It has become a cliché for doomsters to reference either 1984 or Brave New World as a rallying cry or to bemoan what is going on in our world as we move towards a perfect state of digital-surveillance convergence… or is that word I am looking for “trope”? Either cliché or trope or device, there is an overabundance of references to “Orwell” or “Orwellian” on the Doomer (AKA End of The World As We Know It bloggers) bandwidths the way that reporters use “gate” as a suffix of any scandal such as Watergate, Irangate, Iraqgate, Pastagate, Barram Fishergate, Brothelgate. Doomers think these literary references are part of the call to the sheeple to “wake up from your slumber” or expose them to “what really happened.” These analogies have reached epic banal proportions…. Or is that epic droll ratios? (For more than three decades my use of “droll” has been incorrect, according to my brother… so perhaps I need stop with the flowery literary devices searching for the perfect obscure and clever way of demonstrating a certain floccinaucinihilipilification of doomer devices and just spit it out). What if no one read 1984 or Brave New World or did so in school long ago and have forgotten everything about it other than the hatred they have for the composition essay they had to write for Mister Henderson’s English class?
In many ways our world has become so Orwellian as to make this Orwelian world “The World” – that is, digital surveillance has become so normal it is not like “1984,” it is like “Today,” “Now,” or what we call reality in the same way that the majority of Native American tribes generally translated into “The People” or “The Original People” because the idea that other tribes were actual people was so alien of a concept that they needed to be dismissed or destroyed (yes, Native Americans killed each other and hunted things to extinction…. good thing too since who wants to live in the Americas with huge sloths slothing about the trash cans like unstoppable bulletproof raccoons… which is rather frightening to think of… bulletproof raccoons). The World of giant sloths hunted to The Original People was as normal as our world of credit checks, cameras, and drones.
So, we wake up in a world where we can no longer make comparisons to 1984 since that would mean we can still experience or understand a world not unlike 1984. We should use The Googles to look to other books assigned in secondary school classes and then use some software to scan the text in order to find the right word to make the right comparison between the world we had in the past (or wish to return to) and that world we exist in today where our digital fantasies of who we are(Twitter, FaceBook, Foursquare, etc), corporate/government surveillance (cameras in everything, digital tags, metadata, credit reports), and electronic selves (email, Tivo, texts, iDevices) have merged into our own organic experience that we no longer notice we have become cyborgs without all the trappings we expected from science fiction that we’d be all bad ass immortal lasers shooting from our eyes all strong an shit being able to be in space and run like the 6 Million Dollar Man but better….
That world of pre-digital is a thing of the past, a fantasy land made of Candyland and the ghost of distant orgasms. Welcome to life in Real Time. That made up timespace that exists off of the intertubes and seems very malleable and unreal, where three-dimensional avatars walk and work and play away in a pretend landscape created and re-created to suit an emotion or thought and this is blended in with our digital selves. It is all about inventing, reinventing, Tweeting, ReTweeting, Building and Re-Building. Did the local Red Lobster really need a face lift? Does the new facade really change the idea that there are lobster-like creatures to be eaten drenched in butteresque substrate? Did we really need to update our status? Was that Tweet really necessary? That clicking sound we make all day on our mouse is our work. It is what we do for money we turn into food… Our off-line avatar pretends to be a middle manager. Is our avatar any less real or more real than our on-line avatar self that thinks he/she is a real middle manager? In a world that seems more like a game, what can we know other than this new digital world when on and offline seem about the same?
A friend of mine and I were hiking up a mountain in the middle of the night to look at the view. She was explaining her love of Dungeons and Dragons. “It’s like an unfolding adventure,” she said as we leapt from rock to rock in the moonlight. “You wake up somewhere and you need to learn, who am I, where am I, who are these people around me and what do they want?” I said that sounded too close to life. And while it’s called “the door to my office” to me it is the same as the “cloak of invisibility.” “I play that game all day,” I told her. “In the scant few hours I have off,” I said as I surveyed the New England towns dotting the valley below the cliffs my wine soaked self was scrambling up, “I’d rather be doing something relaxing.”
We wake up and have to learn, who are these people and what do they want? We wake up and are told that a man from Kenya has taken to the top office of the land. We are shown proof that he was born of woman on soil claimed by our sovereign nation as a territory and granted full statehood a decade before his arrival ex-utero. We are again having to be shown a document, this time with all kinds of marks and stamps, demonstrating the same basic information – a natural child was born to natural parents in native lands and granted said rights and guarantees by way of said “birthrights” descended from the amalgamated Western traditions derived from Natural Law, Quia Emptores, and the Magna Carta blended with a little African Coptic mystery cult Freemasonery and Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. This document exists only in Real Time, however. So it is mailable, and up to endless speculation. We will never know the truth behind its authenticity. We wake up and find that the banks don’t have any proof of ownership of the mortgages, but that doesn’t matter, we are fixated on a certain Certificate of Live Birth. We choose to believe this is an issue.
