The Innovators

Whit

Great author interview tonight on Fresh Air - All Tech Considered. I've got to read this book!




How The Cold War And George Orwell Helped Make The Internet What It Is
In The Innovators, Walter Isaacson explains that Pentagon officials wanted a system the Russians couldn't attack, and 1984 made the public wary of new...
WWW.NPR.ORG

Heater.

That link to some FaceBook page does nothing for me.


Strangely it may have been George Orwell's vision of big brother that stimulated American defences against the Russians. But today everyone bows down to the big brothers of FaceBook, Google, and others. Giving up their privacy without a second thought.

Heater.

OK I finally got into your linked story.

I agree with the last line: "I fear that our machines these days are a little too sealed up."

Yep. How are we ever going to regain any control?

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

The Facebook link does not work. Here's a direct link to NPR that does:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/353269811/how-the-cold-war-and-george-orwell-helped-make-the-internet-what-it-is

-Phil

Heater.

Phil,

I wonder what is going on here. Your NPR link shows me the same content I eventually got by clicking on the original link in the opening post.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

The original link goes through Facebook, which did not work for me. So I extracted the forwarding link from the Facebook URL and posted that. So, yes, if you got the Facebook link to work, they go to the same place.

-Phil

Whit

It goes directly to APR for me. Is that because it is my facebook page? Sorry for the inconvenience!

The book is out today. I am reading it and will report back! It probably won't, but it should mention Chip!

GordonMcComb

The funny part is the bit about the Pentagon wanting a system the Russians couldn't attack. It's become quite the opposite. The Internet, and everything connected to it, is extremely susceptible to attack from the outside or in. Even if the US were to block all external traffic during some crisis, that still leaves botnets within the US.

The Pentagon clearly didn't get what they wanted. They should demand their money back.

NWCCTV

They should demand their money back.

"They" or "we"?? In any event, that should also include the more than $10K paid for toilet seats!!!!

GordonMcComb

Taxpayers will never see it. I'm still waiting for my refund from the profit the government made on the AIG bailout! I figure it comes out to about $50 per person.

GordonMcComb

On Big Brother: I have some old popular science magazines that show the real inspiration of Big Brother. It was from the artwork and tagline of a home correspondence school that advertised after World War II. In the US, the GI Bill allowed for the government to repay tuititon to these schools, so they were very popular, and everywhere. The guy in the ad says, "Let me be your big brother." He looks like a school principal who doesn't like what you're doing at the drinking fountain.

Among the innovators there are indeed some serious risks to privacy. It takes constant diligence to make sure they don't get a foothold. Many people don't know that Microsoft has long had plans to use Kinect to physically verify the identify of its customers. Not sure if they've ever actually developed anything, but they were serious enough to patent the concept.

There's a not-so-funny gizmo in the Bruce Willis film "The Fifth Element" that works in an eerily similar fashion.

prof_braino

GordonMcComb wrote: »

... Many people don't know that Microsoft has long had plans to use Kinect to physically verify the identify of its customers. Not sure if they've ever actually developed anything, but they were serious enough to patent the concept.

If it were anyone else than Microsoft, I would be worried. But we can all rest assured that it will never quite work right, and will easily be hacked, due to poor design, scheduleing and patches.

LoopyByteloose

It is a bit odd to attribute the coming of the internet to George Orwell's '1984'.

While there are ubiquitous wall sized televisions and spy camera's everywhere, the protagonist has to do all his work via a typewriter. Nowhere does Orwell mention a computer or computer network.

And as far as the origin of 'Big Brother', any Chinese knows that this is the standard euphanism for a Triad leader, the guy that extorts protection money from you. I suspect that usage was present in Shanghai, long before WWII began. Look up Big Earred Du and the Green Gang. They ran ShangHai in its bad old days. Big Earred Du made a ton of money, relocated to Hong Kong and supposedly went into banking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du_Yuesheng

Heater.

Gordon,

The Pentagon clearly didn't get what they wanted. They should demand their money back.

No, no. The USA got more than it ever paid for. The ability to spy on everyone, everywhere all the time. See the money rolling around Google, Facebook and the NSA.

Looks to me like the problem was how to communicate from point A on the planet to point B on the planet.

Back in the day we did that with radio. And before that with messengers and pigeons and so on.

Radio, messengers and pigeons are all really slow and unreliable. And they are all prone to snooping.

The internet has provided that fast and reliable medium to communicate through.

Still the problems of snooping and spoofing by your foes remain.

