Word: orwellian
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...chips specifically for use in human beings, the idea being that the chips would provide a quick and reliable way to store and retrieve emergency medical information; VeriChip is also marketed in South America as a way to track kidnap victims. But it's not hard to imagine more Orwellian scenarios, in which prison inmates or even immigrants would be tagged with RFID implants to make it easier for the government to monitor them. Bizarre as it sounds, these ideas have been floated seriously enough that earlier this month Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--possibly flashing back to the tracking implant...
...family reaction. Parents are often caught off-guard by the arrival of the new technology in their children's school. Last fall, Jim Karlsberger's eight-year-old son returned from school with a newsletter briefly reporting that lunchroom finger scanning was set to begin. "I thought it was Orwellian," says Karlsberger, a 43-year-old hotel manager in Williams, Ariz. "I find it hard to believe that someone, someday, won't find a way to compromise the information on my child's fingerprint." He rallied dozens of parents and the American Civil Liberties union to derail the school...
Harvard, wary of Kleenex’s fate, has always taken special care to protect its brand. The employees of the Harvard Trademark Program, with an official Orwellian mandate to “protect and control” Harvard’s brand identity across the world, show up to work each day to ensure that, Heaven forbid, no street vendor in Dakar or Dot sells an unlicensed T-shirt with our sacrosanct insignia on it. The Harvard name does not merely signify unrivaled academic power—it signifies the registered trademark of unrivaled academic power, full rights reserved...
...This is where the notion of "volunteerism" begins to seem little short of Orwellian. Consider the first category. If someone is forced, by law or by social pressure or any other reason, to "volunteer" for a necessary job that he or she otherwise would not take, someone else is going to lose that job. This someone else presumably was or would be content with what the job paid - at least content enough not to quit. Now he or she is unemployed, and someone else who doesn't want the job is stuck with it. What's the point...
...nonetheless feel as if we are losing our 'real selves' if we no longer have our 'real hair color' - the color we had when we were young and looked our best." We're not talking about the fate of civilization here, but that semantic backflip does seem a little Orwellian. War is peace, freedom is slavery, and the artificial me is the more real...