Orwell saw the black in Blackberry

When George Orwell was writing his political sci-fi novel Nineteen Eighty-Four he had no idea how close his imaginative classic would come to eerily predict our future. It took a few years past the year 1984 but in 2010 our world is resembling Orwell’s futuristic one and realising his grim outlook.

The industrial age gave us the means to pave the technological road, which led us to the age of information. Information or the excessive access and manipulation of it have eventually landed us in the era we live in today, the time we could quite easily dub, the age of paranoia.

Civilisations tend to embrace technological advancements in the hope that with them comes progress and enlightenment. But sooner than the world realised, technology spread like wildfire and before we knew it every man and child had the entire world at their disposal. Overnight, the power of information was available to all, even the once harmless person was now equipped for destruction.

Civilisations also cannot thrive without maintaining order and controlling chaos. Yet this virtual world they helped create and nurture has now turned into a living, breathing monster they cannot seem to control. Information technology has become their Frankenstein.

Once the monster broke loose governments strove to maintain control over the potential chaos it could cause. With the countries’ security at risk governments quickly started to monitor the instigator of all fears, the borderless world they helped create, the Worldwide Web. Emails, chat rooms and blogs became breeding grounds for anarchy and a major concern to government security.

Social networking websites had to revise their privacy policies because when it came to the Internet no stone would remain unturned, no page unmonitored. The social-networking site Twitter has donated the entire world’s status updates (tweets) to the United States’ Library of Congress claiming they took this step for the “preservation and research” of tweets.  Why would the Library of Congress want to preserve and research random peoples’ updates? Regardless of the reasons, whatever you decide to use your 140 characters for, rest assured they will be archived and never be erased. Once you send that tweet you can never take it back.

Countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom took the monitoring to the streets, and to their publics’ outrage, have introduced the use of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) as a tool for crime prevention. The UK has not divulged the total number of CCTVs being used or whether or not this method has directly lowered crime rates, although according to several independent studies CCTVs have reduced crime in the UK by only four per cent. Their effectiveness is very low considering their massive cost on the taxpayers and on their civil liberties.

It is supposed to feel comforting having an eye watching you on every street corner yet there is something quite unsettling about it. Looking back at Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four his Big Brother Surveillance prophecy has indeed been manifested through today’s CCTV.  

After the Web monitoring and the street watching comes the latest fight against terror in the form of cell-phone tapping. The new terrorist on the governments’ block is the Canadian company Research In Motion (RIM). RIM has made it on this list because of their smart-phone device, the Blackberry. The company’s effort to differentiate its product by offering their customers complete privacy, a safe-zone if you will, through the use of this device is its crime.

Yes the big picture is clear and we are reminded of it everyday. Yes, terror is among us. Yes, national security is of utmost importance and governments have the right and obligation to maintain peace within their territory. But while we are staring at and being consumed by the bigger picture have we managed to neglect the smaller one within it?

The conflicting rights are bewildering and can place a person at a thorny crossroad. On the one hand we have to think of our safety as a nation and on the other we have to be concerned for our right in pursuing a private life. National security is sacred and should be fought for but are we willing to sacrifice personal privacy as our not so glorified casualty of this fight against terror?

Should we wilfully accept that every word we type on Twitter be documented by the United States’ security service? Every letter we type in haste or anger be a weapon used against us?

Should it be normal to walk down a street and not feel like you’re being watched but be certain of it?

Should law-abiding citizens be scrutinised and punished in the name of national security?

It is quite a dilemma that once absorbed, forces a person to re-sketch the parameters of his private space and rethink his every step, for you never know who is out there watching, listening and ‘documenting’. 

Most of what Orwell prophesized in Nineteen Eighty-Four has come true in some form or another. In Orwell’s fictitious world “You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized”.

Here’s hoping his Thought Police aren’t next.

This article was published in The Gulf Today newspaper on August 30th, 2010.

EVERYDAY SAVAGES

Have you ever looked at certain people and couldn’t help think that they reminded you of a certain animal, a bird maybe? You could see the resemblance not only in their features but in their behaviour too. Fret not, that doesn’t make you a horrible person it just solidifies the fact that on this planet we are all connected.

Our relationship with animals is one that dates back to the beginning of time. For as long as humans roamed this earth they have walked side by side, or most probably ran in the opposite direction of animals, and therefore, we have a certain kinship to them. We have photographed them in amazement, studied them in wonder, we continue to raise them as pets. And some of us even worship them.

This bond humans have with animals has infiltrated art, and so we witnessed the likes of Leonardo Davinci incorporating them in his paintings, and devising contraptions in their likeness. Writers have made lead characters of them in works such as Aesop’s Fables and Kalīlah wa Dimnah. Religious texts are full of them, each animal representing a human flaw, a strength, a weakness. Each is portrayed as the image of good and evil personified. Why does it seem easier for us to accept reality when it is within the confinement of the animal kingdom yet so hard for us to face it in ours?

In children’s literature animals were used as a moral compass to direct them to the rights and steer them away from the wrongs of the world. One wonders if books such as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would have been as influential if all their characters were humans. Children can easily relate to animals and understand human characteristics through them, as can adults. I guess it is easier to cast aside discriminatory and judgmental feelings when we are talking about Peter Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat.

George Orwell used animal characters in his portrayal of the evils of totalitarianism in the classic novel Animal Farm. Through the pigs, cows and horses that lived within the borders of a farm fence we learned of political manipulation and twisted agendas better than watching the real thing unfold on the news. There must be a connection between the world of politics and that of animals (no pun intended) because to this day the United States’ two major political parties are represented by animal images. The Democratic Party the donkey and the Republican the elephant.

In language animals make an appearance more often than not. We hear terms such as “crocodile tears” when speaking of hypocrisy in human emotions. But why use an image of a weeping crocodile to portray a characteristic reserved purely for humans? It makes you wonder why the slyness of a fox and the wisdom of an owl? Why not the slyness of politicians and the wisdom of monks?

In our so-called civilised world we pride ourselves on being so different from animals. We are not savages we say. Only animals hunt for survival and we hunt for sport. Animals kill because they have no choice yet humans kill because the choice is all theirs. If only people lifted their heads up once in a while, if they gazed at the faces passing them by or glanced over towards a nearby table in a restaurant they would see. They would see the fox in the face of a passer-by and glimpse the owl in another person’s eyes, only then will they realise that there is something beastly in every human and another thing humane in every beast.

This article was published in The Gulf Today on 17th Jan, 2010.