As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
‘You can turn it off!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’
He was opposite them now. His solid form towered over the pair of them, and the expression on his face was still indecipherable. He was waiting, somewhat sternly, for Winston to speak, but about what? Even now it was quite conceivable that he was simply a busy man wondering irritably why he had been interrupted. Nobody spoke. After the stopping of the telescreen the room seemed deadly silent. The seconds marched past, enormous. With difficulty Winston continued to keep his eyes fixed on O’Brien’s. Then suddenly the grim face broke down into what might have been the beginnings of a smile. With his characteristic gesture O’Brien resettled his spectacles on his nose.
‘Shall I say it, or will you?’ he said.
‘I will say it,’ said Winston promptly. ‘That thing is really turned off?’
‘Yes, everything is turned off. We are alone.’
‘We have come here because-‘
Snippet from “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell
This section — where O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, is able to turn off the everpresent telescreen in his office for a period of time — hammers something home to me. It’s a thought experiment that gives me nightmares.
Now that handheld and desktop operating systems feature a “Do Not Disturb” button, with optional timeouts, and now that operating systems are being increasingly mandated by law to know who is using it, it becomes obvious, avoidably inevitable, that at some point there will become classes of users who are able to turn off notifications, and classes of users for whom notifications are always present, always disruptive.
Are you in the Inner Party? You and I will never be in the Inner Party. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in the Outer Party, functionaries for the order. Or if we’re really lucky, we’ll be of the proles, oblivious to our lot.
It’s our job, at this critical point, to wrest the controls at the root, inside the OS. Learn which packages to uninstall. Learn which to deconfigure. Find how to redirect the stream of disruptive bullshit. To turn our tech into something that is unable to harm us.
Find the switch. Turn it off.