The Privilege of Turning off Your Telescreen

People love to talk about George Orwell. Far more than have ever actually bothered to read Orwell, going by a certain poll of a few years ago--with the fact of the poll's reliance on self-reporting, and the rapid decay of what little propensity then existed to read books rather than just speak of them in the years since the poll strongly suggesting that that much fewer of those who talk about Orwell have had any real content with the writings they are talking about. Meanwhile it seems that few of those who actually have read him did so closely or completely--a testimony not only to the falling standard of literacy (so evident among our commentariat, whose "Good Schools" failed miserably in imparting to them a "Good Education") but the ideological blinders of three-quarters of a century. After all, even if at the time he wrote his most famous book George Orwell still espoused socialist ideas intellectually way deep down he had gone over to that mix of muddle, pessimism and psycho-babble that became the sine qua non of critical respectability in the twentieth century, which made it the easier for the fiercest of anti-socialists to appropriate him and his work for his cause as they interpreted him to the public.

Naturally the book's readers fail to note that the horror of Oceania had its roots in a privileged layer's determination to defend their privilege at all costs by maintaining a situation of inequality in which they ruled over a mass mired in an ignorance and squalor in spite of the fact that humanity had acquired the means with which to liberate itself from those evils. Indeed, in the book-within-a-book that is the extract from Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism Orwell spells this out for us explicitly. But the blinders mean that no amount of explicitness can make the point with them. Rather those who do read the book seem to remember, besides the idea that all the repugnance they see is what they are supposed to picture when they hear the word "socialism," the more concrete and physical means utilized by the oppressors to maintain their control, like the surveillance equipment--including the TV that watches you back, the "telescreen." In Orwell's nightmare world only the privileged of the Inner Party had the right to turn those screens off for even a little while. Alas, the salience of this detail became more obvious to the public at a point after they had come to have their "telescreens" on at all times, much of the time by choice, as they quickly forgot that there had been any other way to live--all as, of course, the rulers of our particular dystopia made it as difficult as possible to choose not to be online all the time, not only because of the nuts and bolts of the structures of everyday life, but the design of our computer software itself. You can't set up a computer today using the latest operating systems, or use many of the features of a computer which has been set up, even where they don't actually require Internet access, without an active Internet connection--and of course information flowing from your computer as well as to it, with, indeed, the ever-growing amount of surveillance a major reason for the increasingly complex and buggy and controlling character of the software, and the need for costlier and more powerful computers to run it.

Of course, defenders of the situation will tell you that you have choices--but only up to a point, the more in as acting meaningfully on them requires a good deal more alertness and determination than most computers possess. Yes, you can monkey about in the Registry Editor to block a few of the eyes of the Argus watching you--if you are prepared to take the risk of crashing your computer, which most people aren't. And if at a more modest level computer users can withdraw all those Permissions, well, it's plainly obvious that the scum who design these things make this as hard as possible, not just by making the granting of the Permissions the default setting, but placing the relevant Permissions unintuitively and inconveniently within your options menu, and forcing you to check or uncheck as many boxes on as many different pages as possible by making you reject each and every single one separately rather than denying the lot (No, you can't "create a 3-D map of my surroundings," no, you can't "track my hands"), any and all of which might just so happen to revert to the default the next time an update is forced upon them (Oopsie!), such that the user will have to be attentive to the Permissions staying revoked, and be ready to go through the whole damn thing all over again. Assuming they can find the options, which isn't a certainty given that the updates frequently deliberately remove them, forcing the user to learn a new procedure that is typically more complicated and involves accessing a more obscure, risk-laden, user-unfriendly part of their system, if there even is an alternative procedure for regaining that particular bit of privacy protection at all.

It's too much for most people, who resign themselves to the telescreen being on at all times, and those on the other end of the Internet connection seeing everything they do the way that Big Tech considers to be its Divine Right, a pretension that the protected-but-unbound elite generally approve. After all, what Big Tech gets, Big Brother can also ask a generally very willing Big Tech to hand over--all as Big Tech's brass check recipients in the Mainstream Media treat this as a non-issue, and at every turn encourage the public to think that way, keeping it instead obsessed with such stupidities as the private lives of people who do not even know they exist, and the small change of status politics, while sneering at anyone who raises the matter. Thus did it happen that when The Circle hit theaters the claqueurs did their assigned job and sneered at it--all as certain vulgarian Silicon Valley oligarchs today make it very clear that they see its form of electronic tyranny not as satire but as a manual for keeping the lower orders they regard as put on this Earth to serve them and receive their scorn "on their best behavior."