George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

[hgc]

That's the same reason Radio Shack asks for your telephone number when you buy batteries with cash. Best Buy does it too, as do a number of other retailers. Any program that involves a frequent customer discount usually involves your filling out some sort of name, address, telephone number thing. Although ostensibly it is to get you discounts on future purchases, the primary benefit to the retailer is your marketing and purchasing habits. They use this data to engage in targetted marketing, and also sell the data to third parties for marketing.

It's pretty old hat by now. They're been doing it for a couple of decades.

AS

Bed, Bath & Beyond used to ask for my Zip code. That I didn't mind giving. They get a little a little extra data, and it doesn't intrude on me at all. I don't know why they stopped asking.

 

[Schneibster]

So when you hear Newspeak coming from the highest places - when peace is war and life is death and losing is winning and the meaning of words become distorted to the point where they mean nothing, really, that doesn't even give you pause? ... It is hard for me to imagine, when I hear this sort of language coming from out leaders, that either they read "1984" or they understood it or that they took away any message except exactly the wrong one. I believe that the neocons, for example, look to books like 1984 as sources of inspiration in the worst possible way.

It worries me greatly. What worries me more is that they might have read it and not even realize that it applies to what they are saying now.

 

[bigred]

I gotta agree with Darth Rotor on this one. One of my history instructors in Del Mar would try to make extrapolations between 1984 and the Progressive Era, not to mention trying to suggest that modern developments are becoming more and more like the book (such as how we go into other countries under a "police action" instead of a war). I just couldn't agree with her, and I feel that it's an unfair comparison.

1984 was based on Hitler, Mao, communism, and totalitarianism. To suggest that we're getting to that point, even with George Bush, is a definite exaggeration of the extreme kind. Yeah, sure, Bush had a lot of screwed up policies, but while we can sit here talking on the computer about how bad Bush is, it's nothing like 1984. As long as we can even think bad things about him without ending up tortured or killed, it's nothing like 1984. As long as we have good food, good drink, and a decent living without living in squalid slums with rationed food and drink that tastes slightly better than manure, then it's nothing like 1984. We do not live in a totalitarian state, even though some might consider the political system to be a mess. It just hasn't gotten to that point.

Oh there you go stating facts n stuff and trying to be (gasp) objective. Careful - extremists HATE that.