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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

"Why is everyone confused that smart TVs are popular?"

TBH, Im more confused by the parent comment. (Although this is a very typical type of HN comment, passive-aggressive denigration of anything "not popular".) These type of comments make me wonder why would anyone, other than the companies benefitting, care if some HN commenters do not love so-called smart TVs. This is not a mainstream audience. Moreover, I see no comments indicating "confusion" why surveillance TVs are popular. I see comments that indicate either (a) distaste for them, (b) desire for alternatives or (c) passive-aggressive denigration, like the parent; for example, something like "the market has spoken". WTF. Why would anyone read HN if all they want to read is a restatement of "popular" culture.

Only speaking for myself but I want to read about alternatives to popular choices that feed surveillance marketing as "business strategy".

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> "Why is everyone confused that smart TVs are popular?"

In his Appendix, Orwell explains the syntactical arrangement and the etymology of the Newspeak. A living language, such as English, one that has the capability of diverse expression, has the tendency to gain words and therefore broaden the awareness and knowledge of its speakers. Newspeak, on the other hand, loses words, by removing words that represent opposing concepts. Therefore, for example, because the word "good" presumes the opposite of "bad," the word "bad" is unnecessary. Similarly, all degrees of "goodness" can be expressed simply by adding standard prefixes and suffixes to this one root word: ungood (bad) and plusgood (very good) and doubleplusgood (wonderful). In so doing, Newspeak not only eliminates "unnecessary" words, but it also promotes a narrowing of thought and, therefore, awareness. The idea behind Newspeak is that, as language must become less expressive, the mind is more easily controlled. Through his creation and explanation of Newspeak, Orwell warns the reader that a government that creates the language and mandates how it is used can control the minds of its citizens.

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/n/1984/critical-essay...

Right, true. Hovever, the matter of goodness/ethics, etc. is probably best summed up by G.E. Moore in his 1903 work Principia Ethica:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Ethica

I have never encountered a group as amenable to "Newspeak" as software developers. For example, note how many times developers describe things, including "startups", in terms of what they "are" rather than what they "do".

Strictly speaking, this is not "Newspeak" by Orwell's definition. However the underlying assumption seems to be the same: ambiguity is to be ignored, or eliminated. Fewer words are used; often they are made-up words. Details are hidden. Objectivity, i.e., how something works, is replaced with subjectivity, i.e., what something "is".

"Unscientific" is a good example.

That isn't the hand of government at work. The term "scientist" is itself only ~200 years old. For centuries it was called things like "natural philosophy".

We just haven't figured out a good antonym yet. Unfortunately, with the Latin root scientia meaning knowledge, the natural choice might be ignorantia. But ignorance is already in widespread use. Just try accusing someone unscientific of being ignorantific & see how that goes!

I felt Pirsig quite hit the nail in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with his Romantic versus Classical dichotomy. I'm not sure I'll explain correctly, sorry, but that's what I often come back to, when I meet disdain or lack of trust in 'science'.

The antonym is baloney.

Smart TVs, Smart watches, Smart phones, Smart houses.. how did things become smart? As far as I can determine, the 'smart [thing]' linguistic construct started with 'smart bomb', a propaganda euphemism for guided bombs that emerged in the 70s. Does anybody have an earlier example?

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/26/archives/smart-bombs-and-...

I had a quick look through this page for examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/smart

There were "smart cards" in 1974, "smart casual" dress codes in 1924, and "Smart Set" magazine in 1900.

A more careful look will surely find older and more relevant examples.

Amusingly "smart money" and "smart tickets" existed in the 18th century, referring to the results of injuries ("ow, that smarts!"). See: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/smart

I don't think any of these are examples of it. Smart cards in 1974 postdate smart bombs. "Smart casual" fashion is smart in the "Good-looking; well dressed; fine; fashionable" sense, while smart bomb/phone are being used in this sense: "(often in combination) Equipped with intelligent behaviour (digital/computer technology)."

Smart bombs weren't called smart for being fashionably well dressed. The term was applied to guided bombs with fire-and-forget capabilities, which were first used during the Vietnam War.

"Smartass" was attested as early as 1960.

A smartass is a person, not a technological artifact.

I don't mean to be nitpicky. There are a lot of ways the word smart has been paired with other words. But "smart [object]", where object is some bit of technology that is suggested to have intelligence in it is really what I'm looking for. If somebody in the 1950s had marketed "smart headlights" that automatically turn on at night, that would be an example of what I'm looking for. But I haven't found anything like that prior to "smart bombs."

Being nitpicky is fine. You asked about the "linguistic construct". I went and did a little bit of research on terms that looked like they fit that pattern. It's worth supposing that the idea didn't appear from nowhere, and indeed there were "smart X" before smart bombs with a close but different meaning for "smart", and seemingly unrelated "smart Y" appearing around the same time having the same "intelligent technology" association. This looks like a linguistic trend to me.

I don't doubt that if I read more I'd find the thing you're looking for from before the first mention of "smart bombs" (first I found was US government documents from 1970) but I'm not going to spend any longer at it, so I wrote my findings and sources in the hope it would be helpful.

By the way, Google {Books, NGrams, Patent} were also useful. There have been various things called "smart cards" for a long time. Also the dates on Google Books (and hence NGrams?) are frequently wrong and you really have to look at the front matter to check.

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