Picture this … it’s 1984 and you are inside the towering plastic walls of your laptop. All you can see are the walls and the billowing cyber clouds above them.
Yes, we have taken an ‘Orwellian’ lemming’s leap down into the electronic desert deep inside The Machine.
Big Tech has harvested and monetised us all… Facebook, Google and all those other thieves are stealing away our memories and hopes.
Big Tech is also wilfully allowing us to destroy our world’s languages, to abandon the art of expression and obliterate our common articulacy. Today we are locked up in a dystopian prison of processors, silicon chips, RAM, circuits, mice and motherboards.
And yet so many of us don’t care or even understand what is happening inside these little 15 inches by 9 inch glowing, humming plastic coffins of intellect and invention.
Instead, billions of us pound the keyboards and streets waving cardboard banners and childlike emojis, screaming that Covid-19 is the true conspiracy leading us like blind horses into tyrannous dystopia.
And we never see what is flashing constantly but dully in front of our faces.
Oh, it seems so long ago, when we were lulled into such a false sense of security, believing we were simply sharing photos with old school friends on ‘My Space’.
Now social media is a propaganda machine more determined to robotically destroy our civil liberties than any fascist state.
And Orwell warned us about it way back in 1984.
He postulated that whoever controls language, (Big Brother in his time) (Big Tech in ours) controls the way people think.
And he was right, look at the limited vocabulary of modern text speak!
Orwell wrote: “The whole aim of New-speak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
Big Tech (just like Big Brother) is able to do this by destroying literature and controlling what people read. Look at the shambolic language of self-publishers on Amazon and Kindle – the biggest book shops in the New World.
The first real target Big Tech turned on was the relatively low-tech traditional media, the Fourth Estate of trained investigators, truth-seekers, pundits, performers, writers, sub-editors, editors, photographers, designers and broadcasters.
Social media gleefully allowed Trump to bang on about Fake News while it also filled its ever-watchful pages with spiders, crawlers, robots and lies.
Now social media, internet search engines, data brokers and tech companies are all using our personal data to trade in our interests and behaviour.
Surely, this is a far more sinister threat than pub passports, face masks and the Daily Mail. Let’s face it, you can always drink at home, take off your masks and read a different newspaper.
And that is the fundamental freedom we humans have always had. The freedom of choice, the freedom to decide.
But where is the choice when you decide to allow Big Tech to take over your data and lives?
And then we go to war on a bug rather than a conglomerate.
A new report from Amnesty International paints a dismal picture of global leaders whose handling of the pandemic has been marked by total contempt for human rights.
Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, says: “We’ve seen a spectrum of responses from our leaders; from the mediocre to mendacious, selfish to the fraudulent. They have seen the pandemic as an opportunity to entrench their own power. Instead of supporting and protecting people, they have simply weaponized the pandemic to wreak havoc on people’s rights.”
And we are allowing them to do it while so many scoff at face masks, vaccine passports and Bill Gates supposed little chips of control.
We are missing the point.
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
The first 14 words of 1984 – written in 1947 – and it spell out a world gone wrong.
There is no doubt that today we are living in Orwellian times – look around you, America is Orwellian, Britain is Orwellian, Europe is Orwellian, TV is Orwellian, Amazon is Orwellian. And so is the internet.
In his other masterpiece, Animal Farm, Orwell says that all animals are equal. But some are more equal than others.
You see, if you can convince the world that you are the one saving it from Covid-19, then you can rise far beyond ‘equality’ and join the privileged. The privileged are those who command the attention of the masses. And change thinking.
Their are two basic flaws in human nature – the desire for power and the need to deceive when you are in power. This why there are no honest politicians.
So, we need to ask a simple question, is there really a pandemic out there, Covid or otherwise?
Let’s go back twenty years when the ‘war on terror’ began. We didn’t really know much about the enemy, it was made up of comic book baddies with hook noses, flowing beards and bloody robes.
And we were being led into a war that has never gone away by the constant dishonesty of warmongering politicians like Tony Blair and George Bush.
Today, in similar circumstances of unanswered questions and ambiguous realities underpinned by systematic deception, I am beginning to think the unthinkable.
Once the existence of the pandemic was assumed, measures were justified to fight it including a major reduction in health care for heart disease, cancer and many other problems we all could face within our lives.
If the pandemic had not been assumed to exist, and the dystopian interventions against it had not happened, how would have know there was one?
