doubleplusungood crimethinker unbellyfeel doublethink
Tomorrow it will be the 20th anniversary of 1984. No, not the publishing of the book - I'm not
that ignorant. A lot of people will be participating in the 1984+20 project; publicly reading parts or whole of the book. If I had a copy handy, I might do it myself. The date is, by the way, chosen after Winston Smith's first diary entry. I don't think I need to tell anyone why I think the book is still relevant - especially for those of us loonies who write our diaries on-line.
I would have missed the whole anniversary thing, but a couple of days ago I remembered one book I read when I was still a child: Feridan Onnelliset. The original is in german; Das Glück von Ferida, by Eva Maria Mudrich. The most accurate translation I could come to is The carefree people of Ferida. Written in the seventies, it tells of a secret project: the government builds a community to an isolated island. The people of the community are altered so that they do not feel sorrow, grief or discontent. No-one would complain about the government ever again. What a great idea! Needless to say, it backfires.
The book in itself isn't that good but the idea intrigued me. What if there was a society where expressing negative feelings would be taboo? Then, after days reading
Beyond Role and Play I started getting these
ideas of a totalitarian society, based on 1984, with a few alterations and impressions from Ferida, Huxley's Brave New World, Gilliam's movie
Brazil and Niccol's
Gattaca.
Then I added the idea of using Orwell's
newspeak to alter the player's conception of the world. It worked in
PanoptiCorp and
Mellan himmel och hav, so even though newspeak is nearly unintelligable to a modern day human, perhaps a little watered-down version could be made to work. Maybe.
Ownlife webreport doubleplusungood refs unpersons. Rectify oldthinkful crimethink. Rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
sano: