1984 or the Big Liar

Yesterday night, while watching Buenafuente, the other genius from Reus, I heard that Tim Robbins was supposed to go to his program. At the end, he didn't show up since was not in Barcelona last night, but I could get to know he was doing a play in the city: Orwell's 1984.



I read that book during the last Iraq invasion, and was surprised by its adequacy to the present times, though he wrote it in the 40s to criticize the way the communists used to deal with reality. He had experienced such behavior while fighting in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), where he almost lost his life twice, once in the avant-garde in the front of Aragon, once in rear guard in Barcelona.

Moreover, I don't think it is a pure coincidence that Tim Robbins has selected the Poliorama theater to show the play, since it was there where Orwell stayed hidden while he was recovering from his wounded neck. This experience is accounted in detail in his book Homage to Catalonia.



While in Japan, I submitted a project to the Ministry of Science and Industry to develop an automatic system based on computer vision that would monitor automatically the behavior for pedestrian in crowded areas. It was my little Big Brother, and it was accepted and funded (!!??). I knew it, since Japan is crazily obsessed about being invaded by foreigners, viruses or aliens. Ironically enough, a CCTV system has recently been installed at the Orwell Sq. in Barcelona.

It is just a matter of time that a whole system of ubiquitous intelligence starts surrounding us beyond the satellites, Internet, wi-fi and mobile phones. It is claimed by experts that this is going to help us and our lives, as the rest of technical advances have already done. The difference, maybe, is the degree of intelligence and the amount of personal data that such systems will manage.



It depends on us, though, that this systems are used in a malevolent way by powerful people to enslave us, as depicted in 1984. So, following the clever advise of another egregious anarchist, Noam Chomsky, my suggestions is lying, since lies will make us free. As Buenafuente comically states it, lying is human. So, let's be humans!