The ‘confessional culture’ created and promoted by social media has eliminated privacy
Any serious discussion on modern privacy and surveillance is subject to the unnamed but universal law that George Orwell’s novel 1984 must be referenced in some way at some point. In his new book published in September 2020, titled Life After Privacy, Firmin DeBrabander largely avoids this, mentioning Orwell’s work just once, and only briefly. DeBrabander’s purpose is to first debunk the notion that privacy can protect democracy – or that privacy can even exist – and to then pose the question, "if not with privacy, how else can we protect democracy?".
Nevertheless, an understanding of Orwell’s views on Newspeak can help us better understand DeBrabander’s arguments on what can and cannot be done.
We are in a better world today than that of 1984; although we are under far more surveillance in our daily lives than we were fifty years ago – or even twenty years ago – we don’t see the same unambiguous, soul-crushing oppressive social control of Orwellian surveillance. We are not kept ignorant and unaware of surveillance in the same way as 1984’s society; in fact, as Life After Privacy points out, many of us are acutely aware of how much information we give up; how much is taken by either the state or corporations. We just lack the wherewithal to effectively protest it.
Newspeak, one of Orwell’s misunderstood concepts, was probably the most insidious form of oppression contained within his imagined society. Stripping language down, restricting people’s ability to communicate to the bare minimum necessary to function in the w ..
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