"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
In George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984 readers were introduced to a nightmarish world in which all information, both past and present, is tightly monitored and controlled. Past events are periodically scrubbed from the history books, events edited and rewritten, with the state’s full expectation that the general public will accept and believe in the malleable nature of truth, as an article of faith, in an ultimate gesture of blind loyalty to the State. .
I can remember reading this in my adolescence and believing that the very premise of such an absolute police state was too implausible to entertain. A good book? Yes. Plausible? No. I did not believe that information could be controlled so completely – and I would not believe that people would simply surrender their free will to blatant lies.
I am older now.
I do not need to take up space here giving modern-day examples of Orwellian disinformation campaigns foisted upon and embraced by the public. We’ve all seen it in action with our own eyes. But this is nothing new. Propaganda and ignorance has always been an extremely dangerous mix. Political dogma, and the ditto-heads that repeat it, are nothing new.
But one aspect of this disturbing reality differentiates this generation from all others. As we all become less and less dependent upon the old-fashioned and inconvenient clunky printed word, (e.g. newspapers and history books), and become more and more dependent upon the sleek new streamlined digital online media for our facts – we in fact un-tether facts from their moorings and surrender the truth to the ether of time and space – like the boy in the runaway balloon – into a virtual space where anything can easily be deleted and/or edited – permanently - with no paper trail of evidence that it ever existed at all.
In this medium rumors spread globally, like electronic wildfires at the speed of light. Fact and fiction become interchangeable – and people get to pick and choose which facts suits them best. In this medium people can shop for answers – amidst an infinite marketplace of ideas – and decide that the very scholarly body of knowledge and carefully footnoted essays in one marketplace of ideas do INDEED prove that the holocaust never happened – while they ignore the inconvenient truths that can be found in different markets.
People predisposed toward prejudices of every stripe can now find their own niche market of facts tailored to fit their needs and tastes, in vogue with their own lifestyles and desires. Customized facts served up for every taste.
You don’t like Obama? That’s no problem because you can now join the exclusive club of super-patriots who know the truth behind the cover-up of Obama’s missing birth certificate.
You don’t like the 9/11 Truth movement? That’s no problem either because you can simply create a web of facts and research and media events that purport to prove that a plane did not hit the Pentagon, or no planes were used against the WTC, and enough people will entertain the idea to spread it like syphilis, eventually creating an army of straw men marching into people’s living rooms vis-à -vis Popular Mechanics and Alex Jones and National Geographic’s cable TV – while the legitimate questions languish in a blizzard of disinformation, and Arianna Huffington declares an entire historical event ‘off limits’ in frustration.
“Have we ever been at war with EastAsia,†Chris Matthews asks, lobbing softball question after softball question at empty stuffed shirts, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, while the really difficult questions that suggest inconvenient truths lie buried somewhere unseen beneath our field of vision.
MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan declares on national TV that Adolf Hitler never wanted war – and World War 2 was in fact Winston Churchill’s fault – and nary a peep from the cosmos voicing its dissent.
Bill Maher declares that there is no proof that vaccinations ever worked – citing a quote by Jonas Salk that is over 50 years old – while his niche audience dutifully nods their heads as one, as they do later when he condemns those crazy creationists who ignore the virtual mountains of research and science associated with evolution.
Cable TV News voices outrage over Sarah Palins’s “death panel†lies, while they continue to sell us fables about President Obama’s progressive liberal intentionality – despite all evidence to the contrary.
They create big lies to obscure the cumulative little ones that bury us in our sleep.
They create Glenn Beck to legitimize the insane – and to drive the sane rest of us into the arms of CNN – the more subtle liars of two equally evil evils.
One is forced to wonder – without newspapers and the printed media – will future generations have any way of knowing what is true – and what is not? In a digital age is there really any sure way to secure our past – and render it safe from tampering and the revisionist corporate historians? With the last White House claiming that millions of emails have simply been lost – can future generations ever hope to glimpse a reality that is not viewed thru the prism of an intentional digital haze?
How much information will simply be lost? How much information will simply be invented?
With today’s technology that now allows for Google to track every single website, blog, photo, video and digital archive on every single server in the world – and serve it up to us in the blink of an eye when we type our little queries into their search engine – billions upon billions of bytes of data instantly at our finger tips – is there any way that the awesome power of this technology will NOT be usurped?
Knowing what we know today from the remaining, yellowing and frayed history books that have not yet been burned – the answer is no - and the past, present and future will all soon belong to Big Brother.