III
The system speaks I
Remember this? WAR
IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
And remember this?
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
Have you heard this?
Privacy is a thing of the past, it is a social norm that will evolve in time.[i]
The first two are quotes from the novel ‘ nineteen eighty four’, by George Orwell, as you know. The third is a public statement by the founder of Facebook®. You know his name, your personal data and gossip are making money for him, or, as he would put it, ‘your personal data are the oil of the digital age.’[ii]
First of all,
Anyone who has and hasn’t read 1984.
Read it.
I know you read it when you were fifteen because school made you and you think its corny and you have better things to do, but let me tell you these two things,
One,
you knew fuck all about the world when you were 15 and really, you still know fuck all about the world now, except that now you have closed off certain incoming flows of information because at an eerie early age you felt a surging information overload triggered by a lack of control over that information, and you fill your days forming opinions based on prejudice, experience, add campaigns and instinct (or whatever’s left of it), trying to extremely achieve what you think you want, which has caused a little bubble to settle neatly around you, and through this bubble you filter everything that comes your way. This, you think, gives you a certain type of control and it relaxes you. In other words: You made ‘the’ world into ‘your’ world and thereby made it very small and understandable, as does everyone. The only thing I am saying is that 1984 will sharpen your mind and filter your filter. Why do I say this, I will explain later, hence the little ‘I’ at the title.
And
Two
You really don’t have better things to do.
Come on
Go to the nearest second hand bookshop or click here.
Print it, come offline, for once, and read a book.
You see, reading a book is like eating an apple and a banana, a walk in the park, a swim and a sauna for your brain. Remember your brain? That place where you could wander endlessly when you were young, where you could go anywhere in any way and that has now been turned into an instrument focused only on achieving and planning and extremely realizing your dreams while making a living? I tell you.
Read.a.book.
Not an infotainment pseudo-scientific global study about something-you-always-wanted-to-know-so-you-will-be-able to state-the-trivial-obvious-when-at drink and talk-parties and forget the rest. No, read prose. Let your reality be fictional! Read what someone smarter than you thought and transcribed into a story. No conclusions, no ‘facts’, no data, no overstated relevance. Disconnect from the networks that surround twenty-four hours a day and connect to yourself and a book.
A good book it is like an oxygen mask in the infosmog of the world, and it will clean your bubble from the inside.
For those of you who think they don’t have time to read I book, I can only misquote Nofussius (1921-2010)
‘If you have time to take a shit, you have time to read a book.
To be continued.
S.D.
