The Orwellian Nightmare, 21st Century Edition

Time magazine has published an excellent article on the George Orwell 1984 outcome that we are now living under, in a way that Orwell would never have imagined. It turns out, it’s not state surveillance we need to fear, it’s surveillance by private businesses. The author, Shoshana Duboff, coins the terms “surveillance capitalism” and and “instrumentarian power” and notes:

“Instrumentarian power delivers our futures to surveillance capitalism’s interests, yet because this new power does not claim our bodies through violence and fear, we undervalue its effects and lower our guard [emphasis mine]. Instrumentarian power does not want to break us; it simply wants to automate us. To this end, it exiles us from our own behavior. It does not care what we think, feel or do, as long as we think, feel and do things in ways that are accessible to Big Other’s billions of sensate, computational, actuating eyes and ears.”

The psychological effects this is having are not be underestimated. The article is here:

https://time.com/5602363/george-orwell-1984-anniversary-surveillance-capitalism/?utm_source=time.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-brief&utm_content=2019060710am&xid=newsletter-brief