Every day we get closer to an Orwellian society. The United Kingdom may already be one.
Almost the entire western world is going authoritarian. Very worrying trend. It has to be stopped.
the only thing that can really stop it IMO is mainstreaming decentralized social media and messaging services.
You’d need to effectively replace Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Whatsapp etc… The only thing that totally keeps us from 1984 is that all these platforms for now have decided to be relatively free and impartial (compared to how bad it could be). But that could change at any time if the powers that be decide to on a whim. They could completely ban all privacy, pacificsm or any kind of political opposition tomorrow.
No it won’t stop it. Blood and violence is needed but we are sheep.
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No. This is a very naive & dated way of thinking about the world of today. We don’t really have distinct borders distinguishing politicians at that level.
It’s more accurate to say the Davos group is ruling all western nations. What looks like separate world leaders and parties is actually one world-spanning organization of those with power. And what’s worse, they’re all Nazis and technocrats.
The Nazis learned from WW2. If you invade a country, the people fight back. If you groom and install/bribe your own people into leadership positions, the people just let it happen.
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They don’t need their own tech companies. Europe has its own oligarchs. They’re the problem.
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I’m not going to defend the US and it’s tech oligarchs, they are all shit, but the way things are going, the EU and the UK are currently in way worse shape than the US in terms of all this 1984 bullshit.
No country is safe from this anymore, and we may very well be looking at the worse time to be alive when it comes to privacy, regardless of where you live.
I highly doubt it’s the worse time. There used to be no concept of privacy you lived in a small town everyone knew everything and you lived in a one room house and familys had on bed for everything. There would have been no privacy at all.
That’s an opinion lol
We deff have it better now with corpo and goverment replacing family and the hood
You do make a good point. However, consider the fact that you could talk with your wife, kids, friends or anyone for that matter, and the only way someone else would find out was if one of the parties involved told someone else or if you were too loud for someone else to listen. Now we have to go fully out of our way to keep anything under wraps, and even then, there’s no guarantee that nobody else knows.
I firmly believe this is the worst the world has ever been for privacy and individualism, and everything points to that everything is going to be worse moving forward.
Additionally, it’s highly that any of us lived through those times you mentioned, so I’m speaking from my own life experience, and I’m over half a century old.
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Enjoy it. I’m honestly happy to read this. My country has the bad habit of copying all the crappy shit from the US, and none of the good
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As a US citizen, pray for us 🙏
The olygarch’s have ruined everything again?
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The EU is using genocide censorship as an excuse to abort all “freedom” laws. A hillarious twist.
From the fact Britain produced Orwell, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, I figure the UK has always been some shade of “Orwellian”.
Historically, the UK has always been very self assured in their goals and never looked for outside input while disregarding the people that they were upending. Anyone who wasn’t helping them was viewed as an enemy to be controlled, oppressed , or destroyed. If that isn’t a non-political explanation of rightwing authoritarianism, I’m not sure what is.
https://chng.it/YtL2XwbwBc There is already a petition. I’m posting it here.
Share the good work!
As an American it’s nice to see were not the only ones in a complete downward spiral.
EDIT: wild that there are users pretending to be butthurt by this obviously joke comment so they can farm upvotes from the tens of users on Lemmy
It’s nice to see that the rest of the world is just as bad as U.S.
As an American, no it’s not nice. Why would I want more of this shit elsewhere?
We are living in Orwellian society, it’s just the news catching up with reality.
Oh yeah, I should post about my arrest
Sounds like there’s a story waiting to be unleashed. Please continue.
It’s a post in itself and I only got about half of it down before work, so I’ll drop a link here after I finish it tonight.
Took a while to get it all down but I’ve posted it here: https://hexbear.net/post/5776309
For the age verification is it possible to sign a petition? I think is not too late to join forces… or anything but not letting them go further… as of the chat control probably only contacting the representatives. I really hope lawyers and businessmen try to fight it…
The UK ain’t part of the EU mate
It’s worse in Germany.
France is doing the exact same shit as the UK with age verification…
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Not officially, but the same powerful monied interests control both.
Not any more 😭
Is this thread about the rising fascist movements? Oh…
Is it about the refugees from their colonies they drown in the Mediterranean? Oh…
Well is it about the pivot from renewables and nuclear to oil and gas? Wh… well what is…
Oh. This is a thread about your online treats.
#1 on lemmy ‘top in last 12 hours’
I’m quite curious to see how it will end in the UK with the porn filters because the people don’t seem to be inclined to use their IDs online, the system is brittle, and non-porn websites are being blocked too.
As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.
then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function
A little credit here. They’d rephrase the law to only target VPNs whose purpose is offering as a service to the general public (as opposed to exclusively employees and contractors) the ability to connect to a private network with exit points / the ability to appear as if their traffic originates from outside of the UK.
On a related matter they could also require know your customer for all VPNs, require all VPNs keep logs available on request for police inspection and those who don’t are banned. All companies keep extensive logs for corporate VPNs so this wouldn’t present any additional burden to private enterprise but would be the end of anonymous VPN services.
I really don’t think this is more of the spectacle and move on. Not this time. I think Palestine has them spooked because they lost control of the narrative and the best way to seize control of the internet and clamp down on people conveying information they don’t like is starting with things like this.
I do agree. But calling the UK Orwellian is kind of funny, given Orwell’s 1984 is largely, if not mostly, based on the UK:
- Like Winston, Orwell worked in the UK as a war propagandist, and lamented that he constantly had to lie and censor facts, but thought it worth it to defeat the Nazis.
- The ‘ministries’ were entirely based on the UK’s, especially e.g. the ‘Ministry of Defense’ actually being a ministry of war.
- Orwell complained that the UK secret police constantly opened all his letters because he was a commie.
- Room 101 and the Ministry of Truth is basically just satire of the BBC.
As well as cultural changes in the 80s-90s, I think people don’t quite realise how much the internet ‘escaped’ the grasp of governments for the past few decades. By constantly banging the drum of “what about the children D:”, governments are finally just catching up to where we used to be.
Not even close to the horrors of an Orwellian society and saying it is is an insult to the characters in those books. It isn’t great though, and it’s heading in a troubling direction
I think the characters in the book will forgive as that’s a work of fiction and they are not real. That’s like saying I insulted Bugs Bunny for having big teeth. We’ll get through this calamity. ✌🏻
I’m the guy that gets offended on behalf of what ever I want.
Oh no! Wouldn’t want to insult those fictional characters
The UK is owned by a different country. That country is Italy, where the Roman Catholic Church resides. Any Catholic-owned platform will shut down anything that goes against the RCC, or at best, they’ll just minimize the reach for those who have some things to say against the Jesuits and Catholic leadership.
That’s from what my producer, Neigsendoig, researched.