Heater.

Loopy,

George may well have been fantasizing with science fiction as best he could with the big brother idea. You should not fixate on the technology. Typewriters and TV's etc.

It turns out you don't even need the internet and computers to have a "big brother" society. That was alive and well in East Germany, for example, for many years. Where everyone is spying on everyone all the time and reporting back to the system. If you wanted to get ahead you would naturally turn in your neighbor for having strange ideas that don't fit the party line.

Rather like the USA in the era of the McCarthy witch hunts but other way around.

That tyranny is what George was trying to portray. Well. that's my reading of it anyway.

Oh dear. Did we stray into politics here?

GordonMcComb

People who have not read '1984,' read it long ago and have forgotten, or read it but didn't get the message behind it, might miss that Big Brother is a trusted comfort symbol. This is what makes it insidious, not that it merely spies or intrudes. In '1984,' you must willingly accept Big Brother; Doublethink reverses the meaning of the phrase "Big Brother Is Watching You" to be positive adoration. So, I'm afraid, it has nothing to do with strong-armed Chinese underground.

Of course Orwell didn't write about people using computers, nor would he have. Besides, the image of typing out a new script of an event, then sending it off to "someone" elsewhere to use in order to change all previous historical references, is exponentially more scary. The story, and the horror of the dystopia, relies on duplicitous followers.

LoopyByteloose

Well, I have a recently read copy of '1984' sitting on my bookshelf and have often thought of the fun of writing a revision called '2084' in light of all the things dystopian that have entered the world since the original book was published.

There is a great deal of irony in what George Orwell missed in his predictions for 1984, so it would be great fun to revise the book's themes. Big Brother was pretty much what we now refer to as 'the nanny state'. And there is a strong theme of the superiority of 'the noble savage' being in conflict with the modern nanny state throughout the story. George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was a more politically focused text on authoritarian tyranny. That is on my book shelf as well.

The thread is about what inspired the internet. I feel the original article is off in the weeds about Orwell. I remember ducking under desks in elementary school for simulated nuclear attacks and Mechanics Illustrated publishing how to build your own fallout shelter in case of attack. The Cold War mentality was enough to motivate the creation of the internet.

But the origin of terms will forever remain at best a speculative venture. And many British terms that might be culturally attributed to a British source could well have originated and migrated from the outlying colonies. I have at least one on-line dictionary that attributes 'big brother' to originating about 1860-65 from what appears to be the Chinese term for 'elder brother', and includes the mention of someone that benevolently takes on the role of guiding younger boys. I suspect that the less benevolent recruitment of youth was an error of omission.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/big+brother

My main point is simply that the author may be clever in attributing Orwell with undue credit and not really aware of the true origin of anything.

Another curious author is L. Frank Baum. References to the Emerald City and the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz seem to have been borrowed from the Thai culture. If you visit the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok, you will note murals on the temple grounds that appear to be flying monkeys.. but are actually represent some sort of demon in Buddhist tradition. The Thai Royal Palace grounds in and of themselves are exotic enough and very similar to what the movie "The Wizard of Oz" used to portray the Emerald City.

I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect L. Frank Baum was inspired by something he read of Thai culture.. maybe an old National Geographic. Or maybe, the Hollywood version just heavily borrowed visually from Thai culture.

Authors do borrow a lot of ideas and then to attribute things to their own creativity that might just not be so.

GordonMcComb

But Orwell made no predictions, and often said so. He wrote thought-provoking fiction. Orwell saw TVs, made them bigger so they were all-immersive, and naturally extended the concept of surveillance to 2-way transmission. These aren't predictions, any more than when Star Trek "predicted" cell phones with flip-lids. They're just coincidences that happen in the process of telling a story.

Virtually no fiction is 100% original. That's the nature of story-telling, which has been going on for thousands of years. Orwell's endless war had been done many times in the past, and you still see it done in today's fiction. It's a timeless concept.

The article cited at the top makes the common mistake that "people" make the difference in avoiding Orwellian futures. Orwell would churn in his newspeak at reading that. As I said, in '1984' it's people that make Orwellian societies (potentially) possible. I imagine the same people who buy a pair of Google Glass and similar "cool" yet highly intrusive technologies.

Heater.

Gordon,

Orwell made no predictions, and often said so.

How on Earth could someone write a book in 1949 called "Nineteen Eighty-Four", which does actually contain some, at the time, unavailable technology, and then expect that people don't take it as a prediction or speculation about a possible future?

