
‘A Partial Freedom’: What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives (2019) - prostoalex
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/05/a-partial-freedom-what-latvia-found-in-the-kgb-archives/
======
jgilias
It was a very weird moment when 'the bags' were published. On one hand it had
to be done as there were conspiracy theories abound regarding who's in them.
Intially pretty much everyone would log in to check if there's someone they
know. Journalists would scour the records and then try to get the ones
mentioned tell their story.

At the end of the day though everyone understands that:

1\. Having a record there doesn't necessarily imply active and willing
cooperation with the regime, due to how the whole thing functioned.

2\. Someone not being there doesn't imply they were not active and willing
collaborators.

3\. It is almost a given that the most interesting records are long gone.

So, nothing has really changed. You still don't know for sure who were the
scum amongst us.

~~~
burntoutfire
It was similar in Poland, but fortunately not all interesting records were
gone, so in fact a lot of the scum got exposed.

~~~
arethuza
I wonder how in a situation like that you can check the authenticity of
archives. It must have been tempting for the KGB to plant incriminating
material once they realised they were going to lose control of an archive -
though they probably didn't have a huge amount of time to do that.

~~~
burntoutfire
In Poland the transition happened quite quickly (the authorities barely had
time to burn a lot of the documents) so I don't think there was time to do any
widespread document planting. Plus, if you plant some documents they'd had to
be consistent with all other records or it would be found out upon
investigation (there's a special state-run institute in Poland which hires a
bunch of historians who analyze those records, so it's a real possibility).

~~~
ajuc
Sadly the institute (IPN) became a political weapon for fighting between all
the factions that grew from Solidarity movement (You're in bed with the
communists! No - you!). These factions later became PO and PIS - the 2 biggest
parties that rule Poland interchangeably since 2006.

There's been some archives that were hidden for decades (for example Kazimierz
Kujda or Lech Wałęsa), there's been manipulation of which exact offices
require check with the archives, there were blackmails and misleading lists of
"communist agents" published by politicians and journalists (lista
Macierewicza, lista Wildsteina).

Fun fact - mother of Kaczyński (who currently rules Poland and is famous for
McCarthy-like policies and calling everybody a communist) - is in IPN lists.

If they treated her like political enemies they should already declare her a
public enemy/traitor/spy/etc. And just like they declare any political enemy
with communists in family tree "regime's children" \- that should be enough to
remove Kaczyński from politics by his own logic.

But they didn't (and probably correctly - lots of people were on these lists
without actually being a spy, it could just mean you were considered or
interesting to communist security for a variety of reasons - like being
related to opposition activists, being a homosexual, a priest, having family
abroad, whatever).

In the end I think we should just have had full transparency since day 1,
because smart people realize being in the documents doesn't prove anything
without interrelated evidence, and stupid people believe it's all a huge
conspiracy anyway, no matter how many proofs you show them.

~~~
082349872349872
> _... and calling everybody a communist_

I have to admit, when I read that a pole (old enough to have firsthand
experience with both) claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism, it
made me reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in
poland.

[https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/06/20/gay-ideology-
is-...](https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/06/20/gay-ideology-is-worse-
than-communism-says-polands-president)

PS. thinking of the Solidarity poster: Amy Kane, or Helen Ramirez?

~~~
ajuc
> Amy Kane, or Helen Ramirez

No idea who these people are? The only famous Solidarity poster I remember was
with High Noon:
[https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/1d/96/5cefdcae73cef_p.jpg?155...](https://d-pt.ppstatic.pl/k/r/1/1d/96/5cefdcae73cef_p.jpg?1559223972)

> claimed that gay ideology be worse than communism

They basically believe (or pretend to - it's hard to distinguish what is
paranoia and what is political calculation at this point) that are the alt-
right conspiracy theories are true.

Gender/feminism/lgbt is cultural marxism, Soros wants to replace Europeans
with Muslims from Africa, Jews and Germans want to change history and make
Poles responsible for Holocaust, LGBT is a conspiracy to destroy the church
and turn our kids gay (so that these leftist pedophiles may get them), ecology
is a conspiracy to destroy our economy by renewable energy equipment producers
and leftists in Brussels. And besides global warming is bullshit of course.
Recently government promised miners that we will mine coal till 2060 (despite
having to store more than 2-years' worth of it already because our coal is
much more expansive than imported coal and nobody buys it except for national
powerplants that are forced to buy it :) ).

