Whistleblower Reveals the Largest Mass Surveillance Operation in History and the Coming Slave State
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How does 1984 and the panopticon explain modern mass surveillance?
If you're over 40, you probably were assigned the George Orwell novel, 1984. Not written in 1984, written in 1949, right after the Second World War. And it is famously a picture of the dystopian future where the state controls everything. And if you can think back, the novel, not quite as widely assigned now. Your kids are probably not reading it. If you're under 40, you may not know exactly what it is, except it's like a synonym for... the state being overbearing. Big Brother is watching you. But it's worth remembering what 1984 describes because it is so, so prescient. It does not describe a lot of physical repression by the state. In the end, there is torture and there are allusions to killing. But the state in 1984 doesn't spend a lot of time putting gun barrels in people's faces.
It doesn't need to. What it does instead is spy on them. There are cameras everywhere in 1984. Something called the telescreen, which when the novel came out in 1949 seemed very space age. It was a screen and it listened while you spoke. It eavesdropped on you and it bombarded you with pre-recorded propaganda messages. And again, when this came out, it was impossible to imagine, say, the iPhone, which is listening to you at all times, or one of those seat back screens on Delta Airlines that's yelling at you without your permission about some credit card deal. No one reading 1984 when it first came out had any reference point for this level of surveillance. There was famously a guy called Jeremy Bentham, who was a liberal reformer in the 19th century who had the greatest idea in the history of human progress called the Panopticon.
And the idea was we're going to build prisons with a round design so one officer can see everybody in the prison. All the cells will be open and one guy can see everybody. And, of course, can't see everyone at once, but inmates will never know when he's looking, so they'll know at all times that they could be under surveillance, and that will compel them to obey. They'll be a lot more obedient once they suspect we're watching. That was the whole idea of the panopticon, meaning see anywhere. So apart from that kind of kooky, supposedly well-meaning, but actually totalitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham's, nobody had really constructed a state capable of watching or listening to everything that people did because the technology wasn't there.
You just couldn't do it until 1984. And it painted, once again, a pretty accurate prediction, as it turned out, of what the future was gonna look like. But what's interesting, there's a scene in there where the protagonist in the novel, without being boring about it, but a guy called Winston Smith, meets another person and has a kind of low-grade love affair with this woman called Julia. And the reason this is notable in the book is because there are very few love affairs in 1984 or in a world with this kind of surveillance because they're impossible. One of the things you learn when you lose your privacy is that you can't have intimacy without it. Intimacy is by definition exclusive. It is a relationship between a very small number, usually two people.
You can't have an intimate DMV line or concert. Your bedroom, you hope, is intimate. And that's because not everyone's invited. So without privacy, there is no intimacy. People can't say what they really think. People are afraid that everyone can hear what they're saying. And so they don't say it. And after a while, they don't think it. So the main takeaway from the novel is you don't need to beat people or shoot them to get them to comply. You only need to spy on them and then tell them that you're spying on them, and they will know that they have to constrain their own behavior. They will be so terrified and alone, so completely isolated, that after a while they won't be capable of having revolutionary thoughts.
They will accept whatever you tell them. So stripping people of their privacy is the key to enslaving them. So in the novel, Winston Smith and Julia decide we're going to try to have a normal conversation.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How does 1984 and the panopticon explain modern mass surveillance?
0:00–28:49
2
What are automatic license plate readers and how did they spread across US cities?
28:49–33:15
3
How does Flock Safety market surveillance technology to police and local governments?
33:15–54:29
4
Do license plate readers and Flock cameras actually reduce crime like they promise?
54:29–1:12:02
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from The Tucker Carlson Show
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