In the TED talk by Hubertus Knabe, the surveillance state of East Germany uses close personal connections to conduct espionage on their targets. This is similar to the surveillance state in 1984, which spies on members of the Outer Party and Inner Party through their own families and friends. In the TED talk, for example, Knabe reveals that his two best friends were informants to the Stasi, the East German secret police. This is analogous to the treatment of Mrs. Parsons by her children, whom she should have been able to trust. As Winston notes, "[w]ithin two years those children would be denoucning [Mrs. Parsons] to the Thought Police. Mrs. Parsons would be vaporized" (Orwell 64) Similarly, Hubertus Knabe's "two of my best friends reported about [him] to the Stasi". The central idea in this kind of surveillance is to turn people who the target would trust into informants, so that the people who the target is spending their time with are always reporting on what they say and do. People close to the target are more trusted and can get closer to private information and life, so they are really the optimal choice of informant. Ultimately this kind of surveillance is a sign of totalitarianism or at least authoritarianism, where the government needs control and knowledge over all that people say or do. As a result, people are turned against each other, and everyone is kept under close watch, even if they do not realize it. This is portrayed in both 1984 and East Germany.
0 Comments
Propanganda is communication or media designed to influence an audience or advocate an agenda through spreading its not necessarily objective message. My example of modern propanganda is a video produced by the United Nations, where a dinosaur enters an UN building and gives a speech about how humanity is driving itself to extinction by funding fossil fuels. It proposes that humans use this money to help climate change and disadvantaged groups instead, ending with the slogan, "Don't choose extinction". The video aims to promote political change in favour of increased spending towards climate change, and away from fossil fuel spending. There are three propanganda techniques that were used in the making of this video, being loaded words, fear, and misleading logic,.
Loaded words were used in the form of the reference to "extinction", which has an almost universally negative connotation. Use of this word in the context of the video associates spending on fossil fuels with the demise of an entire species, and of course the death of all of its members. In fact, the slogan, "don't choose extinction", makes use of this connotation, and causes a reaction out of the need to continue to survive, which cannot happen if humanity goes extinct. Along with that is fear, which is generated through the repeated use of extinction. The dinosaur is also a way to use fear of extinction to push the message, as dinosaurs went extinct through a cataclysmic event. Fossil fuels implied to be on an equal level with the meteors that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and therefore invoke the fear of death and extinction in the watcher. Finally, there is misleading logic, which is that throwing money at the climate change problem will actually do something to fix it. This is simply untrue, and in fact blind spending simply ties up important resources that could be spent doing something much more useful, like improving nuclear power or even just trying to improve civilian infrastructure. The logic that more money equals more success has never worked, and it will never work. Good ideas and good execution make progress, not money. In my opinion, the UN video was made in the good faith of bringing awareness to the climate change issue, but is instead blindly trusting the establishment with being able to actually solve problems. It heavily overestimates the ability for governments to do good with large sums of money. For example, in 2020 alone the United States spent $122.1 billion on "food and nutrition assistance". Again a noble goal, but the volumes of money spent has not achieved visible results. Even looking at non-pandemic years, food insecurity has plagued the United States. How does the UN expect climate change response to be magically better? In conclusion, the UN video is an example of propanganda pushing for climate change action. It uses loaded words, fear, and misleading logic to achieve this, and while it is made in good faith, it misplaces trust in the government to try to solve problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DOcQRl9ASc I generally agree with what you said on your post, that Snowden was more a hero than a traitor (but also that it doesn't matter), and that NSA surveillance is a real problem. However, the blog post seems overly optimistic about how the government will react to being whistleblown about spying on citizens. As we saw with Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, the government is more interested in making sure nobody finds out than actually changing. To change would mean to remove spying powers from the government and actually recognize that there was past wrongdoing, which is very rare from the government. Even in cases where there was actual murder of civilians, the government hsa consistently claimed that there was nothing wrong with their approach. There is no reason to believe that something like spying on citizens would be met with actual reform. You also makes a very good point about how changes in government can turn perviously good-meaning policies against us.