We wake up and find out there is an old doddering sick man living in a house without windows right on the edge of a town named after a long dead Briton. This old bugger is killed in the middle of the night, flown a thousand miles to have some DNA scooped up from his brain, and then flown thousands of more miles to be dropped into the ocean just in time for the Monday morning news cycle – and strangely reminiscent the treatment of the villains in Superman II.
We believe every word of this bedtime story, because we want to believe it. As a matter of fact, many of those who disbelieve the authenticity of that Certificate of Live Birth, took to the streets chanting the initials to our fair land and feeling a sense that “we won” seeing how it’s hard to have a victory parade after our ten years of stalemate. And that ticker tape has been replaced with electronic media, so Real Time would have to invent fake ticker tape in order to toss it, and windows no longer open up in these new buildings so we’d have to build structures from which to toss this fake ticker tape, and hire a lot of professional ticker tape tossers in order to toss the fake ticker tape. So many fakes are involved they canceling each other out, making it Real. It’s the Truthiness of our version of D&D.
In our post-Orwellian Real Time lives, we wake up to so many various lies that anyone of them could be the truth. Unlike that old “Manitslike1984andbigbrotheriswatching,” we have become plugged in and look to further plug in to the new digital Real Time. We ourselves lie to ourselves about ourselves – we need no shadow government to lie to us about the world. We need no Thought Police. No Memory Hole. No Ministry of Truth. We own our own Ctl+del to send things from My Documents to My Trash Bin… ahem, “My Recycling Bin” of My Hard-drive. Stephen Colbert in coining “truthiness” except that it is not an external truthiness. For us, no matter the evidence, the ability of so much of our lives to be invented and reinvented for us and by us, we cannot know the truth but have to choose to believe in things from the gut…. just to stay sane. I often tell my friends that I believe a lot of things that are not necessarily true, but I enjoy believing in them anyway. It keeps me grounded.
I choose to believe that Osama was dead a long time ago but this was kept from us in order to forward the myth of building the security state and compensate for our loss of American Empire. The myth of a living Osama allowed companies like Blackwater (now “Xe”) to profit and for our Real Time world to unfold silently. I choose to believe that that organization we quote was not behind the 9/11 attacks directly, since terrorists are always a loose confederation of nut jobs and not a highly organized disciplined set of nut jobs as would be needed for that attack… but, this is not true… I just can believe it.
Ask yourself – if you have ever worked for an organization with several millions of dollars behind it, one that can operate out in the open, advertise freely, have one or more physical locations all of which have signs, with co-workers who live normal lives, the company or organization has a bank account, an accounting department, perhaps even an “operations” or “facility” department to keep up grounds and buildings all in working order. This organization you and hundreds of others like you work for every day, that you and hundreds of others like you attend countless planning meetings and company trainings, couldn’t get the organization to take a warm shit in a pool not just for the first quarter, but after designing a five-year strategic plan, and taking over various other smaller companies or organizations and that while your organization had investors, every cent was lost and this took down not only your company or organization but countless vendors and community economies.
Think WorldCom, Enron, AIG, etc…. These companies fail with all this infrastructure and support and we believe that a man living in a cave was franchising his name brand organization and dispatching operatives to hide bombs in dead dogs thousands of miles away and had sleeper cells and operatives with complex and clever plans and this man was a puppet master…. An evil Ronald McDonald selling third world kids on Jihad? We all believed that somewhere there was a NORAD of goat herders in the Hindu Kusch when the average McDonald’s franchise on your street corner takes more technology in it than the Mercury 7 Spacecraft, trains its staff in a college, and conducts business in a standardized manner all over the globe in order to achieve their goal…. and their goal is to serve you fucking ratburgers…. not run fucking jihad by remote blowing up nations to bits.
We believe story about the clever networks, the franchises of terror IHOPs popping up, We believe that “home-grown terrorists” because we want to. We bombed cave after cave, entire mountains were leveled in “the tribal region” because it was impressive. When we find out there was no WMDs, no “Bring it on, ” no “mission accomplished,” we hit Control Start Select A B A B Up Down Up down, and that story is gone. We still believe that some red-headed kid turned jihad will invent a way to take down our nation with a exploding sack of sparklers when an entire Tsunami and KunChernobylsan didn’t do Japan in. We believe this and can no longer blame external forces, tricks of propagandists, Ministry of Truths, or some complex conspiratorial corporate or commie plot. We believe in lies because we have been fed lies so long, we have learned to lie to ourselves, about ourselves and the world around us.
The world has become a huge Schrodinger’s Cat experiment, and we have solved this conundrum because we can believe we can have both live and dead cat, as long as we never truly open the box and since that box is digital, we can believe we will live and love forever.
What colour is your six sided dice?

Editor’s Note: This post was revised 06/2014 because some of this rant made more sense at the time than it did upon reflection.