“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” –George Orwell
Orwell’s 1984 is one of the most influential novels of all time. In it he predicted with uncanny accuracy our current state of affairs. Big Brother has become a metaphor for the surveillance state erected around us without our permission.
In a true democracy, one actually ruled by the people, such an entity would never exist. But since we live in an oligarchy, and more specifically a paranoid plutocracy, we the people have no say, except when we join together in solidarity. In this article we will break down the four main culprits of the mass surveillance state, using the four overreaching and insidious tentacles of Big Brother as a metaphor, and see if there’s anything we can do to overcome them.
