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@AgreeableLandscape's post about the book 1984 by George Orwell just spurred my thoughts and I felt like sharing. Nothing more, just my take on it over the years:

The narratives about the telescreens struck me the most, seeing how they were used to express a pervasive, unavoidable presence of snitches and thought policing present in every waking moment in the fictional, strawmanned communist society.

Western capitalist nations these days are total surveillance states, everything you do from either an internet connection or being out in public under the collective eye of uncountable and often unseen cameras is recorded somewhere, on some remote server, with fuck knows how much metadata to accompany it, kept for some unknowable amount of time, if not forever, with no accountability or control over any of it granted to the citizens being surveilled.

Your every bank and card transaction (with accompanying video if made in-person) and records of debt/credit are stored digitally with multiple backups around the country impervious to activist destruction or weather events, but accessible to anyone in the government or corrupted police forces at any time. You're opted in, with or without consent or knowledge, to a corrupt and unaccountable credit reporting system that tracks all your financial activity throughout your life (frequently without accuracy) and determines how easy of a time you'll have in this modern hell wherein money is held higher than any deity and is needed for literally every aspect of simply living.

Your smartphone, equipped with multiple cameras and a microphone, operated by hardware and firmware made by privatised capitalist entities (frequently Qualcomm), is equally accessible to state-level agencies; LineageOS or whatever will mostly keep Google from harvesting an ocean of your personal data, but it doesn't help you when the cellular radio firmware (baseband) is so often a closed "binary blob" of unknowable code that interacts with the network at a level below and independent of the authority of the OS software, even when the device is off. These combined with the newer "smart TVs" are the literal, actual telescreens which watch and listen to everything we do in service of capitalist and neoliberal masters.

Every moment of interaction with any police is recorded in sound and video (unless they had plans to murder you in advance, in which case the surveillance is turned off). Your ISP holds all records of your interactions with every website you visit, say something naughty enough about a shithead neoliberal politician on a privatised social platform, or talk enough bad about the system of capitalism itself, and all your details are gleefully turned over to the pork at their request and you get a knock at your door. A lesser form of this snitching is seen when "owners" of intellectual """"property"""" rat out users in bittorrent swarms sharing movies etc., casting the widest net possible to increase chances of a life-ruining lawsuit sticking to some of them, and they do it thousands of times per day with full compliance from the ISPs due to laws written by and for the oligarchy to protect capital interests.

Modern journalism and news are perverted, falsified, and shaped in equal parts by both a violent, highly individualist and reactionary society who have been conditioned to respond only to negative stories, and by force of being controlled from by a small number of multinational megacorporations handing down doctrines of biased pro-capitalism horseshit to keep the narrative on the side of the oligarchy.

I could keep going but I have other shit to do. What I'm trying to say with all this is even though 1984 was apparently written to show what some strawmanned "communist" dystopia would be like, in reality and bittersweet irony it ended up envisioning capitalism to the fucking letter.