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My big brother's keeper

SM King

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2602319.htm

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen."

This arresting sentence belongs in the museum of my youth. From the
first, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four hauled me into its bright,
cold centre. This work that warned of a dystopian future where none
where none were unseen by a roving electronic retina froze my
adolescent person to the core.

This month marks the 60th anniversary of publication of the celebrated
English book. Literary critics generally agree that this slim,
eminently readable text merits the title "modern classic". The rest of
us who have read it are struck by the author's ability to turn complex
political analysis into art. Even those who haven't read it are
familiar with its terminology: thoughtcrime, newspeak and the Thought
Police all made their way into the popular lexicon.

Really, it's the impeccably drawn antihero of Nineteen Eighty-Four who
deserves his place in history. A hapless, tired traitor, Orwell's
protagonist is not brave. Winston Smith is just an everyman drawn by
his libido into trouble. But the man who visits Room 101 is not so
well-remembered by the pop culture. Orwell's real legacy is the
invention of a nebulous Big Brother.

Over the past 60 years, the term became a touchstone. Our fear of life
lived in a panopticon guarded by a blandly smiling leader was
crystallised perfectly by Orwell. We have borrowed his Big Brother to
describe ECHELON, Google Maps, surveillance cameras and any sort of
intelligence gathering that makes us uncomfortable.

We Australians, in particular, have been vociferous in our use of the
term. Privacy is of paramount importance to Australians. We don't like
to think we're being monitored by BB and his mates. The Australian
Privacy Foundation made this plain to Google last year when the
intelligence giant launched its "street view" utility. Australian
faces were the first to be blurred.

Back in the Eighties, a national identification system was proposed by
the Hawke federal government. In one of their last truly liberal acts,
the coalition kicked up a storm against Big Brother. The Australia
Card failed as it seems, in recent news, that the proposed Medicare
smartcard might .

Opponents say that the move from magnetic to smart tech will
facilitate "function creep". That is, we suspect that the intelligence
will be used for Big Brother evil instead of pharmaceutical good.
Tasmanian trials suggest that Australians still nurse an Orwellian
horror of surveillance.

It strikes me that we are engaging, to borrow another useful Orwellian
term, in a little doublethink. We're aghast at the thought of ready
access to our personal details. Nonetheless, we're happy to hang our
underthings out, quite publicly, to dry. Aussies love to bebo, tweet,
Facebook and generally narrowcast details of their everyday to
strangers.

Research company Nielsen Online recently released a report on
Australians' use of social media. It seems we're happily catching up
with the world's mania for talking intimately and openly about
ourselves. The comfort we feel in divulging images and details about
our everyday is surprising. Certain of us might feel secure that
Facebook, for example, does all it can to protect our private
networks. Sooner or later, however, an overly bright nerd concocts a
hack and our embarrassing party photos are all over the web. Just ask
Alexander Downer, Hugh Grant or Paris Hilton.

If you maintain the idea that your social networking poison of choice
keeps you sheltered from surveillance, take a look at yourself on
sites such as Pipl or Spokeo. As a private investigator, I have used
these tools, and frankly I'm aghast that anyone would care to share
their travel itineraries, favourite foods and dating histories.

Big Brother, in short, does not take the form that Orwell imagined. Of
course, I'm prepared to entertain the idea that some vast signals
intelligence body could scan the contents of my pantry at a moment's
notice. Big Brother, as he was so vividly imagined sixty years ago,
might have very well emerged. But it's our own folly that might get us
into real trouble.

Life as it is currently understood must be lived in a public realm.
We've a hunger to be seen and consumed not only by the people who know
us. It seems, increasingly, we're quite keen in engaging the attention
of people we've never met. Our eagerness to declare the details of our
day to many, many others is not something that Orwell predicted. Post
1984, the world, perhaps, is not the panopticon we'd imagined. If
we're imprisoned unjustly by anything, it's our own vanity.

I'll remind myself of that next time I tweet. "Just got home. Maybe
had 1 wine 2 many, lol," is a detail I won't share with the electronic
mob. I'll keep it to myself. Big Brother probably knows about that
extra shiraz in any case.

-- 
Clean Feed, it "cleans" the Internet in the same way that Ethnic
Cleansing "cleanses" the population.

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