Privacy issues in the 21st century is a major issue. But it also isn't, as it is blatantly or subtly violated by corporate and government entities alike. Google, for example, tracks your search and browsing history, and sells it to advertisers. The NSA, specializing in signals intelligence, also tracks this information, as well as phone calls, online conversations, etc. It's often paralleled with the world of 1984, which has become synonymous with authoritarianism. In June of 2013, then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents revealing the PRISM surveillance project. It raised debates regarding the balance between national security and personal privacy. The NSA, in my opinion, functions as a more powerful version of the telescreens of 1984. While the telescreens may be able to monitor your every conversation, it is impossible to place telescreens everywhere. There will always be one spot or another where the telescreen can't catch, due to blind spots or architecture. But the NSA, and PRISM, is different. To communicate with others over the internet at all is to place yourself within their view. But, if government agencies were trustworthy, we could give them this information and not have to worry about it. The problem is that they are not. Ruby Ridge and the Waco Siege should prove this to be true. Two instances where government agents caused mass civilian casualties (which were preventable as well), and were acquitted through an investigation done by the government agencies themselves. This parallels the use of secret courts by the government to justify PRISM. Indeed, while the government may not have any ulterior motives, this does not mean that they can be trusted to reliably handle data and information that they collect. In fact, the very act of collecting this information puts cybersafety at risk. This is because collecting the information requires the use of backdoors, and once installed, backdoors are accessible to anyone that discovers them and can make use of them. One such example is several zero-day vulnerabilities (a vulnerability not yet patched) installed within Microsoft Windows by the NSA. The Shadow Brokers, a hacker group allegedly backed by Russia, found these vulnerabilities and eventually posted them online. It would have been used by the NSA offensively in the interest of national security, perhaps, but it could also have been used by any other group maliciously. Besides, there is no reason to believe that the NSA itself is a benevolent organization. It is utterly unaccountable, and faces no consequences for breaching US law. Just because it is currently benign does not mean it will always be. Other government organizations have shown their contempt for civilian life, freedom, and privacy. Why would the NSA be any different? They, and the government they represent, could easily follow the path of Oceania in 1984--to use this information to suppress any and all dissent, and to monitor and control the official version of the truth. If that doesn't convince you, perhaps this quote by Edward Snowden will: "When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals". The Tiananmen Square protests was a student-led demonstration calling for free speech, democratic reforms, and freedom of press. The protests were violently suppressed by Chinese authorities on June 4th and 5th, 1989. After the events of June 4th, 1989, which are now commonly referred to as the "Tiananmen Square Massacres" (天安门事件 or 六四大屠杀 in Mandarin, literally "Tiananmen Square Incident" or "June 4th Massacre"), the Chinese government suppressed news of the massacre and stopped them from being able to be seen within China. While it is not true that discussion of the event is banned entirely, all discussion within China must take the position that there was no wrongdoing on the Chinese government's part. This kind of information control is similar to INGSOC in George Orwell's 1984, where "[a]ll history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary" (Orwell 42). In China, controversial events such as the Tiananmen Square Massacre are covered up in order to protect the standing of the Chinese Communist Party, and the government frequently engages in historical revisionism to control the narrative. After an event is falsified, it would no longer be "possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place" (Orwell 43) with official government records. This is exactly the effect that Chinese historical revisionism aims for--there is no way to prove that the event happened, so in the eyes of the CCP, it did not. Only those who had been present in the event can really prove, and only to themselves, that a massacre ever took place.
"To lose humanity is to lose a lot, but to lose primitive instinct is to lose everything" - Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem III: Death's End.
(This isn't the exact quotation but a translation, as the original text is in Mandarin Chinese.) The quote highlights the importance of keeping the various primitive instincts that were brought with evolution. They could be many different things, but above all it would be the will to fight and the will to survive. In the film Interstellar, many people gave up their humanity to, perhaps paradoxically, better humanity. For example, Professor Brand, who had to keep his realization of the gravity propulsion theory's impossibility a secret in order to ensure that others would go along with Plan B, gave up his own humanity. What he did not give up, however, was his will to fight and survive. It would be the reason why humanity was saved in the first place--if there was no longer anyone willing to change the situation, how could anything get better? In The Large Ant, the most telling display of the primitive instinct is of course the protagonist's killing of the ant. It is a natural reaction of humans to fight, with lethal force, against the unknown when they can, or to run if they cannot. There is no more justification needed apart from that--a fear of the unknown, that becomes the need to strike at the danger, whether existing or not. Fight-or-flight is an important, and powerful instinct. The best way to describe this quotation, and the movie and text, is the poem: Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. The most important primitive instinct is, perhaps, the will to never go gentle into that good night, and to give up on that instinct is to lose everything. Are humans innately violent?
To me, this is the wrong question to ask. Violence is a means to an end, not an end in of itself. Very few people are violent to be violent--most are violent because it is necessary to reach some goal. Indeed, if violence on its own was the only goal, we would see in our society, and in every society, what Thomas Hobbes described as "the war of all against all". We do not see this because there are more ways to achieve goals than violence itself--violence is simple, but it is also ineffective. To stop writing a long, philosophical essay (and because I can't think of any more philosophical points), the summary of the above is simply that violence is not a stand-alone goal. In "The Large Ant", for example, violence was used to kill the ant-like creature, yes, but the goal was not to be violent. The goal was to remove the ant from his vicinity, and violence was a straightforward and effective way to do so. To that end, it was the appropriate response. To become less violent simply means to use a different strategy to reach the same end goal. It's possible and has been done many times over, from our transition from primitive society into a more organized one, to the very existance of law and order. Yes, it's enforced by the use of violence--but even so, most people do actually accept laws without needing to be beaten into supporting them. If this were not true, there would be a lot more uprisings and a lot less peace in this world. The most common theme in both short stories is isolation due to technology. In both “The Pedestrian” and “The Fun They Had”, the authors paint a picture of a society in the future that is advanced but at the same time isolated. For an example of this isolation, consider “The Pedestrian”: “In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not once in all that time”. We know that the city is probably inhabited (there is traffic on the highways for example, and the city population is revealed to be three million), which makes the effect even scarier. In fact, it is revealed that being outside and walking for air is actually considered regressive behaviour and is grounds for a forced visit to the psychiatrist.