Even pedophilia in Catholic church is leftist's fault because most of it is
male priest to male child so they are actually members of LGBT ideology. Hard
to argue with such "logic"...

Sad thing is - it's not just politicians and tinfoilers, decent people start
believing parts of that after years of propaganda in state media and church.

Basically there's 30% who believe all of it, 10% who believe parts o it, and
about 20% who don't but vote them anyway because of social spending. And it's
been that way since 2015...

> reevaluate my prior estimate of how bad communism must have been in poland

that's the fact not many people want to speak about :) 5% of population was in
the communist party. In 70s few people were protesting - economy was ok and
who cares about these crazy oppositionists.

Communism sucked for people who wanted to be free or cared about historic
truth or wanted to have a career, or to achieve something in life without
becoming a spy. But for your average person that only wanted to have a job, a
flat, and a family it was OK for most of the period. So what if it killed 20
000 people that didn't wanted communism? As long as you're behaving like
everybody else it's very unlikely you'll have any problems.

Solidarity was formed because the regulated prices for many kinds of food went
up (because they weren't sustainable with the inefficient economy).

~~~
082349872349872
Amy Kane and Helen Ramirez are characters in _High Noon_. As the whole movie
is less two-dimensional than most westerns, their characters go beyond the
typical blonde vs brunette.

~~~
ajuc
Doh :) Shows I'm not into westerns.

~~~
082349872349872
Is "Wybory" the same slavic root as the chorus singing "pick me" in:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSf1UcFRq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSf1UcFRq0)
?

(Russia is not subtle about encouraging deep rural population growth! The
Subaru w/ spoiler and well-depreciated tractor are stereotypical village rides
here, but we, being more densely populated, also have monoaxes. And you remind
me I ought to explore "disco polo" sometime. Or do you have any
recommendations for a more refined genre?)

~~~
ajuc
I don't know Russian, the sound and ending changes are very predictable for a
Pole that heard the language several times, but there's lots of false friends
and they often use different root words than we do. But I'm pretty sure it is
the same in this case.

In Polish "brać" = "to take" and prefix "wy-" adds aspect of movement out of
some place so "wybierać" is literally sth like "to take out" and means "to
choose".

"Wybór" is noun made from that verb, and "wybory" is the plural of that noun,
so it literally means "choices", but is most often used to mean "elections".

"wybier mienia" from that song would be "wybierz mnie" in Polish.

As for disco polo it's basically Polish country - few people listen to it
unironically and say so publicly (epecially outside countryside), but play it
during any party and everybody will dance. There's no wedding in Poland
without disco polo.

As for recommendation sorry for wall of text in advance :) I didn't know how
to choose so I went chronologically.

60s and 70s were all about "big beat" which was basically Polish rock'n'roll.
Some recommendations: Czerwone Gitary, Czesław Niemen, Skaldowie, Karin
Stanek.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjLZwpmufw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTjLZwpmufw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CM68Z3z0A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1CM68Z3z0A)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WtBpMkxz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2WtBpMkxz8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_XYk-
Xc94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW_XYk-Xc94)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVFvIK7IRkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVFvIK7IRkw)

In 70s-80s there was this weird genre that I like called "poetic song" that
turned into "student's song"/"touristic song".

It's started with Kaczmarski as something like Vladimir Vysocky or Bob Dylan -
lyrics are more important than music, one guy and a guitar. I especially like
Jacek Kaczmarski songs, there's also Łapiński, Gintrowski, Kleyff and others,
and then the touristic songs took over and instead of politics and angst
students started singing about how pretty the mountains are and how nice it is
to camp in them, but the music style is still similar. The best examples are
Wolna Grupa Bukowina and Stare Dobre Małżeństwo, but there's many more. It's
very obscure genre, by the way, except for a few songs by Kaczmarski that
turned into anthems because of politics in late 70s early 80s.

