Big Brother is Watching You - Orwell's 1984 in the year 2018
And now for another non-Korea related article, with my apology for that:
Just happened to glance a tidbit of news that there was a search engine which had been developed to be "gender neutral". As I searched that term, I noted several instances of document "gender specific filters", and so forth for removing [and replacing] instances of gender specific masculine or feminine pronouns such as his, her, hers, sir, madam, Et al. This should be alarming for several reasons.
As a side note, I've watched a number of videos by Dr. Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto on enforced speech. Canada is trying to put into place LAW that makes it illegal to refer to an individual by anything OTHER THAN the other person's selected personal pronouns, chosen from a myriad cherry bowl of countless possible gender 'identities'.
Read that correctly, you can be fined or jailed because of the mode of your speech toward another person. Dr. Peterson is alarmed and already battling it, and I think it's important we realize what is happening in the world in this regard. It is very alarming, indeed.
In Orwell's famous book "1984" there was the Ministry of Truth. It was paradoxically misnamed, as were all the Ministry buildings - because the Ministry of Truth was in fact in charge of fabricating lies in every possible known format - books, movies, pamphlets, posters, and went so far as to alter or "rectify mal-reported production numbers, mal-reported war casualty figures. They could even erase people who had been arrested and killed for their unorthodox thinking, calling them "un-persons". By removing the person, and removing any historical reference to them, they were simply erased. This was enforced so deeply, that it was a Thought Crime punishable by death to even recall to mind someone who existed in the past and was now an un-person. This imaginary Ministry is where Winston, the protagonist, worked. Illegally, he kept a private diary where he lamented their altering of history. This continual stirring of facts called on people to accept preposterous announcements as truth. For instance, one week there was a notice the rations for chocolate went down from 30 grams to 25 grams. The next week there was an announcement the ration was going to be increased from 20 to 25 grams, in a huge victory for the manufacturing sector. Winston knew that it mean instant arrest and death at the hands of the Thought Police to even ask this question of anyone. In the middle of it all, the Ministry of Truth had a select group of people whose job was to produce the next form of spoken language, called Newspeak. Their job was not creating better and more accurate language and descriptive expression, but quite the opposite. They were to destroy superfluous terms and reduce the number of available words for communication, yea, even for thinking.
A word like "good" suffices when all the other terms we use today, including the overused and ruined term "awesome", words like "excellent", "first-rate", "stupendous", "Tip-top", "sick" and so forth - were systematically removed from the dictionary, and people warned sternly to use the new terms, under threat of arrest and death for Thought Crime. Words like "better" were replaced with "plus-good", and "best" replaced with "double-plus-good".
Think for a minute how closely this parallels electronic efforts to remove gender specific terms from documents and speech.
Being an electronics engineer, much of what we create depends mightily on the existence of two easily identifiable genders which are specified in nature, male and female. We recognize a male connector from the fact it has protruding pins, and a female connector from it's receptacle which is the exact mate for the opposite connector. Imagine these descriptors suddenly were removed from existence. My mind immediately hearkens to the movie "The Silence of the Lambs", where the antagonist says "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."
Now, think about this: You have already experienced on many applications such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Pages, Keynote - as you type a particular word and misspell it, the word is automatically replaced with the correct spelling. What IF those same applications were to disallow YOU using certain words as "he", "she", "herself", "himself" - and would replace those words on-the-fly as you tried to type them? What if all digital copies of books were suddenly scanned and filtered, and the gender and even the names of every character replaced so they were somehow gender-less? All it would take would be the same social pressure placed on companies of every size and distinction in the last 20 years or so, to be turned on software giants.
[Insert organization name here] prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy related conditions, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability unrelated to job requirements, genetic information, military service, or other protected status.
How did this statement not only come into existence, but be powerfully enforced by every organization? Well, discrimination became law, didn't it? Remember, Canada is considering making personal pronoun usage a matter of enforceable LAW. It is exactly the same premise.
It's the exact way the first thing came into being - under the herald of righteousness and dignity for all, and it is not a distant cousin to the next coming thing. If the law can be pressed on people to such a degree where it is illegal to even mention these diversities we supposedly celebrate, how far a step down is it to just destroy a few thousand words from the dictionary?
Last week, I gave my young daughter a vintage cassette recorder and blank tape. I then showed her and her 'BFF' how to operate it. After she and her friend played with it and laughed at their own voices, they went to my workshop and extracted a cassette tape of some music that has now mysteriously come back into vogue (Queen, I think it was.) Prior to that, she could only guess what the tape was and until I demonstrated its use, could not have told me what purpose it ever served, what 'fast-forward' and 'rewind' mean. In just this one generation, one of the most giant symbols of technology from that era (in fact, even the 1960's era as well) has faded completely from the knowledge base of most children.
How long, then, would it take for the tools of our current technology to completely remove gender related words and terms from the entire language? And if they are removed from the language, can they some day be completely removed from thought? Can the human mind become that malleable? Can the human race become that soft and pliant?
That world awaits our descendants.
