[div class="text-html" lang="x-western"] Irony, Thy Name Is Amazon
Amazon Kindle owners awoke this morning to discover that [a href="http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/"][em][/em][/a]two books that they had bought and paid for (and thought that they owned) had mysteriously disappeared from their Kindles.
Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. That's right- Amazon reached into their Kindles by remote control and erased a couple of books, without any warning and without asking permission.
What were the two books that were deleted? Here comes the part that pushes the Irony-Meter to the end of the scale: the deleted books were[a href="http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/"] [em]1984[/em] and [em]Animal Farm[/em][/a] by George Orwell. Amazon customer service may or may not have responded to queries by stating, '[a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#The_War"]We've always been at war with Eastasia.[/a]'
>From 1984:
"Ignorance is strength"
"War is peace"
"Freedom is slavery" Here's the new fourth one: [/p] "OWNERSHIP IS DISCRETIONARY"[/p][div class="commentBody"]
[/p]Have you read "Animal Farm?" If you have, you would know that the power of the people to unite against the power of corporations has long been extinct.[/p] You know what's going to happen? A small but vocal minority will heavily protest and boycott Amazon and the Kindle, while the vast majority of mindless consumers will continue to purchase their goods. Amazon could not possibly care less about this. As a large corporate entity they make money hand over fist. Eventually, if the Kindle becomes sufficiently popular and achieves critical mass, people will simply accept the ability to remotely revoke your ownership rights as part of the normal terms of usage of the device.[/p] The exact same thing happens in Animal Farm. The government, which in actuality is ruled by a privileged elite, leverages the power of propaganda to exploit the worker class under the guise of improving the collective good. Dissent is not tolerated and mercilessly suppressed until the people simply accept the injustice as the reality of life. What the American public has largely failed to grasp is that Orwell's allegory of the dangers of communism is not a specific condemnation of this particular political ideology, but rather, of the dangers of an imbalanced power structure and a malleable, uneducated society. The modern-day corporation has supplanted the role of the communist elite. They are the true puppet masters in today's Western capitalist systems. We have quite vividly observed this phenomenon in the US government's reaction to the past year's economic debacle.[/p] What many people do not realize is that the game is already lost. Americans do not live in a democratic society founded upon the principles of liberty and justice, but an illusion of one, much in the same way that the proletariat class lived under Communism. The average American consumer is as much brainwashed as your typical North Korean.[/p] [/div] [/div] [div class="commentBody"] Finally, if you don't want to buy a book from a publisher who think it's okay to sell you DRM-infested crap and then take it away on a whim, you can get those exact same books legally, and for free:[/p] Animal Farm: [a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt" title="gutenberg.net.au"]http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100011.txt[/a]
[/p] 1984: [a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt" title="gutenberg.net.au"]http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt[/a]
[/p] [/div]
