Facecrime

"[…] If all of this summons thoughts of George Orwell’s fictional dystopia 1984, you’re not alone. In an August 2011 ruling that blocked the U.S. government’s attempted warrantless seizure of subscriber location data from Verizon Wireless during a criminal investigation, federal judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote, 'While the government’s monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government’s surveillance of our movements over a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution permits.'
     Take Cisco’s vision of Songdo (and by extension the new China), an urban civilization powered by ubiquitous two-way video screens, and fold in the latest in biometrics. It would be hard to design a more flawless replica of Orwell’s 'telescreen,' which pumped out propaganda while watching vigilantly for hints of dissent.
     As Orwell wrote in 1984, 'It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: Facecrime, it was called.'
     Peaceful Chongqing is just a warm-up for Cisco. The market for surveillance products in China is growing at double-digit rates. It’s a future where police, bureaucrats, employers, and hackers may look out from every screen we look into."
— Anthony M. Townsend, Salon
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"Crazypants-level weird"

"While the George Reeves television show The Adventures of Superman was on the air (1952-1958), the folks in charge decreed that his comics adventures must be seen as extensions of his televised exploits. That meant they had to conform to the show's comparatively narrow scope and effects budget. Thus the comic book Superman, the most powerful being in the known universe, ended up hanging around Metropolis most of the time and nabbing the odd jewel thief like a beat cop in blue L'eggs.

     Once the show ended, however, all bets were off, and writers and artists were free to get weird. Crazypants-level weird. And under the firm editorial hand of Mort Weisinger, who encouraged his writers to surround the Man of Steel with a vast and quirky network of friends and relations (Girl cousin! Super dog! Mermaid ex! Super-powered teen pals from the future! Super monkey! Super horse who is a centaur who is also a guy never mind why! Super cat! Dead Kryptonian fiancée he met when he went back in time! Tiny bottled Kryptonian municipality!) Superman became the harried, bemused patriarch of a garishly colored clan that routinely traversed the galaxy and the timestream as if they were just running out to the Piggly-Wiggly."
— Glen Weldon, OPR
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