BIG BROTHER GOES ONLINE
The ability of corporate giants such as Amazon to add or remove content from your personal digital device raises concerns about the new frontiers of censorship
It’s almost 10 years’since 500-million users of Apple s iTunes music platform woke up to find that Songs of Innocence, an album by Irish band U2, had automagically appeared on their phones or iPods.
An iPod, for younger readers, was a portable media player first released in 2001 and officially discontinued in May 2022. Nowadays, of course, we just use our phones, and pluck the music straight from the air.
The misguided beneficence of U2 and Apple CEO Tim Cook formed part of the promotional razzmatazz that went with the launch of Apple’s then latest phone, which included U2 performing at the Apple iPhone launch event in California in September 2014. I don’t know if you were one of the indignant recipients of this unasked-for largesse, but if not, let me remind you how it landed.
There was a huge backlash. U2 frontman Bono was dumbfounded to discover that people didn’t appreciate the fact that a millionaire rock star could reach out into their personal space and foist music on them that they hadn’t chosen themselves.
Even worse, perhaps, was the indignity of having a terminally uncool band appear among your carefully curated playlists. If you are a lover of music, or the arts in general really, you don’t want some gigantic corporation or other organisation deciding for you what art is.
Cook called it the largest album release in history, which is a fine example of Orwellian doublespeak (a word which doesn’t actually appear in George Orwell’s much-misappropriated book 1984, funnily enough). The Washington Post called it “rock-androll as dystopian junk mail”.
Bono was forced to apologise, sort of. The Guardian quotes him as saying: “Oops, I’m sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea and we kind of got carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that kind of thing. Drop of megalomania, touch of generosity, dash of self-promotion and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years mightn’t be heard. There’s a lot of noise out there. I guess we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.”
Neutral observers might want to replace the word “drop” with “deluge”.
Iggy Pop, a man whose music is almost entirely at odds with the bloated excesses of U2, was quoted in The Guardian as saying: “The people who don’t want the free U2 download are trying to say, ‘Don’t try to force me,’ and they’ve got a point. Part of the process when you buy something from an artist, it’s kind of an anointing, you are giving that person love.”
Iggy Pop is right. Art is a personal choice, and nobody should be deciding for you what that art is. As Slate magazine put it, it’s deeply unsettling when “consent and interest are no longer a requisite for owning an album, only corporate prerogative”.
In 1984, Oceania is a totalitarian superstate led by Big Brother, a dictator who is kept in power through a cult of personality manufactured and maintained by the Party’s Thought Police. The Party, via the Ministry of Truth, uses extreme surveillance, historical negationism and a never-ending stream of propaganda to persecute anybody who tries to think independently, or to be an individual distinct from the herd.
An example of this is that government censors erase all traces of news articles that might be embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the memory hole.
In July 2009 people who owned digital copies of 1984, as well as Orwell’s other great satire of politics, Animal Farm, woke up (and I might be editorialising a bit there), to find that the books had disappeared off their Kindles.
As we all know and accept, when you buy a digital book for your Kindle,
it’s sent to you over a wireless network. It turns out that Amazon can also use that network to make your books disappear off your device if it wants to, sending them down the memory hole.
Pretty much everyone noted the literary irony of this. Here is a representative quote in The New York Times by Charles Slater, an executive who had bought the digital edition of 1984: “Of all the books to recall, I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.”
It’s reminiscent of the U2 album being forced upon people except in this case, it’s a big corporation deciding what you can’t have on your own personal device. Either way, it’s an uncomfortable thought that businesses have the capability to censor what you can or can’t see.
An Amazon spokesperson said, rather drily: “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”
Well, maybe, Amazon, maybe. But here we are in 2023, and something very similar appears to be happening.
Readers won’t have been able to avoid the recent furore about editorial changes to new editions of Roald Dahl’s children’s books to as publisher Puffin Books puts it remove words that could be deemed offensive to some readers.
Puffin has made hundreds of changes. For example, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Augustus Gloop is no longer called “fat”, but is “enormous”. OompaLoompas, previously described as “small men”, are now “small people”.
I mistakenly found myself on the right-wing nut-job (can you still say that?) site Breitbart News Network, and it reckons “paleness is in itself also considered controversial, as is the lack of it: references to being ‘white in the face’, ‘white as paper’, and ‘turning white’ are changed to avoid the word ‘white’ or removed altogether, while a simple description of two machines in Fantastic Mr Fox as ‘black’ is excised.”
Breitbart, of course, has its own agenda in highlighting that example which might actually be made up, knowing the US far right but it does strike you as overkill.
Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about the violence inherent in censorship, tweeted: “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship.
Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Guardian columnist David Mitchell pointed out that “Puffin said that [it] made the changes so that the books ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today There is nothing soft about making these changes at all it is commercially ruthless.
“The recent announcement that the publishers will now keep the original versions in print as well is equally so: they’re frightened of the anger in the marketplace and are trying to placate all possible buyers.”
And Suzanne Nossel, CEO of freespeech nonprofit PEN America, pointed out the danger of letting censorship into your life. “Those who might cheer specific edits to Dahl’s work should consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.”
It doesn’t matter which side of the debate you fall on, you can’t help but be appalled as our clickbait brethren put it by what happened next.
According to UK daily newspaper The Times and you can take this whence it comes British owners of Dahl e-books are waking up (again, I’m editorialising for effect here, but also because I like the pun about wokeness) to find that their versions have been automatically replaced with the new, altered versions. Or censored versions, as The Times describes it. (I should point out that, so far, The Times is the only source I can find for this story, so let’s keep an open mind as to whether it’s substantiated or not.)
A reader told the Times: “It feels Orwellian that we are having the updated versions forced upon us.”
That reader has a point. We might be able to understand, and even have a modicum of sympathy for, people who want to offer new, sanitised versions of problematic classics. But the idea that you can go into people’s personal lives and take away the originals smacks of a Stalinist rewriting of history.
Stalin used to have his opponents cut out of official photographs, effectively erasing them from history. How he would have delighted in the ability to go directly into people’s lives and change history at source, as it were.
We’ve always known we are prey to the machinations of big, usually US corporations, and that our cultural and social fabric is just an extractive industry for them. But it’s scary to realise how extreme their power can be if they so choose. And once governments have these tools in their hands and some, such as China, already do it’s going to be a whole new frontline for the battle against censorship and state control.