Kaczmarski story is very interesting. He wrote a song called "Mury" in late
70s (inpired by Lluis Llach protest song about Catalonia freedom) which was
supposed to be about political movements taking over art from artists with
good intentions and turning on artists and anybody who isn't with them
eventually. That's the song:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwD6i9eOiYE)
Solidarity took that song as its anthem and changed the last verses because it
was "too pessimistic". Few people realize now what it was even about, mostly
they think it was only about destroying communism. Basically it's a song that
predicted what will happen with it :)

Other "poetic songs":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38k_Jom2eg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38k_Jom2eg)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmfE9PkNpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmfE9PkNpA)

The touristic subgenre:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt03Q4EDHYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt03Q4EDHYQ)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxpdLbw3zM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcxpdLbw3zM)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1q80-m-yo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1q80-m-yo)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfp-
DRAUN8E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfp-DRAUN8E)

80s and early 90s was all rock (because it's a protest genre and there were
lots of things to be raging against). Perfekt, Maanam, Lady Punk, Budka
Suflera, Kombi, Lombard, Kazik. Examples:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661sTP275nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661sTP275nE)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7OgVpWQs5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7OgVpWQs5s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3Yp4aUU7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd3Yp4aUU7E)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nxamh3-t0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Nxamh3-t0)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kicEsx7g0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3kicEsx7g0)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqVcDyOAoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuqVcDyOAoY)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esu5UYDFBew](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esu5UYDFBew)

The first song refrain is "Chcemy być sobą" (we want to be ourselves) but
people sung "Chcemy bić ZOMO" (we want to beat up ZOMO). ZOMO was communist
political milita that beat up A LOT of people to pacify protests and shut down
concerts.

90s-00s was mostly about pop and rock-lite by bands like Wilki, Varius Manx,
De Mono, T.Love, Elektryczne Gitary. It's my youth so I'm nostalgic about
these but they aren't that good in general:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby1imQDs3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xby1imQDs3E)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYyu4wH4dQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leYyu4wH4dQ)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SN_ZH75e68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SN_ZH75e68)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guJ25FxCwmY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guJ25FxCwmY)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghh0ttnRdiQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghh0ttnRdiQ)

Best Polish female singer of all time also made career in 90s - Edyta Górniak.
It's criminal that she didn't won Eurovision in 1994
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5rmmpiHp8)

Recently Polish hip-hop is pretty good (but it's 90% in the lyrics so you'd
have to have translations and I don't know how well it translates). I
recommend Paktofonika, Kaliber 44, Łona, Quebonafide, Taco Hemmingway, Mata.
Paktofonika was the band that started serious hip-hop in Poland, they are till
considered the best, especially "Jestem Bogiem" (I am god). Important
culturally too. Here it is:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2paBCLSSc)

~~~
082349872349872
It's a shame that hip-hop really needs reasonable language skills. I'll give
it a listen (while working down the rest of your wonderful suggestions!) but
probably won't get any more out of it than the Gaeilge of:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sf0htzbMKk)

Does poland have any folk tradition similar to the russian chastushki?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastushka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chastushka)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ppG_G2s9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_ppG_G2s9g)

~~~
ajuc
I've heard something similar at folk concert but I don't know from which
region of Poland it was and it's generally not stuff that people know or sing
(except for folk bands, recontruction groups etc.) Maybe it was translated
from a russian song.

I think the most alive folk music is the one from górale (Tatra highlanders).
It's very distinctive, after 2 chords you know it's from them.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8)

Besides górale there are a few folk songs that everybody knows and sings at
campfires or on weddings or other gatherings (they are called "piosenka
biesiadna" because you usually sing them when you're eating).

Examples:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg)

I'm not sure they are 100% authentic folk music though, because most versions
nowadays are disco-polo :)

Example of true folk song I've heard a few times in my region (on weddings or
concerts):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w)

It's in regional dialect that nobody really speaks anymore in daily life.

Another kind of folk music that's still alive is przyśpiewki (orchestra plays
same tune and people switch and sing to diss everybody else on weddings :)).
It's basically folk rap battles :)

Example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDABYBOXaAg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDABYBOXaAg)

BTW in one Kaczmarski song there's a Russian folk song included. I always
wondered if it's true folk song or something he invented. Have you ever heard
it?

