Party Like It's 1984

Big Brother is certainly alive and kicking today, just not (yet) to the extent that Winston experiences it in the book. You're being filmed everywhere you go with the hopes of keeping society safe, but that is a scenario that could be misused very easily, should it fall into the wrong hands. Normally, nobody really cares about the video logs of the dumpster behind Sheetz, but I know I'd be a lot more paranoid just walking in the alley nearby if I knew there was a government official on the other side of that, watching my every move. It's not like I have anything I'd try to hide, but what if they think I do? I could end up in the basement of the Ministry of Love in no time at all!

Before I start to sound like I should be wearing a tin foil helmet, I want to stress the fact that I do believe privacy still exists, you just have to look for it or know where to go to get it. For instance, right now it's late at night and my roommates are all asleep. Their doors are closed and I have no clue what any of them are doing. They also have no idea what I'm up to. I could not be wearing pants right now and nobody would know the difference. Any place where I can go to and confidently say "I would feel comfortable pantsless right now" is a place that is private enough in my mind. But who's to say that I'm not being watched by some robotic fly camera or through some pinhole in the wall? Well, to an extent, I think privacy can exist largely in one's own mind. There are tangibles behind privacy, but it is also a feeling. If I feel safe and private, I'll be content.

It's hard to decide how much privacy I'm willing to sacrifice in order to feel safe. On one hand, it would be great if Big Brother was purely Mr. Nice Guy, and only looked after us because they want what's best for us. Unfortunately, in 1984 that's not the case. Big Brother wants what's best for Big Brother, and if you don't like it you can just shut the hell up. Their privacy is being invaded as opposed to being sacrificed for a greater personal good. I guess I wouldn't mind if telescreens were everywhere (except in my house), or if there was a Feed in my head, because that has potential to be epically cool. It just sucks that as soon as somebody gets a sweet idea like internet in your brain, jerks have to come and exploit it and ruin everyone's good time.

Blog #5, Choice 4: The Times, They Are A-Changin'

Waking Up in the Future
I awoke today in a very different world. It appears that I was transported into the future. I spent the first few hours gathering myself and walking around town. Everybody seems to have somewhere important to go, so I walked into a corner store that smelled of rich nuts and coffee and was loaded with people on fancy machines that looked like thin typewriters. All the customers' clothes were ripped or faded, as if they had just come from a fight. Nobody really wanted to talk, but I saw a calendar on the wall that read February 20, 2011. I have a lot to learn.

Life
All day, every day, everybody seems to be rushing around me. The life in the streets seems to be nothing more than a segue between buildings, where I'm still not really sure what people do all day, because all I see are large groups of people sitting at desks, looking at lighted screens attached to thin typewriters. Bright lights and loud noises consume every aspect of life, both outdoors and indoors, sometimes advertising products, and sometimes I have no idea why they are occurring. I need to get out of here. I have decided to go back to my cabin at Walden Pond, on my mentor's old property, where I should be able to clear my mind and gather myself before I return to life here in the city.

Unable to Leave
When I went to the location of Emerson's old cabin where I had stayed before, I was horrified to find that the pond was not where it should be, nor was the cabin, and nor were the trees! The land had been cleared and replaced with several large buildings, and large areas of land where many automobiles could park. I found that one building was a hotel where I could spend some time alone, though I had people playing loud music and causing lots of noise through all hours of the night. Unfortunately I only had enough money to stay for one night, so I wasn't able to get much thinking done.

Going Home
I need to go home. There is nothing appealing to me about this world; the people are unfriendly, the wilderness is gone, the air is dirty, and every one of my senses is offended with some form of advertisement or cheap gimmick. This future is bleak indeed for humankind. In terms of my own life, it really makes me appreciate our lifestyle of the past. I have nowhere to escape to without paying some ridiculous sum, and every opportunity is riddled with fools trying to make a few dollars off of me. Life has changed to such an extent that people are not even living anymore, but rather just doing whatever they can to collect more and more money. Somebody please send me back.

Blog #4: Whenever I write about living alone in the woods, I try to be as Thoreau as possible.

Emerson bothers me. In my humble opinion, his writings often jumped from deep, insightful advice to self-centered arrogance. I do agree that before anything else, you have to look after yourself, but Emerson takes it to an extreme. The whole reason we live in civilizations as a community is because we care about others; we enjoy hearing from other people and responding to what they have to say, whether it is with empathy, sympathy, or just a good laugh. I didn't agree with Emerson on several points, but I probably disagree with this one the most:

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it...

