During this blog entry, I was asked to reflect on one question: Why is the Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell relevant to a student taking the Programming Language course? In case I haven't told you before, in my programming languages course we were reading 1984 by George Orwell.
The book is about a man that is trapped in a totalitarian system. He is just, let's say, another gear in a super huge mechanism. This man, Winston Smith was a little bit different from everybody else. He saw what others didn't want to see about their way of living. He saw the little mistakes that the system made and how they deprived them of their humanity. It seemed like everybody else just wouldn't notice that they were being lied to.
In the book, the party had three slogans that were supposed to guide the way people living: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
Let's take a look at the first slogan first: War is Peace. By making the people believe that they were constantly winning wars and fighting the enemy, whether it was with East Asia or with Eurasia. Enemies where being constantly captured and tortured in public. Sides where always changing, people didn't really know if the fight had always been with Eurasia or if it had always been with East Asia, they changed this at their will, and people swallowed it.
The second slogan was Freedom is Slavery. The thing here is that everyone was just a gear in a super huge system that was brainwashing an entire population. Everyone was supposed to act the way they are supposed to. Nobody could ask questions, Winston eventually found out what happened when you face this people. He was sent to the Truth Ministry (The one regarding torturing of captured enemies) and he was absolutely ripped of everything that the had. Every memory, every essence of what he was, they killed it. So to be free, is to be a slave.
The third slogan, Ignorance is Strength, made me answer the question I was asked to answer. In the novel there was this new language that everyone had to learn, newspeak. The thing with that language is that it was a language that was constantly being shortened. It lacked abstractions, it lacked self representation in any context... They were basically murdering the ability to think for one self and commit a so-called thoughtcrime.
I think it was relevant for me to read this novel during this course because we are in a point in society where communication between man and machine is getting more and more real every day. We communicate with systems like Siri, or Cortana. Chatbots that have a natural language developed by IBM. Even when we develop things we want to do it in a way that is "more idiomatic". We want to speak the same language, people and machines. We know that it's a reality that androids and humans will be inhabiting the same space in a close future, so we better understand each other well and not fall in the Babel's side of the story!
Thanks for reading!
Diego Canizales
The book is about a man that is trapped in a totalitarian system. He is just, let's say, another gear in a super huge mechanism. This man, Winston Smith was a little bit different from everybody else. He saw what others didn't want to see about their way of living. He saw the little mistakes that the system made and how they deprived them of their humanity. It seemed like everybody else just wouldn't notice that they were being lied to.
In the book, the party had three slogans that were supposed to guide the way people living: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.
Let's take a look at the first slogan first: War is Peace. By making the people believe that they were constantly winning wars and fighting the enemy, whether it was with East Asia or with Eurasia. Enemies where being constantly captured and tortured in public. Sides where always changing, people didn't really know if the fight had always been with Eurasia or if it had always been with East Asia, they changed this at their will, and people swallowed it.
The second slogan was Freedom is Slavery. The thing here is that everyone was just a gear in a super huge system that was brainwashing an entire population. Everyone was supposed to act the way they are supposed to. Nobody could ask questions, Winston eventually found out what happened when you face this people. He was sent to the Truth Ministry (The one regarding torturing of captured enemies) and he was absolutely ripped of everything that the had. Every memory, every essence of what he was, they killed it. So to be free, is to be a slave.
The third slogan, Ignorance is Strength, made me answer the question I was asked to answer. In the novel there was this new language that everyone had to learn, newspeak. The thing with that language is that it was a language that was constantly being shortened. It lacked abstractions, it lacked self representation in any context... They were basically murdering the ability to think for one self and commit a so-called thoughtcrime.
I think it was relevant for me to read this novel during this course because we are in a point in society where communication between man and machine is getting more and more real every day. We communicate with systems like Siri, or Cortana. Chatbots that have a natural language developed by IBM. Even when we develop things we want to do it in a way that is "more idiomatic". We want to speak the same language, people and machines. We know that it's a reality that androids and humans will be inhabiting the same space in a close future, so we better understand each other well and not fall in the Babel's side of the story!
Thanks for reading!
Diego Canizales
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