Millions of America know their every move and utterance are being recorded, but all those gizmos are just so darn convenient. From Fred Reed at fredoneverything.com:
Sez I, we are barreling into a world of mixed unreality and invited surveillance, not quite noticed but at warp speed. The unreality? We can now do politicians in video software and make them convincingly say things more reprehensible then they would themselves. The surveillance creeps in like a barely noticed smell. It creeps and will creep. Consider:
Several years ago Vi and I bought a sixty-five inch LG screen that we use for watching YouTube and Netflix. It has search-by-voice. Thus by pressing a button on the remote to wake it up, we can say, “Tianjian automated Chinese seaport,” and it will find the relevant sites on the web. Of course we have no way of knowing whether it is listening the rest of the time. Since it is convenient, we are not important, and we don’t say anything criminal or probably even very interesting, we use it.
The screen also has control-by-gesture. It doesn’t work very well, and I would feel like an idiot waving my arms and gesturing at a television, so I have never learned it. However, we have no way of knowing whether and when it is watching us. Just in case, we confine human sacrifice and orgiastic sex with farm animals to the garage so, if it is watching, we will be boring.
At last everything is done for you with a convenient condom over your thought cloud so that we can all get along in the New Civility.
No shirking deplorable kulak untermenschen scum, we are just one more law or regulation away from the golden egalitarian workers of the world utopia.
We have a ditch out back where the armed troops only follow orders for those dissident wrongthinkers who hold up the glorious people’s indispensable progress great leap forward reset.
Forward, yes we can!