SciFi

I'm an avid reader of Science Fiction since I was a kid (the great collection of SciFi books from my elder brother and specially from my elder sister were a great help for such). Many don't understand what I see on SciFi, when the response is quite obvious: SciFi is a futurology practice of telling you the possibilities of our future, an help for us to understand the choices we have today to help us shape the future. So when I read some news of today about some practices that shock someone, I usually aren't shocked: it was something already predicted by someone, and that means something. Fahrenheit 451 talks about a society where books are taken out from their owners, a couple of weeks ago Amazon decided to take out some books they sold from their "owners". 1984 is a book that talks about a society where people's houses are watched ("Big Brother is Watching You" is an expression that comes from that book). Yesterday came the news that United Kingdom are making a program to keep an watch on more than 20.000 families using CCTV cameras. Now, the question really is: do people understand what's at stake? Do they know the choices? What are they doing to make the world turn into the direction they want? For instance, it still puzzles me how can people vote the way they do...

How History is re-written

I wrote this article countless times for the last fre weeks. I wrote and re-wrote, cited some books, gave some examples, and got more and more pissed off and frustrated while trying to write it.

So, I quit. I won't give examples. I'll just state it: while Internet, Wikipedia and all the new age of information and user generated content is great, it makes me angry every time I see one of its consequences in effect: History is getting distorted and even re-written more and faster.

I wonder than this global state of wiki-style "let's rewrite history" isn't getting too close to what was done in the novel 1984... But the small group of people doing that is those interested in "writting history", which could be anyone.

It scares me.