And do you know where most people got their information about Covid-19 and its variants? From the dishonest robot-controlled Trumpian disaster of social media, that’s where.
To validate YouTube, twitter and Facebook as the go-to-platform for truth and honesty, the ordinary man on the street had to be seen to expose traditional media as the true cauldron of dishonesty and propaganda.
And this is when the incomprehensible ambition of control got its metallic talons in to us all. The nightmare in a thin plastic box began here.
So, is there a secret plan – adopted by every government across the world – which demands upgrading repression in a way that could have only been dreamt of by Hitler?
It is real that now, because of social media and the pandemic, we have the foundations of global surveillance able to monitor everything we do?
Social media was needed to change our way of thinking and the pandemic was needed to create a new form of radical world slavery.
Then think about the vaccinated population of the world and those who refuse to be vaccinated – two tribes already at war on the internet. And there are of course ‘privileges’ for the vaccinated, like seeing your family, going to work, going to the pub and on holiday. The privilege of returning to some kind of normal life.
Society is today totally divided there is no doubt, and if you wanted to take it to its Orwellian Best, the powers that be now have the ways and means of culling the population and can make it look like natural selection.
They’ve pumped all the old people full of experimental drugs, they have caused despair and poverty in families which leads to suicide and they have a good part of the population under house arrest.
And they have anarchy on the streets where violent action can be taken by the police to control things – and emoji anarchy inside our thin plastic boxes where every move you make is watched and therefore controlled.
In this pandemic there is one thing we know for sure and that is the identity of the culprit, a virus called SARS-CoV-2. There is no connection between it and influenza viruses.
And those are facts.
Our lives have been uprooted and our future looks uncertain. Many of our inherent freedoms have been lost at least temporarily. So we need clarification on what is actually happening.
In the past – before s0cial media – people struggled to find information. Now people struggle to understand because there is just too much and so much of it is just wrong.
It is another fact that on Twitter at least, false information spreads further than true information and six times as fast.
But who is responsible for that? Not the Fourth Estate and not Democracy for certain.
***
In the final second of December 31, 1999, clocks ticked in the new millennium, and we waited for another virus… the Y2K bug, a computer code predicted to cause global chaos.
Nothing happened.
But the Coronavirus pandemic isn’t nothing. Something has happened.
And the real proof is as simple as the bodies of my friends killed by Covid-19 metaphorically piling up outside my front door.
Many of them are traditional journalists who, died in the last flush of youth despite leading fairly healthy lifestyles. And they all had articulate partners and families who would have asked the right questions if there was a doubt about the narrative of their deaths.
They would have stood up and have been counted.
And there is the rub.
In this Covid conspiracy world promoted by social media there are just too many intelligent people who would have to be drawn into the chicanery of an all-out reset of our lives, like the 59 million health care workers in the world and 15 million doctors.
And what about kings, queens, governments, presidents, prime ministers, civil servants, registrars, coroners, world health officials? What about so many rights organisations and the churches. What about workers in the vaccine industry?
Where are the whistleblowers?
So, as we stare up the plastic walls of social media into the infinity of the billowing cyber clouds where our lives are stored like sardines of data and lied to – and about – second by second…
Why do we see what we hope are temporary little white masks, pub passports and thin needles of hope as the real enemy of the world when the loss of honesty and privacy on the internet are gone forever?
#coronavirus #honesty #privacy #whistelblowers #socialmedia #internet
Well said Leigh it’s so refreshing to read something like this 👏👏👏
Working for a Big Tech company and Orwell being most influential to me, I find this article quite profound and nihilistic. I fear this is our “Brave New World!”
Yes, there is no doubt that this article is deep and profound. Many of us have met people who are apparently of above average intelligence denying the pandemic. Exclamations like; ‘I won’t wear a mask, won’t socially distance, won’t have the jab, will mix as I wish,’ culminate in varying reasoning – one taking it so far as to say, ‘The vaccines are themselves means of wiping millions of people off the earth. In ten years time you will see that the world population has been decimated by coercing people to have these ‘jabs’. While there are people coming up with such ideas and getting them across the airways and all media we should really be making comparisons with Orwell’s predictions. The trouble is that though the evidence for the virus is manifold, there are still people choosing to believe the conspiracy theorists. One thing is certain the internet in all its forms has taken over our lives in ways even its inventors would never have predicted.