Big Zucker is watching you: Facebook has realised Orwell’s dystopian vision, and we like it
Niall Ferguson says Facebook tracks our data, our smartphones track our movements, and Mark Zuckerberg has become filthy rich from that information
In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the telescreen is the primary tool of totalitarian surveillance. It is, in Orwell’s words, “an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the wall ... The instrument 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 ... You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.”
Winston Smith (“6079 Smith W”) knows to keep his back to the telescreen as much as possible and, when facing it, to wear an “expression of quiet optimism”.
“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen ... To wear an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called”.
For most of my life, ever since I read Orwell as a teenager, I have thanked God that I didn’t end up as a citizen of Airstrip One, living my life as a helot in thrall to Big Brother. It was not long after the actual year 1984, when I made my first visit to the Soviet Union, that I realised a significant part of humanity was in precisely that situation.
