Sustainable Saturday - Still Doubleplusungood

In July of 2009 (the first year of my blog) I blogged about an incident where Amazon.com "disappeared" Kindle copies of the book 1984 by George Orwell.  This book, written in 1949 by the late George Orwell, was a warning against totalitarianism and the ability of governments to manipulate information.

In the world of 1984, there was no Internet.  But there were telescreens in each home that had to stay on constantly and they were two way - you watched them but Big Brother (yes, that was where that name came from) watched you, in turn.  There was constant emotional manipulation in a daily ceremony called the Two Minute Hate, where Party members had to watch a film about the Party's enemies and scream out their hate in a period of two minutes.

Constant surveillance.  Information manipulation.  Sound familiar?

Think about our modern world for a minute.  Websites and their contents can disappear or change in a minute.   We ponder these questions:  Are our virtual assistants, Siri and Alexa (among others) secretly listening to our conversations?  Recording our questions? (The answer to this last one, incidentally, is "yes" for both Siri and Alexa.)  Is there tracking software that can follow what we say on Facebook or Twitter, ready for the future use of a totalitarian leader?

I just read today that Microsoft is about to shut off its ebook DRM servers.  They are getting out of that business and the books ("protected" by a technology called DRM) will no longer work.

Customers will get refunds but - if books can be turned off, their readers can be monitored.

What does privacy mean anymore in our electronic world?  Or ownership?

Here's my post from 2009, with some edits:

Doubleplusungood, dudes

This gives me a bit of that Big Brother feeling.

For all of you lucky enough to study the book "1984" in high school back in the 1960's, there are certain things in this book that stuck with you forever. The present generation would not be impressed but this book was absolutely chilling in its depiction of a world where a dictatorship totally controlled all sources of information, complete with a Ministry of Truth whose bureaucrats labored to continuously revise all written records to reflect the current Party line. To control thought, a new language called Newspeak was introduced. Words and thought were so short in Newspeak that one could spit sentences out without giving a thought to what one was actually saying.

Of course, nowadays we manipulate photos with ease via programs such as Photoshop and can manipulate electronic records with just as much ease.

And, apparently, we can buy an electronic book and download into our Kindle, and Bi...I mean, Amazon.com, can take it back for whatever reason.

When's the last time your local bookstore knocked down your door to grab back a book you legally paid for?

How ironic (not that this is exactly not my original thought) that the book they "vanished" was....1984. (Along with another Orwell classic, "Animal Farm".)

For the record:
1. This was due to a copyright infringement issue, not censorship and
2. Amazon.com duly refunded monies paid to the customers affected.

However, when they sent emails with the refund notices, some customers claimed Amazon never bothered to explain what was going on.

 Can amazon.com take stuff back whenever they want? Maybe we should just stick to the old fashioned books that clutter up the house?

If not Big-Brotherish, it is certainly creepy.