Forget Facebook’s ‘Mission’: Big Zucker is Watching You!

In George Orwell’s “1984,” the telescreen is the primary tool of totalitarian surveillance.

“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen . . . To wear an improper expression on your face . . . was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.”

Facecrime.

For most of my life, ever since I read Orwell as a teenager, I have thanked God that I didn’t end up as a citizen of Airstrip One, living my life as a helot in thrall to Big Brother. It was not long after the actual year 1984 that I made my first visit to the Soviet Union and realized that a significant part of humanity was in precisely that situation. How relieved I felt to return to capitalism and democracy.

Little did I know that the freest society in history — that of Northern California — was already hard at work on the technology that would not only match but exceed the telescreen as a tool of surveillance.