20,000 families in the United Kingdom are about to receive a forced installation of technology that all free people have feared since Eric Arthur Blair first published his prescient pre-history, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1949. These “problem families” will be subjected to 24-hour surveillance, in their own homes, via telescreens. No, I’m not kidding.
Evidently, there are already some 2,000 families that have gone through these “Family Intervention Projects” so far. I had no idea things were so bad in the UK. Britain’s “children’s secretary”, Ed Balls, is the overseer of this £400 million ($668 million) plan to curb “anti-social” behavior. Clearly, he is just acting like an older sibling for those children whose family issues put them in need of a Big Brother.
Simply recounting this news seems to defy all laws of irony and creative license. I cannot imagine anyone reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and thinking of it as a guidebook, but it is evidently just that in the Balls household. How appalling!
Alas, poor Britain! I knew them, Horatio; a nation of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; they have borne me on their back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those ideals that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your minds now?
#1 by Courtney on August 12, 2009 - 12:34 pm
I didn’t know that was Orwell’s real name.
Perhaps this explains why a Londoner (Doctorow) is writing better about privacy and government intrusion better than any American I know of right now.
There’s an update to that story now:
“UPDATE: Further research shows that the Express didn’t quite have all its facts straight. This scheme is active, and the numbers are fairly accurate (if estimated), but the mentions of actual cameras in people’s homes are exaggerated. The truth is that the scheme can take the most troublesome families out of their homes and move them, temporarily, to a neutral, government-run compound. Here they will be under 24-hour supervision. CCTV cameras are not specifically mentioned, not are they denied, but 24-hour “supervision” certainly doesn’t rule this out from the camera-loving Brits.”
24-hour supervision at a government run compound sounds a bit like re-training camp. How far out of the social norms do you have to be before you have to be re-trained by the government on how to be proper member of society?