Scientia Est Potentia

Knowledge is power. Look at this logo and tell me it's not more Orwellian than even Hollywood could have made it. (The connections to The Handmaid's Tale are also inescapable: the secret police in the novel are called "Eyes" and are represented by a winged pyramid. Yikes.) If you're in the mood for more fun, check out "Dr." John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness System (TIA). [via today's Mondo Washington]

Are you scared yet? So if we're entering entirely new levels of Orwellian existence, shall we start assuming that everything "they" say means the opposite of what it would normally mean? What's the opposite of "Homeland Security"? Professor Cooper has some interesting thoughts and links on the matter (as usual).

Oh, and this just in: Homeland Security is now law. Read it for yourself here. The bill grew from 35 to 484 pages in length, which means most of the people who voted on it today have not read the whole bill. If you read that Post article you'll see that TIA is only the tip of this bill's iceberg of horrifying provisions.

And if that's not enough fun for you, see what the media is saying about Sciencia Est Potentia. Welcome to the brave new world of homeland security, everyone.

Posted 07:51 PM | general politics

Why Write?

The whole notion of "Total Information Awareness" (see previous post re: Homeland Security, etc.), combined with re-reading/teaching The Handmaid's Tale sent me on a little research about George Orwell. And since I'm currently supposed to be writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month, I was struck by Orwell's explanation of why he writes. Orwell says:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Unfortunately, in unskilled hands (like mine), even writing with a political purpose can easily become rather lifeless and purple. Which is to say: Don't expect to see the fruits of my novel-writing labors anytime soon.

Posted 04:21 PM | life generally

Myths of Security

Still busy, but this is worth coming out of hibernation for. Is William Safire just trying to scare us with this "Total Information Awareness" and "virtual, grand centralized database"? There's some great discussion related to that question at Scott Rosenberg's blog.

It just so happens that I'm currently teaching The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Atwood imagines a near-future America that has been taken over by conservative religious fanatics who believe they're making the world a better place by waging war against those who hold beliefs opposed to theirs. This creates a state of permanent war both at home and abroad, but this arrangement also means that if you want to live in what the U.S. has become, you have to follow the religious rules. Anyway, the main point here is the method Atwood imagined the religious fanatics would use to take over the U.S. -- they centralized information about everyone in a computer database, reduced everyone to a number, and began methodically controlling people via this information. The parallels to what the Homeland Security bill makes possible are pretty spooky.

"Total Information Awareness" potentially means "Total Control." No matter how scared we are about "terrorists among us," I can't see a single benefit for democracy, freedom, or justice in this "Homeland Security" plan. In fact, these appear to be the very things the bill directly threatens. So where's the "security" in that?

Posted 07:44 AM | general politics