1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Dance to show you worship the control bots like
good little citizens, dance you fuckers, post your
happy dancing propaganda to social media some more...
New Video Shows Boston Dynamics' Robo-Dog Dancing To A Whole New Beat


https://consentfactory.org/2021/06/29/the-war-on-reality/
https://twitter.com/TiceRichard/status/1408155047859560454
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-cj-hopkins-critic
https://consentfactory.org/2021/06/20/manufacturing-new-normal-reality/
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer


https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/george_orwells_1984_has_become_a_blueprint_for_our_dystopian_reality

https://verilymag.com/2019/01/dystopian-novels-book-roundup
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180507-why-orwells-1984-could-be-about-now
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/30/15865462/minority-report-steven-spielberg-surveillance-technology
http://nation.time.com/2013/08/01/the-surveillance-society/
https://www.businessinsider.com/george-orwell-1984-what-came-true-2019-5
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/opinion/another-hit-to-the-fourth-amendment.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/1984-george-orwell/590638/

George Orwell's 1984 Has Become A Blueprint For Our Dystopian Reality

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a
human face - for ever.”

    - George Orwell, 1984

Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell (Jun. 25, 1903-Jan. 21,
1950) has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day
surveillance state.

It’s been more than 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and
bloody coughing fits, and driven to warn against the rise of a society
in which rampant abuse of power and mass manipulation are the
norm—depicted the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and
totalitarianism in 1984.

Who could have predicted that so many years after Orwell typed the
final words to his dystopian novel, “He loved Big Brother,” we would
come to love Big Brother.

    “To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free,
when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a
time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age
of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother,
from the age of doublethink — greetings!”—George Orwell

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are
not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the
corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology
has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society.
Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought
Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government,
or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere
with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future
dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous
Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.

    “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell
people what they do not want to hear.”―George Orwell

Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its
corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave
New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their
liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they
[are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or
brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is
now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that
they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they
conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept
their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”

And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a
dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s
futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in
which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and
if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and
pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under
control.

What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by
the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris
scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so
on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at
tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our
behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our
reality.

Our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior
prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars,
voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones,
and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be
criminals before they can do any damage.

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on
our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a
philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle
of modern society.

    “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough
men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”―George Orwell

The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against
unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down
doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police
that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in
contemporary America. And bodily privacy and integrity have been
utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights
over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government
officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on,
probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for
the slightest provocation.

    “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to
pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say
which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.

What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating
alone. It cannot. The government requires an accomplice. Thus, the
increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government,
especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management,
have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to
be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of
governmental overreach.

In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and
we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread
worldwide. The government now has at its disposal technological
arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional
protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown
itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy,
the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military
and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant
surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.

Money, power, control. There is no shortage of motives fueling the
convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the
price? The American people, of course.

Orwell understood what many Americans are still struggling to come to
terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for
the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in
government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and
control over the citizenry at all costs.

    “The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate
those who speak it.” ― George Orwell

Even our ability to speak and think freely is being regulated.

In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and
compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government
dictates what words can and cannot be used. In countries where the
police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as
tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and
thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind.

Dystopian literature shows what happens when the populace is
transformed into mindless automatons.

    In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are
burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised
entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them
easily pacified, distracted and controlled.

    In Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific
thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical
thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos
and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality,
independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.

    In my debut novel The Erik Blair Diaries, the dystopian future
that George Orwell predicted for 1984 has finally arrived, 100 years
late and ten times as brutal. In this post-apocalyptic world where
everyone marches to the beat of the same drummer and words like
“freedom” are taboo, Erik Blair—Orwell’s descendant and unwitting heir
to his legacy—isn’t volunteering to be anyone’s hero. Unfortunately,
life doesn’t always go according to plan. To save all that he loves,
Orwell will have to travel between his future self and the past.

    And in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable
and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely
rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.” Orwell’s Big Brother
relies on Newspeak to eliminate undesirable words, strip such words as
remained of unorthodox meanings and make independent,
non-government-approved thought altogether unnecessary.

Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have
meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that
which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The
power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and
prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge
their authority.

This is the final link in the police state chain.

    “Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until
after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”—George Orwell

Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of
elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of
police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and
technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and
naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears
all—we have nowhere left to go.

We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king
to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.

    “Big Brother is Watching You.”―George Orwell

Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched,
especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint. When you use
your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who
you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time.
When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you
used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped
with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a
car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such
information is shared with government agents, including local police.
And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits,
your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the
government.

The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to
tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic
cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards,
satellites and Internet surveillance.

In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you
can prove yourself innocent. To underscore this shift in how the
government now views its citizens, the FBI uses its wide-ranging
authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether
they are suspected of criminal activity.

    “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your
skull.” ― George Orwell

Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just
what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is
being tracked and targeted. We’ve already seen this play out on the
state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down
on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages
self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

Say hello to the new Thought Police.

Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as
God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly,
control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think.
For example, the NSA has been working on an artificial intelligence
system designed to anticipate your every move. Aquaint (the acronym
stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence) has been
designed to detect patterns and predict behavior.

No information is sacred or spared.

Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text
messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites,
to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit
card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with
its agents in crime: the CIA, FBI and DHS.

What we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and
efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the
watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers
(government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).

Clearly, the age of privacy in America is at an end.

So where does that leave us?

We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored,
managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but
to our government and corporate rulers. This is the
fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on
a daily basis.

It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past
with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted,
buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words
and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants
such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA,
and used against us by militarized police with their army of
futuristic technologies.

To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of
privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes
and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.

Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy
ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw. Just look at what
happened to Julian Assange.

So how do you survive in the American surveillance state?

We’re running out of options.

Whether you’re dealing with fact or fiction, as I make clear in
Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in my new
novel The Erik Blair Diaries, we’ll soon have to choose between
self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the
news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry,
etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about
threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.