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Friday 7 September 2012

Ministry of Truth



Most of us must be familiar with George Orwell’s novel 1984 and main character Winston Smith’s job at the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. As we know, his job, and an enjoyable and rewarding job it was too, was to alter newspaper references to bring them into line with the true version of history from which we must all learn important lessons.

Now of course, the job would involve more and more editing of computer records, which presumably could not possibly be automated so there’s no chance of it happening.

How would we tell?

I’m sure our dynamic and principled Prime Minister David Cameron would make quite sure this kind of thing never happens, but just in case there must surely be a few official tests we need not apply ourselves.

For one thing, if I tried to write something such as:-

That utterly useless scumbag Nick Clegg should be kicked out of an office to which he was never elected in the first place.

I think that if we had covert government editing of online comment, that would be changed to something like:-

That utterly useless scumbag Nick Clegg should be kicked out of an office to which he was never elected in the first place.

And that’s essentially how we’ll know that something of genuine public concern, but entirely necessary in these difficult times is going on. It’ll all be done quite seamlessly of course, because I’ve no doubt that the software has not been under development for some time.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure there is a file on all of us as subversives to be rounded up one morning (3am is the preferred time). What good it will do them heaven only knows, any fool can figure out that really bad people will operate well below 'the radar'.

Unless of course AK is playing a double game - looking mildly subversive, but all the time plotting the big one - and all these comments are really messages in code.

A K Haart said...

Roger - I'm playing a cat and mouse game, but working out which is which can be an issue.

James Higham said...

Quite sure Roger's right here.

A K Haart said...

James - so am I. A categorized list of blogs and bloggers at the very least - plus those who leave comments.