Essay: Is the Age of the Internet Pushing Us Toward an Orwellian Future?
Is the Age of the Internet Pushing Us Toward an Orwellian Future?
“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” reads the title of the National Security Agency’s website over a patriotic image of the waving American flag, reminiscent of the landmark phrase “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself” from George Orwell’s 1984. The NSA’s seemingly reassuring phrase alludes to a much darker concept of an age where more bills are being approved that allow unrestricted surveillance of Americans, like the Patriot Act. The internet is one of the most widely used forms of social communication in the modern world, and society has reached a point where it cannot function without it. Because of its immense user base (3.2 billion people according to Wikipedia), it is also the easiest place to harvest people’s data and monitor their activity. 1984 by George Orwell is a roadmap to understanding the worst possible scenario that could happen to society if the internet, social media, and its technologies were left to fall into the wrong hands. Media and government are two types of entities competing for our data right now, and both are troublesome for freedom. Major media corporations are harvesting our information and monetizing it along with our attention spans. Whoever can pay them the highest price can put any message they want to before the people. On the other hand, information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 shows how the National Security Agency has been intercepting the web conversations of over a billion users from not only just the US, but also from around the world. The worst part is that people that threaten control over what information a population is exposed to are considered dangerous to those in power and are typically dealt with accordingly. The internet doesn’t necessarily make society more democratic; it just gives society a platform to exist in a new setting and puts it at greater risk for abuse. Many elements of 1984 are already happening today and modern users of the internet, social media, and related technologies have to acknowledge that the reality depicted in the novel isn’t that far off from ours. We have to use 1984 as a lens to observe our reality to make sure it doesn’t get any closer.
Those that threaten the authority or level of power of those in charge will suffer for it. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an ex-CIA employee, began leaking information about the surveillance mechanisms put in place to watch over Americans and intercept terrorism. The practices seemed extreme and unethical to Snowden. He was privy to information that demonstrated how the National Security Agency had access to billions of telephone calls, internet history, email conversations, and more. “With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” he said. (France 24) Snowden himself realized the graveness of the situation, saying “I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” (France 24) Snowden was forced to flee the states or face charges of espionage and government theft. Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez is another example of someone who has tried to use the internet to expose the injustices occurring in her country, and has also faced arrest along with the consequences of censorship to be able to do so. The Cuban government is threatened by her immensely. Jose Manuel Prieto, a fellow Cuban exiled from his country and a visiting scholar at the New York Public Library, says that “She is not a news agency, so she circulates the population’s feelings rather than journalistic scoops. But it bothers those in power that she has challenged their monopoly on information and offers a different reading of the country’s reality.” (Rohter) She, like Snowden, does not have any intention to protect the image of the government or keep anything a secret. For her, the internet and her capacity to use it is something that means freedom, and freedom means she will tell the truth at any cost. To circumvent the issue of people like Sanchez revealing too much about government affairs, those in power have gone to great measures to plug the hole in their leaking boat. For example, the Chinese government has essentially created its own internet by “creat[ing] a gargantuan intranet for most of China and link[ing] this intranet to the World Wide Web through carefully filtered portals.” (Dowell 113) This modernly routine scenario taken from “The Internet, Censorship, and China” speaks for itself.
“Nothing illustrates the inherent absurdity of China’s efforts to control the flow of information better than the case of Shi Tao, a thirty-seven-year-old Chinese business reporter arrested in November 2004 and sentenced in April 2005 to ten years in prison. Shi Tao’s crime was sending an e-mail to a New York-based Web site; the email, which was eventually passed around the internet, included the text of a government warning that the return of a handful of dissidents who had witnessed the Tiananmen massacres might prove socially destabilizing. The memo, the government insisted, was top secret.”