You can't argue that there is no universally acceptable measure of good and evil. Yes, there are gray areas in some cases, but a lot of times it is black and white. I wonder if Emerson would be okay with a psychopath coming into his home and burning all of his works in progress, because in the psychopath's head it was the right thing to do. I wouldn't want to live in a world where nobody shared a common set of beliefs when it came to what is right and what is wrong. I also probably wouldn't want to be friends with somebody who was happy but only concerned about their own perceived concept of good and evil. What good is it being happy if everybody else thinks you're an asshole?

Enough about Emerson. Let's move on to Henry David Thoreau, or as I like to call him, HDT. One day this guy thought it was a good idea to go out into the woods and live in a one-room cabin owned by Emerson. Apparently HDT was sick of all the distractions of modern living in the middle of the 19th century, and rightfully so...I mean, just take a look at some of the inventions that occurred in the 1840s: the steam hammer, the typewriter, the saxophone, and artificial fertilizers. These were the big things of that time. Clearly he was sick of everybody complaining about how "in my day, we had to write our thoughts down with a PEN", constantly honking on brass tubes and smelling like shit all the time.

 "Lisa, I swear to God if you don't stop playing, I'm running away for a year."

HDT's time spent out in the woods is nothing new to me, though. It's probably not new to any of us; if you've ever went for a run to clear your mind, or just escaped to be alone and think about stuff for a while, you got a taste of what Thoreau was aiming for. I love having time to myself, when I can just forget about life for a while. I've actually even thought about disappearing for a long time with nothing, in true Thoreau fashion, but right now as a soon-to-be-graduated college student, I have more than enough responsibility to keep me living within the limits of civilization.

I really appreciated Thoreau's writing. I remember reading most of it in high school because my Literature teacher recommended it to me after reading a paper I wrote about my life which included angst-y rants similar to Thoreau, so it wasn't too much of a surprise when I read it here. He's not afraid to leave everything behind to get a better grip on this extremely limited existence we call life, which is very admirable in my eyes. Sometimes I worry that I'm not really "living", that I'm just running through the motions and missing out on opportunities that I should be taking advantage of. I wonder if I really am driving life into a corner, or if I'm just swinging in the dark and one day I'll end up cornering myself.

Could I really just give everything up and live in solitude despite all the technology we have today? Probably. I've spent a considerable amount of my spare time hiking, camping, and exploring strange woods during college, almost all of the time doing so with nothing but my driver's license as a form of ID (mostly because I usually randomly swim during hikes). It's nice to be separated from everything for a little bit. Eventually though, I think if I was alone and with nothing, there would be something else to throw me into a routine and it would get old and dull. This makes me wonder, is it simply human nature to get so used to something that the attraction wears down and you want to move on to something else? Maybe that's why technology is so appealing...it changes just fast enough to keep our interest.

Grumpy Old Men - Literature Edition

When I first saw the interview with reason.tv, I thought this guy was just an outgrown Holden Caulfield with not much merit to what he had to say. The articles didn't really change my mind, but they at least gave me material worth thinking about. I thought he was an over-generalizing man who skewed facts with little evidence that can be interpreted pretty much however you want to. For example, if I had a huge soap box to stand on where I could get everyone's attention, I could complain about how most adults over the age of 30 are the dumbest generation because they can't do physics, calculus, or programming. It's probably true, but then again, the majority of people in any age group probably can't. He really repeated this theme of generalization until it almost got boring (or sickening, not sure which).

In my discussion group we didn't have much good to say about Mr. Bauerlein. We spent a lot of time complaining about why he's becoming a success by simply complaining about the youth of the generation. EVERY OLDER GENERATION COMPLAINS ABOUT THE YOUNGER GENERATIONS. We talked about how this man is unoriginal. Then, with surprising irony that we should have seen coming, we began not only defending ourselves, but arguing that the generation after us is WAY worse. I know I made the argument that "I never even had a TV in my room when I younger. Now these kids have everything they ever want in their rooms."

With regards to our generation, there is some truth to what he says. We may not have as much knowledge as previous generations, but as the Newsweek article says, we have so much more information readily available for us wherever we want it, whenever we want it. Does that mean there's no reason for us to know, understand, and appreciate the knowledge that generations gone were expected to know? Absolutely not. However, we have a very unique privilege, and as far as I'm concerned, there's really no reason for me to spend my time memorizing formulas, authors, and old-fashioned actors when they're only a click away. I know Lasn constantly laments the overuse of technology, and maybe I'm biased because I'm a computer science major, but I think technology is a beautiful thing that can be extremely advantageous. Sorry if you can't figure out how to browse the Web, Mr. Bauerlein, but quite frankly, technology is here to stay so we might as well use it to our advantage.