The inner song starts here:
[https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151](https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151)

~~~
082349872349872
The start of the included song is the same as a ukrainian folk song (with a
very similar theme).

[https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379](https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379)

another version (gaily gown-greening):

[https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html](https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html)

And доню and собі́ would also be ukrainian. So it looks like I have to
transliterate from polish to ukrainian, neither of which I have any experience
with...

(Incidentally, _wesele_ seems to be one of the false friends you mentioned.
Part of the chorus in

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4)

is Давай, давай веселей, but somehow I doubt the context has much to do with
weddings.)

Edit: and speaking of weddings, YT just gave me
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q)

I guess
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth#/media/File:Rzeczpospolita2nar.png)
probably had something to do with the distribution of the song?

Edit2: The instrumentation for Głęboka studzienka reminded me of my favourite
bavarian cover band (for anyone that doesn't know they need to hear oom-pah
metal):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI)

Edit3: TIL poland is a civilised country. You all also have carnaval!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg)

~~~
ajuc
Yeah the song is a relict of PLC times.

"Wesele" means "wedding", "weselej" means "more happily" (wesoło, weselej,
najweselej = happily, happili-er, happili-est - as adverbs not adjectives).

So "dawaj, dawaj, weselej" would mean something like "let's go, let's go,
happier now", right?

~~~
082349872349872
Yes. I'd imagined something along the lines of "c'mon, c'mon, party!"

And I'd anglicise "Wiesiołyje Rebiata" as "Party Dudes"[1], but take that with
a lot of salt[2], as my command of californian is much stronger than my sense
of slavic...

(I'm pretty confident about it though, because pop music tends to gravitate to
a certain vocabulary. Just as _corazon_ is one of the first words one learns
when listening to mexican radio, and _сердце_ occurs often in russian, I
assume I'll be hearing _serce_ frequently, along with appropriate first and
second person possessives, in disco polo...)

[1] Here's that band rocking their 80's style:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk)

[2] i chlebem?

Edit: one of these days I still need to play with the Kogut programming
language,
[http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html](http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html)

------
neilv
> _From then on, most of them have been kept under lock and key, first in a
> secure room in the Latvian parliament, and then in the Center for the
> Documentation of the Consequences of Totalitarianism._

In English, that name of the center sounds to me like it might be a great
thing. Can anyone familiar comment on the nature of this center, or on general
public sentiments around the topic (such as any sense of need for vigilance,
and against what)?

~~~
donw
I love the name.

For obvious reasons, I've been thinking a lot on this topic, and it's... just
flat-out complicated.

For any culture -- be it a business or a country -- there is both (a) a
maximum rate of sustainable change; (b) a minimum rate of necessary change;
and (c) the need to walk back from poor decisions.

Too much change, and the culture breaks down. Too little change, and the
culture can't handle growth.

Walking back from poor decisions is _super-hard_. The harder it is to get a
law passed, the more incentive there is to try and justify it for eternity,
rather than being able to say things like "Our law proposed to decrease the
murder rate faster than it was already. That didn't happen, so we're rolling
things back to where they were and trying something different."

Not sure what the answers are here, though.

~~~
simonh
The answer is democracy. If a policy doesn't work out, elect a new government
with no political investment in the old failed policy, and in fact maybe even
a platform to fix it, and have them fix it. Prohibition in the US is a classic
case in point.

~~~
rmrfstar
The answer certainly includes democracy, but having a constitutional republic
like the US is not sufficient.

Figure 1 on pdf page 10 [1].

[1]
[https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)

~~~
082349872349872
"Economic elites" here being approximated by the "affluent", namely 90th
income (why not wealth?) percentile.

> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich
> nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received
> only about $146,000 in annual household income."

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
...not very much, it seems?

 _But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what
these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything._

------
lixtra
> But it is impossible to tell, from the materials currently available, what
> these local agents for the KGB actually did, if anything.

We know of a similar structure - the stasi [1]. So just because there was more
time in Latvia to destroy the actual evidence does not mean similar stuff was
going on.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi)

~~~
082349872349872
> "By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had
> been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages
> of 18 and 60."

For contrast, 45% of the world's population owns a smartphone.

~~~
orbital-decay
I don't know why you're being downvoted, the comparison seems completely
appropriate. Today's governments (and other entities with a lot of power) have
orders of magnitude more private data than Stasi or KGB ever dreamed of. An
non-targeted informant network of that scale would be simply redundant and
hard to maintain for their lookalikes these days.

~~~
aktenlage
It is a quantitative comparison of alternatives with a very different quality.
Apples and oranges, if you will. The fact that both spy on private information
does not mean that the information is roughly equivalent, nor the level of
betrayal.