With that said, if one were to compare the events of 1984 with modern day, it’s really not that unlikely that this form of extreme censorship and paranoia could become the new reality. China is already experiencing the stifling of the openness of the internet by entities in power. Through our 1984 glasses, the Chinese government is akin to the inner party, and its people are the Oceanic lower class. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power,” says O’Brien to Winston in 1984, continuing with “no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.” (Orwell 332)
On the other hand, companies that are monetizing our information veil this as beneficial to the user, but this is actually a dangerous form of surveillance that is bending the original beneficial features of the internet into something the creators of the internet could not have expected. Cookies are an example of the corruption of technology: they were originally created to streamline the net experience but now serve their deployers anything they need to know about users on a silver platter. Almost any website a user visits warns about the use of “cookies” and makes reference to their privacy policy, something that many internet users find too intimidating to be able to read in its entirety due to the typically immense size of the document. Companies like Amazon and Google are making changes to their privacy policies that give them permission to “target” ads at us that will get them the most money from the advertisers, and we are being left in the dark because we’re too lazy to read and understand exactly what the changes mean. Privacy in the United States and the rest of the world is dwindling, and social networks may be the achilles heel of the internet’s might. A main issue concerning data privacy is the lack of awareness of users of social media in regards to what happens to their data once it is published online, and what exactly they are agreeing to in accepting the privacy policies of whatever online entity they engage with, a point made in Jennifer Golbeck’s Analyzing the Social Web. A major question to ask here is whether or not we are sacrificing too much privacy for convenience. Facebook’s data policy admits to collecting “information you allow us to receive through device settings you turn on, such as access to your GPS location, camera or photos.” Someone that hasn’t read this specific part of the policy may be unaware of what they’re sharing with Facebook. Is it really necessary for Facebook to make money off of telling you where, on a map, your friends are? Furthermore, Facebook admits to being able to access information about “your activities off Facebook—including information about your device, websites you visit, purchases you make, the ads you see, and how you use their services—whether or not you have a Facebook account or are logged into Facebook.” Where is the line drawn between the cost of using the service and the service using you?
Social media gives an illusion of control over what you want to share but really does not explain how public, accessible, and permanent your information might actually be despite having privacy settings enabled. Data permanence on the internet is a subject not often broached but in need of attention; information is archived in many places and it’s virtually impossible to delete entirely from the internet.
“Once data becomes publicly available on the web, it is archived and cached by many different sites. Thus if users change their minds about what they want to share, previously posted information cannot effectively be removed from the web. This also applies to violations of users’ privacy where information is shared without their consent or knowledge.” (Golbeck 223)
Now, imagine a scenario through the lens of 1984 occurring in modern times where the government suddenly had access to every Facebook status, tweet, livejournal, or blog ever made by everyone residing in the country. This is already the reality. The information they’ve gotten from us could provide them with sufficient content to be able to use it against the people either through manipulation, blackmail, or or worse. For example, Golbeck cites how “a 24-year-old teacher was fired for posting a picture of herself on Facebook holding a glass of wine. A teen was fired after she complained on Facebook that her job was ‘boring.’” She even goes on to provide an example of a woman whose insurance benefits were revoked after being diagnosed with major depression because the photos on her Facebook page did not reflect her condition. Big Brother collected information on the citizens of Oceania in order to ensure complete control over them. “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU;” the famous quote resonates with the reality of what is happening to people based on their online activities in the modern age. The information/attention economy of the internet only ever benefits whoever controls it, in this case tech giants. If the tech giants suddenly decided that profits from ads or online markets were not enough, to what extent could they use the information they’ve gathered on us?
1984 is a roadmap to today. We have to use the concepts of surveillance, privacy, and manipulation covered in the novel to examine how they are affecting society in real life. In John Naughton’s From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, he expresses that the most concerning and “Orwellian” aspect of the internet is the traces that every interaction leaves, down to the uniquely identifying IP address of each user. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in 2011, two years before Edward Snowden began to leak the classified information, that
“while the internet has in some ways an ability to let us know to an unprecedented level what government is doing and to let us cooperate with each other to hold repressive governments in account, t is also the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen. It is not a technology that favours freedom of speech. It is not a technology that favors human rights. It is not a technology that favors civil life. Rather it is a technology that can be used to set up a totalitarian spying regime, the likes of which we have never seen.”
Assange may have predicted Snowden just as 1984 may have predicted the internet. Naughton ties it all together for us. The truth is, social media is leaving an open door for the ignorant and uninformed to be extorted to the benefit of media giants. Our information is already being farmed, the internet’s useful technology is being used against itself, and dissenters are actively being silenced or facing punishment, although maybe not to the extent that Winston did in the novel. He represents all of us. The key question that people need to ask is: how close are we to winding up like him?. The internet is merely a platform for democracy, it does not work in favor of it or against it by its own means if not for manipulation by entities with power. This is why we have to make an active effort to preserve democracy beyond the internet so that it is well-represented within it.
Works Cited:
- “Data Policy.” Facebook Data Policy, www.facebook.com/policy.php.
- Dowell, William Thatcher. “The Internet, Censorship, and China.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vol. 7, no. 2, 2006, pp. 111–119. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43134125.
- 1984 George Orwell. Spark Publishing, 2014.
- Naughton, John. From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know about the Internet. Quercus, 2012.
Comments
Post a Comment