Originally shared by Miguel Afonso CaetanoThis is very good writing taken from a book chapter where the author attempts to assess if we are really living in George Orwell's dystopia of total surveillance he imagined in 1984. Of course it only takes us so far in terms of our perceptions as users of the risks and dangers of mass surveillance. For instance, the author doesn't address the real reasons behind our crave for these technologies that facilitate surveillance. Nevertheless, it is still a very worthwhile read. It is already on my list of books to buy on paper:
"We have become desiring machines, and we lock onto other desiring machines. Those other machines, we know them all too well today. We are glued to them. Inseparable. And we give ourselves up to them—in the process, giving ourselves away. “Everything revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire.” We take so much pleasure playing with our videos, texting, and Facebooking that we simply do not resist the surveillance. We let our guard down. We care less — we don’t read the terms of service, we don’t clean out our cookies, we don’t sign out of Google. We just want, we just need to be online, to download that app, to have access to our email, to take a selfie.
The technologies that end up facilitating surveillance are the very technologies that we crave. We desire those digital spaces, those virtual experiences, all those electronic gadgets—and we have become, slowly but surely, enslaved to them. To them, and to our desires, desires for passionate love, for politics, for friends. The uniformity of Winston’s blue overalls, the smell of boiled cabbage, the blunt razors, the rough soap, the houses that are rotting away, the disgusting canteen with its “low-ceilinged, crowded room, with walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables, and chairs … bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs … and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee
and metallic stew and dirty clothes” (59)—these are the things we have avoided today, and by avoiding them we have made the world so much more palatable. Palatable like the colors of the iPhone, the liveliness of IM, the seductiveness of the new Apple Watch, and the messaging that surrounds us daily.
No, we do not live in a drab Orwellian world. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world that is online, plugged in, wired, and Wi-Fi enabled. A rich, bright, vibrant world full of passion and jouissance—and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. In the end, Orwell’s novel is indeed prescient in many ways, but jarringly off on this one key point. So much so, in fa ct, that one could almost say that whoever it is who has conspired to create our digital world today — if one were so naive as to believe there was such a conspiracy — has surely learned the hard lesson of Orwell’s brilliant dystopia. We live in a world today that has rectified Big Brother’s error. And, sadly, we no longer even have the illusory hope that Winston once had —hope in the proles."
- Harcourt, Bernard E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 52.
"We have become desiring machines, and we lock onto other desiring machines. Those other machines, we know them all too well today. We are glued to them. Inseparable. And we give ourselves up to them—in the process, giving ourselves away. “Everything revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire.” We take so much pleasure playing with our videos, texting, and Facebooking that we simply do not resist the surveillance. We let our guard down. We care less — we don’t read the terms of service, we don’t clean out our cookies, we don’t sign out of Google. We just want, we just need to be online, to download that app, to have access to our email, to take a selfie.
The technologies that end up facilitating surveillance are the very technologies that we crave. We desire those digital spaces, those virtual experiences, all those electronic gadgets—and we have become, slowly but surely, enslaved to them. To them, and to our desires, desires for passionate love, for politics, for friends. The uniformity of Winston’s blue overalls, the smell of boiled cabbage, the blunt razors, the rough soap, the houses that are rotting away, the disgusting canteen with its “low-ceilinged, crowded room, with walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables, and chairs … bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs … and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee
and metallic stew and dirty clothes” (59)—these are the things we have avoided today, and by avoiding them we have made the world so much more palatable. Palatable like the colors of the iPhone, the liveliness of IM, the seductiveness of the new Apple Watch, and the messaging that surrounds us daily.
No, we do not live in a drab Orwellian world. We live in a beautiful, colorful, stimulating, digital world that is online, plugged in, wired, and Wi-Fi enabled. A rich, bright, vibrant world full of passion and jouissance—and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance. In the end, Orwell’s novel is indeed prescient in many ways, but jarringly off on this one key point. So much so, in fa ct, that one could almost say that whoever it is who has conspired to create our digital world today — if one were so naive as to believe there was such a conspiracy — has surely learned the hard lesson of Orwell’s brilliant dystopia. We live in a world today that has rectified Big Brother’s error. And, sadly, we no longer even have the illusory hope that Winston once had —hope in the proles."
- Harcourt, Bernard E. (2015). Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, p. 52.