"Do it to Julia!"

-Agave: January 21, 2001

This is what the main character of George Orwell's 1984 screams as the last shred of his humanity is stolen from him by torture. Julia was the woman he loved but he didn't even have the privacy with which to love another human being without interference from those in power.

In the present year of 2001, we have passed by Orwell's date of doom, but we have not escaped it's feared consequences. Right now, at this very moment hundreds of voices are screaming - in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Tamil, Kurdish, Farsi, Croatian, Malay, Shiyeyi, Khmer, Guarani, Tibetan, Swahili, Korean, Turkish - "Please stop the pain!" Do it to anyone else but me, just stop.

The internet was turned over to the public at large in 1984.

Privacy fell, not long after.

We are told that such detailed information gathering via cookies, and other methods on the internet will not be used in an inappropriate way. Of course the people telling us this are the very same people who want to use that information to manipulate everything from our choice of which toothpaste to buy, to which candidate to pick. And I am supposed to place my trust in them and be confident that they can manage themselves with personal information about me, and keep that information discreet and not share it with others. That they will protect me.....

Constant surveillance of the general public is only expanding.

From cameras perched high atop metal posts in London, to the camera pointed at loading docks outside my local supermarket, to the highway cameras that monitor the movement of traffic, to the three cameras that watch the entryway to my very apartment building, we are being monitored, guilty or not. And those London cameras now come with handy face recognition software that is tied into a criminal database. Question: who decides whether I am a criminal? This camera may have reduced crime in that area of London, but how might that same technology be used in Tianammen Square?

Orwell predicted that machines would churn out worthless fiction for the masses to consume. In the mid-forties, the idea of a machine writing books was pure science fiction. But in our time, Ray Kurzweil has invented just that very thing. A computer program that writes for you. Want it to compose a Japanese Haiku? Just press a button.

Newspeak is practiced not only by the government with it's excessive use of acronyms, and subtle manipulations of language to make the public think all manner of things, but it has been mastered by the corporation to an extent that I think even Orwell would find surprising. Additional chemistry in our food becomes merely "New and Improved!" on the box containing it. And while a list of all ingredients is required by the government, corporations seek to block passing the information on to the customer that such food has been "genetically modified". Why? Why would they be afraid to tell me about that fact, if it was "for my own good" to eat such things?

Did we really escape Big Brother? Personally, I think he's alive and well and living large.