
Flood Washington with 1984 - mmorearty
https://www.facebook.com/FloodWashingtonWith1984
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mpyne
Should be "Brave New World", not 1984. Read Snowden's interview with New
Yorker that's been posted here.

[http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/edwa...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/06/edward-
snowden-the-nsa-leaker-comes-forward.html)

~~~
mtgx
I think this will be the deciding moment whether it's 1984 or Brave New World.
If Americans don't rise up in the streets and do something to change this,
then I guess we'll have our answer, and I'd say that's a lot scarier than if
it was 1984, because at least then there would be a slight glimmer of hope for
overturning the government and changing things. But if it's Brave New World,
then no one cares how authoritarian the country's leaders become and how much
they abuse their power.

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riffraff
I'd say it's neither. Much of the power of the 1984 picture is the
totalitarian state where everyone is afraid all the time, and that is not the
image we have now.

But much of the picture in Brave New World is that there is no real need for
hard repression as people simply don't rebel and are happy with their comfy
lives.

The reality here would seems kind of in between (people mostly don't care
_and_ the state is more scary).

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ck2
Oh the irony of using facebook to rally people for this.

You'd think this would help bring back individual websites and running your
own smtp/pop3 setup.

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asperous
Is it Ironic? If we are trying to send them a message I don't mind if they
listen in on it.

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BMorearty
Thanks for the (funny) vote of confidence.

\- The OP

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wam
I think this campaign largely misses the more interesting problem, which is
that we got to this point despite the fact that 1984 is a bestselling
cornerstone of literature. It's been required reading in high schools for
years and years.

Are the representatives on the receiving end of this campaign going to slap
their heads and go "Oh golly, I never thought of that"?

There's no easy way to get through to people who think the benefits of
ubiquitous surveillance outweigh the costs. They know 1984, and they don't see
themselves in the role of big brother. Throwing this book at them isn't going
to change that.

Edit: "There's no easy way" suggests that this is meant as a solution, which
obviously isn't the campaigner's intention. What I mean is that I don't think
this will have an impact other than to make the recipients think their
constituents are oversimplifying the issue, a la Godwin's law.

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gosub
If you want to make a piece of literature irrelevant, make it a mandatory
reading for school.

~~~
wam
That's a good soundbite (honestly), but it doesn't jibe with my experience.

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eurleif
The goal here is presumably to create a news story, and raise awareness. So
why not send books to journalists instead? If I'm a journalist, which do you
think will have a larger effect on me: seeing some anonymous people online say
they're sending copies of 1984 to congresspeople (who will quietly throw them
out, presumably), or receiving several copies of 1984 myself?

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BMorearty
Good point. I can answer it, hopefully with good points of my own, since I'm
the guy who created the Flood Washington with 1984 campaign earlier this
evening.

Several reasons:

\- Elected officials have a direct vote. "These programs are subject to
congressional oversight and congressional re-authorization and congressional
debate." — President Obama on June 7. \- If the campaign is successful,
journalists will hear about it in a way that makes it more interesting to
report on. If I'm a journalist, I want to write about a grass-roots campaign
to change Washington--not a campaign to--what, change journalism? \- I'm upset
with elected officials such as my own Dianne Feinstein who are publicly
defending the program. I have no beef with journalists. \- It didn't even
occur to me to send the book to journalists.

P.S. You are correct about the goal, but there is a further goal you did not
mention: to change the law. The best way to do this: change the minds of
lawmakers.

~~~
eurleif
Elected officials respond to political pressure, but 100,000 books to
officials from across the country do not represent significant political
pressure by themselves. They could become political pressure if they turn into
a news story, and more people hear about it; but if elected officials are the
ones receiving the books, they have a high level of control over how much
attention the story receives, and since they don't want to be subjected to
pressure, it's against their best interest to publicize it.

Of course, you can create your own publicity to some degree, and I do agree
that elected officials are the ones who need to fix this, which makes them a
good target in many ways.

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p1mrx
Yeah, wonderful idea, let's remind them that we're 30 years behind schedule.

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D9u
Which schedule would that be?

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tomca32
From 1984 to now ~= 30 years

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D9u
I was contemplating a different schedule.

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adamnemecek
Slacktivism at it's best.

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chill1
What are you doing to make the world better? When's the last time you did
anything that helped make things better? Yes, this might be a relatively easy,
small thing to do, but at least it's something. Who knows? Maybe one of the
representatives / senators actually notices and pauses for a moment and
thinks. Stranger things have happened.

And it's "its".. "It's" is a conjunction. "Its" is possessive.

~~~
adamnemecek
You are quite presumptuous in assuming that I have not done anything for
others recently. I have in fact but I don't think that I have to justify
myself to you. What sort of argument is it that "stranger things have
happened"? If you got cancer, would you start jumping on one leg on the off
chance that it would cure your cancer? Probably not. You'd probably want to
concentrate your limited resources in a way that might actually have some
results.

>> And it's "its".. "It's" is a conjunction. "Its" is possessive.

K

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rorrr2
Be careful, they might consider it an instruction book.

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pvdm
... and create a Ministry of Truth. We already have a Dept of "Defense".

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quantumpotato_
Department of War!

