The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
- 1984, George Orwell
We would do better at recognising the tools of fascism if more people engaged with the literature of our culture. It’s there right under our noses.
Julia was twenty-six years old… and she worked, as he had guessed, on the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department. She enjoyed her work, which consisted chiefly in running and servicing a powerful but tricky electric motor…
She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the final product. She “didn’t much care for reading,” she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.
, also from Nineteen Eighty-Four
It’s… optimistic about how much AI users know about the internal workings of AI, expecting them to be engineers rather than commodity consumers, but the disdain for what is produced is on point. As is its role in maintaining a post-truth society.
That’s another good one. There are so many parts of that book that are directly relevant today. It boggles my mind that people in general are not furious about what is happening.
- 1984, George Orwell
We would do better at recognising the tools of fascism if more people engaged with the literature of our culture. It’s there right under our noses.
I’m surprised you didn’t go for
, also from Nineteen Eighty-Four
It’s… optimistic about how much AI users know about the internal workings of AI, expecting them to be engineers rather than commodity consumers, but the disdain for what is produced is on point. As is its role in maintaining a post-truth society.
That’s another good one. There are so many parts of that book that are directly relevant today. It boggles my mind that people in general are not furious about what is happening.
Ofc a random@piefed.social would be referencing George Orwell. 🤦♂️