I wish they would stop citing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, because the truth of the matter is that by 1984, we were already to the level of surveillance and government intrusion found in that book.
And it hasn’t gotten better since. In fact, it is now a hundred times worse.
So think of the sequel, call it “Twenty-twelve”, as a new benchmark for obsessive and futile government *and* private voyeuristic surveillance, dossiers, databases and data mining.
It is oppressive and evil. You betcha. But probably the worst part about it is that when government is unwilling or unable to do its job—the big stuff—it spends vast amounts of time and labor fussing with petty and stupid data accumulation.
Government officials always tell themselves that, by doing this, it will “make their job easier”, and accomplish some nebulous and positive goal. The truth is that it just clutters society with stupid and useless data, at great cost, while the big stuff is ignored. Nothing good ever comes from it.
So why is America $14T in debt? Simple, because government *truly cares* about your toilet paper consumption on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. They *truly care* about the names some old cat lady has given her 23 cats.
Because if they didn’t fuss with nonsense like that, the public would demand that they do something about important things, and that is the last thing they care about.
“...because the truth of the matter is that by 1984, we were already to the level of surveillance and government intrusion found in that book.”
Hmm, in 1984 you had government surveillance devices in every room of your home that could be monitoring you at any time, 24 hours a day? Color me incredulous.