If you haven't read 1984 by George Orwell, you may want to check it out - and soon. The basis of the book, published in 1948 when 1984 was seemingly an eternity away, is the results of a totalitarianism based government.
The government in the book, referred to as Big Brother, is everywhere. Big Brother watches what you do both in public and in your own home, censors what you can see and read, and forces citizens to bend to their will by limiting the information they receive and effectively "dumbing down" the population. Sound familiar? Before anyone gets up on a soap box and calls me a conspiracy theorist or, more likely, a crazy Liberal nut job, let me explain my comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, a key part of what makes Big Brother such a looming force is the censorship they impose on their people. They control literally everything the people are exposed to, destroying books and images that go against their ideas and even enacting a "thought police" to get rid of people who have opposing thoughts.
While this is very extreme, it is not that far-fetched at this point. To me, the debate about net neutrality has been extremely reminiscent of 1984. To anyone who doesn't know about net neutrality and what it means, I suggest reading up on it. In short, net neutrality means that all of the information and media on the internet is accessible to all, no matter who your internet provider is.
If net neutrality were to go away, we would be left with information censored at the discretion of our internet providers. In some cases, there may even be fees in order to be able to access the plethora of information that should be at our fingertips. This could mean that, yes, we would lose our internet freedom from Netflix to Wikipedia and maybe even to Odyssey. Sure sounds like a lot of control to me.
Another hallmark of Big Brother is the way they are constantly watching their citizens, with cameras everywhere from the street to their bedrooms. While I'm not saying the government has cameras in our bedrooms, there have been numerous claims of spying through webcams. Some people, including people high up in internet security positions, cover their webcams to avoid any lurking. Unfounded or not, those are some scary claims. And it's no secret that the amount of security cameras all over the word is at an alarming high. One article* claims there is one camera for every 11 people in the United Kingdom. That's a lot of eyes at any given time.
*I am in no way saying that we are living in an exact replica of 1984, but there are a lot of things that lead me to believe we are closer to that than we ever have been. While these are just two examples, there are surely many more already and many more to come.
