Moving Towards Control and Insult.

My new Norton antivirus program has an irritating habit: every time the computer is left idle for a short space of time, the program runs what it calls ‘background checks’ which slows the computer for a while even after the checks are done. But then it gets worse because it frequently picks up threats (which are ever-present, I think) and takes action to remove them. That’s fine, but apparently the removal can’t be completed until the computer is restarted, so dear Norton flashes a box up onto the screen which says ‘You must restart your computer.’ Note the word ‘must.’

The first time this happened I did as I was told and restarted the computer, but I soon discovered that this was not a rare event. It was happening all day and becoming an almighty nuisance, so I clicked on the little arrow under the instruction. It gave a list of options starting with ‘restart now (recommended)’ and continued with ‘remind me in 1 hour, 2 hours, and so on up to 24 hours.’ It obviously isn’t particularly urgent then is it, so why the ‘you must’? If it had said ‘removal of the threat will not be complete until you have restarted the computer’ I would have been happy with that. But no, we have to have the phrase ‘you must.’

I had a similar occurrence when I bought a new Epson printer a few years ago. I was suddenly getting flashes on the screen saying ‘You must’ do something or other (I forget what it was now) which was clearly unnecessary. After it had happened several times I called Epson and asked the question: ‘Why do you keep telling I must do something which isn’t necessary?’ The person I spoke to was apologetic and agreed that I didn’t need to obey the instruction; it was simply company policy to use that kind of language.

So now we have the millennials, Gen Z people, and the coming Gen Alpha kids, all being brought up to obey their computers rather than treating them as machines which exist explicitly to serve their needs. This worries me because it feels like the progression of a trend.

So let’s look at another issue – advertisers which formulate their ads on the presumption that the little beings out there who they want to entrap are all imbeciles.

There’s an ad currently dominating my Outlook (Hotmail) inbox which shows a young man leaning proudly against some huge and hideous prestige automobile. The message underneath reads:

Millionaires Want

To Ban This Video

Watch It Now!

Now tell me: who but a brain-dead half wit would even begin to consider clicking the Learn More button? It’s part of trend in fatuous, click bait adverts which include other moronic statements like Doctors hate us for telling you this, The police say to do that, Vet was amazed by results from this product! It’s almost inconceivable that there are people out there who fall for the bait, but I assume there must be or else the advertisers wouldn’t keep doing it.

And all this strikes me as being part of an insidious process by which governments, local authorities, the corporate world, and bloated advertising executives are trying to have more and more control over the population to suit their own various ends. I ask you: did Orwell get his timing just a little wrong when he wrote 1984?