Metadata, The Public-Private Nexus and Modern Surveillance

This essay discusses the relation of surveillance in the modern world to that in the surveillance society of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We establish a link between the motivations of the governments in the two worlds, and use this link to investigate the role of surveillance in each society. We further analyze the two primary types of modern surveillance — internet tracking and data collection carried out by private corporations and the collection of metadata by government agencies — to support this comparison. O RWELL’S Nineteen Eighty-Four portrays a frightening world where the rules of modern society are not applicable. It depicts a dystopia where the modern notions of privacy and individuality do not exist. This aspect of the book caused a resurgence in its popularity when Edward Snowden’s recent revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance program came to light. However, there are many journalists and policy-makers who believe that comparing modern society to that in Nineteen Eighty-Four is foolish. For instance, Michael Moynihan argues in Newsweek that since “1984 is a book not only about surveillance but also the full-spectrum dominance of Stalinist totalitarianism, from the government-directed corruption of language . . . to absolute control of information and historical inquiry.” and that since no modern state is so far down that path of tyranny, even accounting for mass surveillance is not enough to “establish the literary analogy” with Nineteen Eighty-Four [Moy13]. However, what such analysis fails to realise is that Orwell’s purpose in writing Nineteen Eighty-Four was never to imply that society in the Western world would someday