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by grayhatter 894 days ago
> Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit.

that feels very orwellian

1 comments

George Orwell — 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.'

I think this is closer to the direction of Huxley in Brave New World, where a deeper understanding of how to manipulate without brute force creates a very different dystopian society than 1984.

"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Censorship by itself doesn't stop people thinking (or even expressing) forbidden thoughts, it stops a person's words reaching other people.

BNW had a similar effect by conditioning, rather than by applying the strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

It's not perfectly isometric, but neither is it a stretch to call it orwellian.