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Fri, 16 Sep 2022 01:27:13 +0200
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StartpageSearch@mastodon.social
🚨 Pop Quiz! No cheating!
What's the origin of the term "Big Brother" and what does it mean today?
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Fri, 16 Sep 2022 01:35:06 +0200
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doomy 🦀
doomy@mastodon.social
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refers to my big bro who kept telling me limewire is gonna give me viruses
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Fri, 16 Sep 2022 01:38:51 +0200
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BC
https://mstdn.social/@BreachCat
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The expression comes from George Orwell's "1984," in which it refers to the state's surveillance of its citizens. The face of this surveillance was "Big Brother" - the head of state with unlimited power. Posters of him were hung on every corner, and his portrait was painted so that no matter where you went, it seemed that he was looking at you + the inscription on the poster "Big Brother is looking at you" added to the feeling of constant surveillance by the posters. Although the fear did not form from nothing, everyone was indeed being watched, but not through the posters, but through the patriot denouncers and the TV screens, which, unlike the TVs of our reality, were the analog of cameras in the book.
Nowadays this phrase still means surveillance by the state
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Fri, 16 Sep 2022 02:19:31 +0200
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Hans van Zijst
hans@social.woefdram.nl
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Been a while since I read 1984, but if I recall correctly, Big Brother was the nickname of the leader of The Party in the dystopian world where government controlled everything that people would read, know, discuss and even think. There were Telescreens everywhere, that could see and hear what everybody did and said. The Thought Police could arrest you if there were any hints that you had wrong thoughts. All of this was, of course, to protect the people...
I think Orwell would be shocked to see how close our current world has come to his book. The Telescreens are smaller than he wrote, and mobile, but our mobile phones are pretty much that, and we never know for sure if anyone is watching us or listening in on our conversations. And I get the shivers if I think about what's currently being discussed in Europe, the #
chatcontrol
(see
https://chatcontrol.eu
): a proposal in which government will scan all (yes: ALL) digital communication. Of course, this too is to protect the people: this is supposed to fight child abuse
In the western world you won't be so easily arrested for a single "bad thought", but I wouldn't want to try my luck with that in China, Russia or North-Korea.
In 1984 history was continuously rewritten by the Ministry of Truth: articles (on paper, of course, there was no digital Big Data in Orwell's days) were taken from the archives and rewritten, and the original version were thrown into Memory Holes, were they were utterly destroyed.
We have a lot of changing histories today too, and although original versions don't really disappear, they tend to be hard to find: search engines find the most recent stuff and seem to struggle finding older articles.
I would recommend everybody to read the book (the film sucked btw), and read
The Circle
after that, for an eerily realistic, modern version.
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