These aren't predictions, any more than when Star Trek "predicted" cell phones with flip-lids. They're just coincidences that happen in the process of telling a story.

I would not say "coincidences". Perhaps sometimes those fiction authors think things through a bit and see how it must be if it is to be at all. Or perhaps those young kids watching Star Trek grew up with that in their minds and the flip phone was the result when it became possible.


I do agree that no fiction is 100% original. But why limit that statement to fiction? Nothing in the non-fiction world is 100% original either. Mathematicians, physicists and the like are building on a story that dates back a long way. After all everyone involved had to learn what came before and be inspired before they could take the next steps.


Sure it's people that make Orwellian societies possible. Or any other society. As we see from many examples in history people can be led to do all kinds of crazy, or good, stuff by a very few leaders.


Google Glass is interesting. Recently people have been complaining that they get physically attacked when using them. I wonder why they are surprised? Not many years ago one would have suffered similar attacks by simply pulling out a camera in the wrong place.

LoopyByteloose

@GordonMcComb
Ah ha! The greatest irony of all is that the internet seems to have gotten into Orewellian 'Newspeak' and away from real information.

@Heater
How can an author write a book about the future and claim to not predict anything? That's why it is called fiction.

"1984", "Island" and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley, and "Fahrenheit 451" tend to be grouped together as a classic genre of dsytopian literature, but there are a few other ones.. 1984 was written in 1949, Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and Island in 1962. They got lumped together as 'must read' in the late 1960s. Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' actually pre-dated WWII and was written in 1932.

=====
Further thoughts about the etymology of 'big brother'.

It is a well founded linguistics concept that the meaning of words change over time. This terms seems to have evolved.

So, the original may well be the Chinese meaning ... eldest brother.
Then came the other Chinese meaning... a Triad leader (the addition of irony and sarcasm to a pejorative)
Orwell's term... big government overrunning powerless citizens
The Hippy Anti-war Movement ... a tyrannical government.

I suspect Orwell did not think much about the Chinese origins and figured he had creative license to do as he pleased.

I suspect that the majority of Hippies never read the book, but adopted the term in the spirit of protest solidarity. More than likely, they knew more about "Big Brother and the Holding Company" (a band made famous at the Fillmore Auditorium along with the Grateful Dead) than Orwell.

Dsytopian literature seems to have started in the 1800s with 'Gulliver's Travels' by J. Swift. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dystopian_literature

BTW, sorry, the 'noble savage versus the modern world' theme is actually in 'Brave New World'

GordonMcComb

Loopy Byteloose wrote: »

@Heater
How can an author write a book about the future and claim to not predict anything? That's why it is called fiction.

Precisely. Otherwise every writer of fiction, especially speculative fiction, is "predicting" something. It's far simpler than that: good writers observe human nature, ask "what if," then use that to build an interesting story.

On Orwell's technology: Orwell didn't predict big screen TVs: they already existed. By 1949 RCA and other TV makers had already demonstrated projection TVs. Remote surveillance by wire? It was already a problem in 1934 when they passed the Communications Act outlawing it without a court order. Things like Thought Police continue to be a fantasy, and every country/empire/civilization since the beginning of recorded history has had their version of a Ministry of Truth. Orwell, and every writer at the time, understand that if a TV camera could point at a stage and beam it into a home, it was no big leap to wonder "what if" going in reverse. This is not a prediction unless EVERYONE predicted it.

Coincidence goes beyond accidental similarity. A fictional counterpart can have some logical semblance of technological merit, even though the remaining 95% is wrong. Like '1984,' people are fond of saying how Roddenberry "predicted" the future because of shallow similarities in things like flip-open communicators. Walkie-talkies were already invented, and it was logical to consider building the antenna into the flip front. The extrapolation makes common sense, though it was nothing even remotely like a cell phone. For that matter, most flip phones didn't flip open like they did in Star Trek, unless the hinge was broken. So no, I don't think anyone said, "hey guys, let's make these like in Star Trek!"

Nostradamus and Crisswell tried to predict. Orwell just tried to write something that personally interested him, and he thought would inspire others. Some of his ideas may have been prophetic, but in the free world (yes, it exists!) none of the "predictions" attributed to him have come true, except in the minds of some tin-hat wearing super cynics that insist the Thought Police really exist. It's a pity, because these people miss the true message behind '1984,' which is ultimately about rejecting totalitarianism (Orwell was a democratic socialist) and nurturing individuality. These are concepts worth contemplating and building toward.