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Comment by cempaka | Hacker News Reader

> on the other hand people are very quick to dismiss anything that sounds like paranoia from anyone

It takes willful blindness at this point not to comprehend how bad the panopticon is for us, and that's before even venturing into more conspiratorial analyses of the real purpose of all this infrastructure and what it's meant to be used for. I've noticed these dismissals will often take the form of a sort of learned helplessness/powerlessness, i.e. "they already know everything about me, so why wouldn't I just hand over my retinal scan, DNA, and images of my private moments?" It's just a method of coping with the subconscious recognition of how bad the situation has become.

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I think we're already in an age where you can maliciously clone someone's likeness to commit petty fraud. That's really the threat model I'm working with here.

It's interesting how much it parallels the novel 1984. The members of the party lived under extreme surveillance and control for what?

My analysis is that the outer party traded off those things effectively for a sense of safety, and the inner party traded off even more for pride. In total the party was only about 20% of the populace.

At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.

But he was invested.

And I think that's the parallel I see in modern capitalist society. We're so invested that we cannot imagine walking away. Disposable gadgets, next-day shipping from the comfort of your couch, virtual social scores (either crowd sourced or provided by your ruling party). These things all feed into the sunk cost fallacy that starting over would be too hard.

And maybe it is. Maybe that's why I keep marching with the herd.

Travel was extremely restricted and even the fields had microphones, Winston couldn't reasonably escape and there would have been no where to go

We only ever explore the book through Winston's eyes. He FEELS trapped and scared, but how could the party possibly prevent his escape? The fields had microphones, but he wasn't GPS-tagged. Part of the purpose of the panopticon is that people don't HAVE to always be monitoring, but you never know if they are.

But I still assert he could have left. The fear just worked too well on him. Just like it's working on me. I'm too scared to quit this life and start a new one.

He didn't just feel trapped and scared in the book. There was also depiction of him and Julia being kidnapped by members of the Party when they rented a room above the shop. Winston was then tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally - he never sees Julia again (from what I recall).

He does, they just don't care about each other anymore. By thr end of the book he has been permanently defeated, he could do whatever he wanted, and he didn't want to anymore.

> At any point Winston could have left. The party had obviously created an oppressive wartime environment that made it scary to leave the safety of the party, but Winston had many opportunities to simply walk away.

Could he have left, really?

I read 1984 not even 2 months ago and absolutely nothing suggests that members of the party can leave.

If you are saying that he could have ran away, that's simply wrong too, it would just have been a short lived uncomfortable run before being executed.

Yeah I was confused by his comment as I’ve read the book dozens of times as I helped translate it once and it seems a very unique interpretation.

The whole point of the narrative is the party is all consuming, all seeing, all hearing and even controls how you think.

‘Simply leave’ wasn’t an option.

Winston knew. The plebs in 1984 lived in blissful agreement with whatever the party put out. They were ignorant and held their oppressive government's rhetoric as lighty as a feather in their minds.

Winston knew what it was really like, he knew what the party could do, he knew how little influence he had over his life in the final accounting.

The fear is hollow. The knowing is what got winston.

In contemporary life it's not as clear cut. We want the benefits of tech without the tyrannical control over us. You can't leave or stay to solve it. You have to work hard for a long time to create the boundary against tech that isn't tyrannical, under difficult resourcing conditions and the deck is stacked against you.

The gov doesn't need to be blanket oppressive like 1984. It can be freedom loving for 98% of policies and ram home the 2% that matter to their plans for world domination or whatever.

Every business owner gets to choose to install face recognition cameras or not in their business, sure, freedom. And the government puts them on the streets and in stadiums without public involvement, making any choice about partcipating in the program null and void.

The gov is expert at bullying it's own people, freedom for society's ownership class, and freedom for the gov to do whatever it wants, too.

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