Orwellian Reality (from Tim Meyer)

[Tim Meyer <ti...@gmail.com>]

I'm writing to thank you for access to the office suite functionality that seems effectively for "free?"—I thought there was no such thing as "free"— so Apache Open Office allows access to the information culture despite poverty, for which I am exceedingly grateful. If I had it, I would contribute money.

Ever since I resigned my DoD chemist position more or less on principle, my financial reality has gone from bad to worse. So strange, rapidly our system declares a person "long-term unemployed" within months; "gaps" in the resume are implicit crimes to justify rejection for employment that leads to an effective permanent lock out from the work force. Unable to earn money, the budget for office hardware and software becomes zero. For the latter, Microsoft minimally requires about one hundred U.S. dollars for our information functions.

Well, lucky for me I had been a skilled musician before I entered the workforce. I bought a Yamaha DJX (vintage) from consignment for sixty U.S. dollars, playing gigs at fifty to a hundred a show, the instrument has been a vehicle for upwards of six figures and going . . . This did not require information age tools such as our office suite.

"Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment
the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
He thought of a man whom he had passed in the street a few weeks back;
a quite ordinary-looking man, a Party member, aged thirty-five to forty, tallish
and thin, carrying a brief-case. They were a few metres apart when the left side
of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. It happened again
just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid
as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered
thinking at the time: That poor devil is done for. And what was frightening
was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. The most deadly danger of
all was talking in your sleep. There was no way of guarding against that, so far
as he could see."
          -Chapter 6, 1984

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