Just happened to glance a tidbit of news that there was a search engine which had been developed to be "gender neutral". As I searched that term, I noted several instances of document "gender specific filters", and so forth for removing [and replacing] instances of gender specific masculine or feminine pronouns such as his, her, hers, sir, madam, Et al. This should be alarming for several reasons.
As a side note, I've watched a number of videos by Dr. Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto on enforced speech. Canada is trying to put into place LAW that makes it illegal to refer to an individual by anything OTHER THAN the other person's selected personal pronouns, chosen from a myriad cherry bowl of countless possible gender 'identities'.
Read that correctly, you can be fined or jailed because of the mode of your speech toward another person. Dr. Peterson is alarmed and already battling it, and I think it's important we realize what is happening in the world in this regard. It is very alarming, indeed.
In Orwell's famous book "1984" there was the Ministry of Truth. It was paradoxically misnamed, as were all the Ministry buildings - because the Ministry of Truth was in fact in charge of fabricating lies in every possible known format - books, movies, pamphlets, posters, and went so far as to alter or "rectify mal-reported production numbers, mal-reported war casualty figures. They could even erase people who had been arrested and killed for their unorthodox thinking, calling them "un-persons". By removing the person, and removing any historical reference to them, they were simply erased. This was enforced so deeply, that it was a Thought Crime punishable by death to even recall to mind someone who existed in the past and was now an un-person. This imaginary Ministry is where Winston, the protagonist, worked. Illegally, he kept a private diary where he lamented their altering of history. This continual stirring of facts called on people to accept preposterous announcements as truth. For instance, one week there was a notice the rations for chocolate went down from 30 grams to 25 grams. The next week there was an announcement the ration was going to be increased from 20 to 25 grams, in a huge victory for the manufacturing sector. Winston knew that it mean instant arrest and death at the hands of the Thought Police to even ask this question of anyone. In the middle of it all, the Ministry of Truth had a select group of people whose job was to produce the next form of spoken language, called Newspeak. Their job was not creating better and more accurate language and descriptive expression, but quite the opposite. They were to destroy superfluous terms and reduce the number of available words for communication, yea, even for thinking.A word like "good" suffices when all the other terms we use today, including the overused and ruined term "awesome", words like "excellent", "first-rate", "stupendous", "Tip-top", "sick" and so forth - were systematically removed from the dictionary, and people warned sternly to use the new terms, under threat of arrest and death for Thought Crime. Words like "better" were replaced with "plus-good", and "best" replaced with "double-plus-good".
"It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words."
Think for a minute how closely this parallels electronic efforts to remove gender specific terms from documents and speech.
Being an electronics engineer, much of what we create depends mightily on the existence of two easily identifiable genders which are specified in nature, male and female. We recognize a male connector from the fact it has protruding pins, and a female connector from it's receptacle which is the exact mate for the opposite connector. Imagine these descriptors suddenly were removed from existence. My mind immediately hearkens to the movie "The Silence of the Lambs", where the antagonist says "It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."Now, think about this: You have already experienced on many applications such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Pages, Keynote - as you type a particular word and misspell it, the word is automatically replaced with the correct spelling. What IF those same applications were to disallow YOU using certain words as "he", "she", "herself", "himself" - and would replace those words on-the-fly as you tried to type them? What if all digital copies of books were suddenly scanned and filtered, and the gender and even the names of every character replaced so they were somehow gender-less? All it would take would be the same social pressure placed on companies of every size and distinction in the last 20 years or so, to be turned on software giants.
"What if applications were programmed to prevent you from using gender-specific pronouns?"You've read company statements like this before, right?
[Insert organization name here] prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy related conditions, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, age, veteran status, disability unrelated to job requirements, genetic information, military service, or other protected status.
How did this statement not only come into existence, but be powerfully enforced by every organization? Well, discrimination became law, didn't it? Remember, Canada is considering making personal pronoun usage a matter of enforceable LAW. It is exactly the same premise.
It's the exact way the first thing came into being - under the herald of righteousness and dignity for all, and it is not a distant cousin to the next coming thing. If the law can be pressed on people to such a degree where it is illegal to even mention these diversities we supposedly celebrate, how far a step down is it to just destroy a few thousand words from the dictionary?
Last week, I gave my young daughter a vintage cassette recorder and blank tape. I then showed her and her 'BFF' how to operate it. After she and her friend played with it and laughed at their own voices, they went to my workshop and extracted a cassette tape of some music that has now mysteriously come back into vogue (Queen, I think it was.) Prior to that, she could only guess what the tape was and until I demonstrated its use, could not have told me what purpose it ever served, what 'fast-forward' and 'rewind' mean. In just this one generation, one of the most giant symbols of technology from that era (in fact, even the 1960's era as well) has faded completely from the knowledge base of most children.
How long, then, would it take for the tools of our current technology to completely remove gender related words and terms from the entire language? And if they are removed from the language, can they some day be completely removed from thought? Can the human mind become that malleable? Can the human race become that soft and pliant?
That world awaits our descendants.
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