Apart from the first sentence, I agree with your statement though.

~~~
082349872349872
I did say 'contrast', not 'compare'. I agree the information is not roughly
equivalent (the smartphone gathers much more data) and agree the level of
betrayal is not there (as with the line about the advantages of making the
landlord and the tenant the same person, there are also advantages to making
the informer and the informee the same person).

For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the
corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1]
conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2]

Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices
(or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all?

As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4]
eventually come up with some social ones.

[1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage)

[2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been
classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of
mine was excited to work on [https://eos.com](https://eos.com) due to the (for
the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't
help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who
had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets.

Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for
good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain
parameters).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824)

[3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially
designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..."

[https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-
DOC-19-PUB-...](https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-
DOC-19-PUB-002-Public-Docs-Vol-II-2019-List-of-DU-Goods-and-Technologies-and-
Munitions-List-Dec-19.pdf)

[4] "What you mean _we_ , kemo sabe?"

------
jdk2020
May be employees of FAANG should read these archives. This will give them
insight into how to design humane tech and avoid surveillance.

~~~
simonh
There's a story that the soviet Communist Party actually circulated copies of
George Orwell's 1984, not as a warning against how totalitarianism could go
wrong, but as a manual for how to implement it more effectively. I'm not sure
if there's any truth to it.

~~~
082349872349872
Seems unlikely to me, but Trotsky does provide useful background for
Goldstein's analysis of IngSoc.

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch06.htm#ch06-4)

Fun fact: only about 13% of the world of 1984 lives under constant
observation.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23975900)

Is the Room 101 fear of the "middle class" that they could be sent down to the
"working class"? Young Blair (as Orwell was known then) and his classmates
were surprised to run into a former classmate of theirs who had been
rusticated — and seemed much happier for it.

------
motohagiography
What's different about these files and those of tech platforms is that the
information itself didn't matter. It was the system of government itself to
maintain the impression that there were secret informants everywhere and there
was no way of knowing who was or wasn't. The point was to instill terror for
its own sake, and to politically paralyze individuals, or "atomize," people
into inaction. The randomness and absurdity of the system was by design, as
the arbitrary nature of it had the effect of creating uncertainty and paranoia
in every individual relationship. This secured the power of the party and the
regime.

The information itself was meaningless to the government, they just needed
enough for a pretext to find someone of whom to make a periodic example. There
was no real legalism in the use of the information. It was a pretext for
arbitrary targeting to keep the belief in terror going. The system was
intended to prevent an individual from working out specifically what being
"good," could mean, or behaviour that would insulate them from the detentions
and interrogations of the state. People collaborated and informed because all
they had was fear, and having any principle at all would make you a danger for
reprisals against people you cared about. It operates as simply as a ponzi
scheme for terror.

Don't take my word for it, it's covered in the final chapter of "The Origins
of Totalitarianism,"
([http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readin...](http://virtuallaboratory.colorado.edu/Origins/class%20readings/Hannah%20Arendt%20-%20Ideology%20and%20Terror.pdf))

Platform companies have enough data to operate a terror, but the reality was,
you didn't really need that much data at all. You just needed to be able to
link people and a means to terrorize them and their loved ones in as random a
way as possible. The worst was achieved in the 20th century with orders of
magnitude less data.

------
leptoniscool
Facebook and Google literally has over 300 GB of data on me

~~~
stareatgoats
Not doubting that they have a comprehensive dossier, but that seems like an
exaggeration to me. How did you come up with that figure?

~~~
gambiting
Yeah I get a full Google data dump every 3 months and it's about 350GB at the
moment. Most of it is photos, but still.

~~~
thih9
With advances in AI and digital image analysis, I'd guess that long term these
photos could provide lots of information too. Especially if google attempted
to extract information from aggregated media of all users.

Very offtopic, there's a sci-fi novella,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Leopard_Plague)
, where one of the plot elements is a search for information through old
photos and movies.

------
dmix
(2019)

Previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321366)

------
fallingfrog
I wonder whether the files stored in nsa and dhs databases on all of us will
come out someday? We do get leaks and hints from time to time:

[https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/12903846737896734...](https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1290384673789673472?s=21)

------
reinis_zambergs
Now Latvija gain freedom from Russia and become one of best counterey in the
Europe Union and the World!

