was the whole point of it.

I lived under Stasi and yes, the means where limited, but just the threat alone was enough for most people to be cautious. If you are a target and your phone is recorded 1% of the time, you will get caught eventually, it is just a matter of time. A few relatives of mine requested their Stasi-documents and there were quite a lot of personal episodes and details in these protocols. Who visited whom when or what they talked about.

And as another commenter mentioned, Stasi had your neighbours, friends and family too. That's actually harder to leave than your banking apps. Especially if you can't even leave the country.

True but there was safety in numbers. And freedom that you could experience in mass gathering.

In a street protest, on a strike, in a church, discussion club, samizdat. That is why the movement in Poland called itself Solidarity. The police could have easily break a strike in a single factory but were helpless when all factories in a city went on solidarity strike.

Just look at Hong-Kong today..

For me the fundamental story was about class. All of the principles of Ingsoc were intentionally crafted as a way to prevent the middle class from deposing the high class with the assistance of the low class.

The surveillance, propaganda, double think, cult of personality, eternal wars, Newspeak, etc, were all just a means to that end. That's the boot stamping on the face forever.

I think a lot of people skip over Emmanuel Goldstein's "book within a book" in 1984, but I feel like it's one of the most important parts of the entire thing, because of how it lays all of that out.

Especially since, with his history in the party and his Jewish name, he's clearly supposed to be a reference to Trotsky. Orwell fought in a Trotskyist militia in Spain and hence is likely to use a Trotsky stand-in to express his own views.

I don't find that clear reference at all.

For a mid-20th-century audience with a passing familiarity with contemporary communist politics, it would have been much clearer than to an arbitrary person today.

Contemporary reviewers were very convinced, and also thought that the written passages from Goldstein's in-universe book were call-outs and/or parodies of specific passages in Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed", I don't know enough about that book to comment on parallels, but Orwell's contemporaries did not consider the Goldstein/Trotsky reference especially subtle.

I have that passing familiarity and lived in soviet union and read a lot memoirs of dissidents. If did not appeared straightforward similarity.

I think the stasi world was actually more terrifying than an AI eye in the sky.

Because you couldn't trust anyone, not your friends or family. Everyone was part of a big network out to get you, so you were sort of locked in your own head.

The more realistic fear for me is ending up in a cyberpunk dystopia where the world is run by 3-4 big corporations. Which is ofc not something they like to bring up.

Consider reading "To Destroy You Is No Loss". It's the only book to have ever made me cry while reading it. It's a true first hand account of the genocide in Cambodia in the 60s. I read it after having read 1984, and I could not help but pick up on the parallels. There was no AI technology, but it reminded me of what you said: "Everyone was part of a big network out to get you"

A lot of people already live that former reality. Try to have a professional from Hong Kong tell you what they really feel. A student and child won't have any issue with that. A professional deriving benefits from corporate life is worried about the network of people snitching.

More similar to someone in the west offering their thoughts on Israel or Palestine. There are consequences for your ongoing standing in society, or ability to have any standing in society, no matter whether your own government is involved in those consequences or not.

> Because you couldn't trust anyone, not your friends or family. Everyone was part of a big network out to get you, so you were sort of locked in your own head. Have you seen Twitter?

Doesn’t require A, but the I is absolutely required, intelligence is what the Stasi did.

Automating what we know is a dangerous policy should not be treated as lightly as you’ve put it just because you are bored of people quoting 1984 to you.

Have you considered the reason they are quoting it more and more lately might be because real life has been getting closer and closer to it?

Agree to an extent, but people are throwing it around in the context of vaccine passports and other state actions that are pretty reasonable.

Frankly the tossing around of 1984 has degraded discourse because its used way too much and often ignores nuance in favor of a slippery slope argument.

There have always been fringe opinions. They too get a much wider audience today.

Some people get rats, some people get poorly thought out quotes and allusions.

And the issue is not limited to governments. The person being interviewed in the article belongs to the most credible current real threat: giga-corporations. While Microsoft haven’t made it to the news recently, Twitter censorship is totally in line with was is depicted in the book. The ability to control information at large level from a few entities, that happens to all push the same ideology, is very worrying, much more than a buzzword or two related to hyperparameters tuning.

> fertile ground for people to accept fiction over truth

The ground was always fertile, the only thing that changed was that such power used to be monopolized.

Also the suspicion and mistrust around families and neighbors reporting each other to the authorities.

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