``The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. . . The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.''

``The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; 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.''

He is right though.

Or a guy who realized how much data the tv manufacturers are collecting and selling.

I bought a new TV in 2026 and refuse to connect it to a network. For good reasonS (plural).

That's a needlessly snide take.

Any device inside my network that talks to the outside world is a potential vulnerability. TV manufacturers aren't exactly known for their stellar development practices, and dodgy apps on TVs are being used as VPN exit points for cybercrime or scraping. Then there's the part where smart TVs are adding ads to their home screens and other random places.

I want my monitors and TVs to be completely dumb. Just a display, the necessary circuitry to plug the display into a bunch of input ports, maybe the necessary circuitry to function as a KVM switch, and nothing else.