Arnold Ahlert: '1984' — on Steroids

Privacy is dead. It's death is best described as a homicide committed by tech titans.

“Big Brother is Watching You.” —George Orwell, 1984

Privacy is dead. It’s death is best described as a homicide committed by tech titans, whose power and wealth are unprecedented, and millions of American accomplices whose insatiable quest to be noticed and validated — epitomized by the now-ubiquitous “like” button — has overcome any sense of foreboding.

In Orwell’s novel, three main components enabled The Party’s totalitarian control: surveillance, enforcement, and coercion. In 2018, the level of surveillance — exactlythe right word for the terabytes of personal data acquired by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — makes Orwell’s Big Brother look benign by comparison.

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