Night Talk Read Online Free Page B

we do has paved our way to being controlled from birth to death, that we’re already there and just don’t know it. He mentioned 1984 the first night he was on. He said it was the only novel he read in school that stuck with him.”
    In Orwell’s 1984, a totalitarian regime ruled through mass surveillance. People in the dystopian book were constantly reminded that “Big Brother” was watching.
    â€œEthan’s not the only one,” she said. “I can’t surf the Internet without ads targeting me because my buying history has been recorded and sold to businesses. I can’t get away from it no-how. When I go through a thirty-day supply of pills I get a message from my pharmacy. Remember the condoms?”
    He remembered. A caller to the show claimed that just before taking a business trip out of town, a friend of his bought condoms at the local drugstore. To get a discount, he unwittingly scanned his family’s drugstore card that registered purchases. Not long afterward his wife got an email from the drugstore offering a discount on more condoms. It wasn’t hard for Greg to anticipate the punch line—naturally, the husband and wife didn’t use condoms.
    True or not, it illustrated the fact that people were stripped naked mentally and physically by what they purchased.
    â€œThe invasion of our privacy by our every move being watched on the Internet and our being filmed when we step outside is like the weather,” Greg said. “We bitch but still put up with it. Not just because we’re told it’s for the war on terrorism but because the information on us is being collected in so many different ways from thousands of entities—from government to businesses—that we have no control over. Worse, most of the time we don’t even realize what we’re revealing when we send an e-mail or swipe a credit card. They know our loves and hates, wants and desires and needs, even our sins—what we read, what we watch, what we buy, who we do it with and who we don’t.”
    â€œYou’ve been hammering that fact on the air for years.”
    â€œAnd we still elect the same do-nothings to Congress. I doubt if they ever can stop the ball rolling. The onslaught on our personal lives has become a world-class steamroller with the war on terror as its mantra. Remember the caller who theorized that it wouldn’t be long before movies we stream are programmed for an ending the system knows we would prefer and with computer-generated images of the actors we preferred in the role?”
    â€œSounds good to me,” Soledad said.
    â€œSounds like Brave New World and 1984 are no longer dark visions of the future but the society we are coalescing into.”
    They stopped at the entrance to the parking facility.
    She squeezed his arm. “You look pretty devastated. I shouldn’t have insisted you take the call.”
    â€œIt’s nobody’s fault, not even Ethan’s. For some people suicide is the only way they can see to avoid the pain they’re experiencing.”
    He felt bad for the guy. He didn’t get close enough to the body to pick up any of Ethan’s physical details other than he had dark hair, but he had a mental image of the hacker from the call-ins. Probably late twenties, early thirties, a techie with his head stuck up a C drive, a computer geek who was better able to communicate in a computer language than table talk.
    Like most young people today, he probably was more comfortable communicating with people through an LCD screen on a computer or cell phone than face-to-face. But from the calls into the program it was obvious Ethan was also bright, inquisitive—an idealist who opposed Big Brother spying down on everyone from the electronic cloud.
    Greg said, “There had been a noticeable difference in Ethan’s calls during the past few weeks, as he became more angry and paranoid about what he claimed was