© GoogleMapsThe notorious, massive Qalandiya checkpoint lies in the center area surrounded by three roundabouts. Qalandiya is the scene of relentless ethnic control, murders by the IDF, violently suppressed protests, and a major cause of the impossibility of normal civilian life and movement. On GoogleMaps, the checkpoint does not exist.
In Orwell's
1984, Winston Smith happens upon an old newspaper clipping that proves that Big Brother had framed three men for crimes against the state. All past evidence contradicting the regime's ever-changing "truth" was supposed to have been destroyed, but this one scrap had been missed. Winston finished the job - though to his ultimate demise, destroying the evidence could not erase the knowledge from his mind.
What Orwell could not have foreseen was a world in which Big Brother did not need to destroy evidence, a world in which evidence did not exist in physical form and could be changed at will without a trace. All "copies" of a virtual newspaper would instantly update to every new "truth". Thought-criminals might, of course, have saved a copy of the previous virtual file, or even a screen-grab, but all these were nothing but numbers on media. What proof of whose sets of digits were the true ones, when there is no physical, forensic trail? True, false, faked, real, new, old, past, present, cause, effect, and even time-stamps and digital signatures, are ultimately nothing more than sets of ones and zeros with no distinction, because - to rewrite another Orwell novel - all numbers are created equal, none more equal than others. Whoever controls the virtual printing press that creates and rewrites reality as needed, wears the Wagnerian ring of the Nibelung - is granted the power to rule the world.
Welcome to the present. Welcome, for example, to Google Maps.
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