Big Brother, the long-time dictator of Oceania who was brought into the limelight via George Orwell’s novel 1984, has resigned.
At a press conference given this morning, Big Brother, who still refuses to give his real name, started by reading a simple statement but halfway through it broke down and went into what, to this reporter anyway, seemed like a genuine tirade.
“Everybody’s worried about how ‘Big Brother is watching,’” he said. “What a joke. What facebook has demonstrated is that everyone’s biggest worry is that no one is watching.”
When asked to explain his sudden resignation, he went on: “it used to be that doing surveillance on average citizens was actually fun and challenging. College kids used to discuss Nietzsche, civil rights, foreign policy, and even occasionally overthrowing the government. But for the last couple of years, there’s been nothing but pictures of people hanging around in bars, captioned with such Algonquin Roundtable-esque witticisms as ‘OMG’ and ‘ROTFLMAO.’ What garbage. And if I have to sit through one more cat video, I think I’ll slit my throat. The people who coined the phrase 'vast wasteland' didn't know how good they had it.”
When asked about issues of privacy in an online world, he replied, with more than a trace of bitterness: “Privacy, schmivacy. Most people should be so lucky as to find their clichéd little life to be of any interest to anybody. I have better things to do than keep track of what brand of toilet paper you bought last month. Who cares?”
Big Brother’s employer, who asked to remain anonymous, said that they would not be looking to hire a replacement. “We really don’t need to pay people to do surveillance of individuals when everyone is eagerly publishing and publicizing their every move on a blog, facebook, twitter, and flickr. The issue now is not about maintaining surveillance of the average citizen. Our biggest problem is coping with all the average citizens who want us to pay attention to what they’re doing. We simply don’t have the resources to pay as much attention to people as they seem to need.”
He then went on to say: “The good thing is, people are so busy looking at mentos-into-coke videos and sharing recipes on their blogs that no one is really paying much attention to the real abuses of power. So we can pretty much do whatever we want and no one says or does anything. Thank you, Facebook.”
© Justin Locke