As another example, consider “The Fun They Had”. Asimov paints a picture of a world set in 2155, where schools seem to have been abolished (along with paper books) though not much else is revealed about this society. In particular, the schools and teachers have all been replaced with a “mechanical teacher” that automatically receives and processes homework and tests, and also teaches various subjects. School seems to be completely personalized, and everyone works at their own pace (though they also don’t get to see any other classmates since there are no schools). Both stories have the idea that technology creates isolation. As people have better things to do inside the comfort of their own homes, they no longer go outside, socialize, or even interact with other people at all. It is my opinion, therefore, that both “The Pedestrian” and “The Fun They Had” warn us about the dangers of this self-isolation created by technology, something we can already see today with the widespread use of smartphones and internet communication. My group encounter several challenges over the course of this project, which could be organized into three categories: acting, music, and presentation.
First, acting. Figuring out what to do was hard. I say this completely seriously—figuring out how to turn text from the King Lear script into a tableau was actually much harder than anticipated. My group had to give up on a quotation due to not knowing what to do with it (which may have actually been a good decision), and had to modify the acting for scenes several times. Ultimately this was not that big of an issue because our group simply made up acts ad-hoc until we felt like it was good enough. The music was a bit harder to decide on. I picked a piece of music called “Land of Diplomacy (War)” from Themes of the Old World, a music mod for the grand strategy game Europa Universalis IV by Utopia. It’s a good piece of music actually but it was really loud as compared to some of the other pieces which included the OST from The Martians and Payday, as well as a soundtrack from Battlefield 4 (seriously, some of the best music I’ve heard have come from video game soundtracks. Case in point: Frostpunk OST). Out original plan was to get the soundtracks and the 30-second timestamps, then splice them into one track (this was my job) to play. Ultimately, the school Wi-fi was much to slow for this job and while I waited for the music to download my team members already found their solution (which we ended up also not using) which was to screen-record the soundtracks on an iPhone. Eventually we decided that it was easier to just play the music one by one on a Chromebook. The presentation was the least challenging part of this project save for the technical issues we encountered at the beginning. Of course, there was also the fact that our presentation was cut in half, but that was not actually so much of a problem. The character analysis probably could have been better, as with the tableau itself, but for a group of people who (mostly) didn’t know how to act, I would consider it pretty good. Our character, Albany, didn’t have too many lines or too much to understand, so while the project was interesting it didn’t help too much in coming to a deeper understanding. Maybe for a character like Lear or Gloucester, but certainly not for Albany. Ultimately, the project was fun, though I doubt I learned too much about the play from it. Bonds between family and friends are sometimes considered the strongest bonds in existence. There is good reason for this—the family is the closest relation we have on this world, and friends and family are often the ones we trust the most. But sometimes these bonds are corrupted by various factors, such as abuse, adultery, or even greed and lust for power. When this happens the bond can either be broken outright or used (maybe abused) for a different purpose.
For example, in the short story “The Winner”, the main character, Pius, wins a football pool, a system in which people win money for guessing correctly which team will win a certain football match. When the news is revealed, many of his relatives come over for a visit. Many of these were “People he hadn’t seen for years and only recognized with difficulty”. They fell upon him with cries of joy, though it is not hard to guess why they did so—for the money that he had just won, as Cousin Sarah, the main character’s eventual love interest, remarks: “Don’t worry. They will soon disappear when I tell them there is no money, and then I shall send for a couple of my grandsons to come and help us do some replanting”. The bond between Pius and those relatives grew quickly because of his potential possessions, and dissolves just as quickly when they realize that Pius would not receive most of his money, having had to share it with almost three hundred people. The bonds in “The Winner” are not always corrupted, though. Cousin Sarah (though not really Pius’s cousin), and Salongo, Pius’s friend, had bonds that were motivated by something other than material wealth, and so these bonds were more pure than that of the relatives. The Shakespearean play King Lear also contains elements of family relations. These relations are corrupted often for a different reason—out of a certain displeasure directed towards a certain member, or out of plotting for power. King Lear, for example, disowns his daughter Cordelia and verbally attacks another daughter, Goneril; the former over her refusal to say how much she loves him, and the latter over her attempt to get Lear to reduce his train of knights. He says this to Cordelia: “Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity, and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this forever”, and this to Goneril: “Hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful. Into her womb convey sterility. Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honor her”. Here these bonds are not broken because of an external factor but simply because of displeasure from one side of the bond. So, in summary, bonds between family members can become corrupted or even dissolve over matters of personal anger, attraction to wealth, or other reasons. But they can also be pure bonds of love and friendship that will stand the test of time. |
AuthorAnthony's blog for Grade 12 English. Archives
January 2022
Categories |