612
Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State
(greenwald.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
612 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
81286 readers
5210 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn't been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.
In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don't have the psychology for anything but labor.
In spite of that, it's not an especially oppressive society. There is a "perfect" drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.
Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.
Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.
So... is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement... just that not everyone can be good at everything.
From the view of John the Savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
From the view of the savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.