In George Orwell's 1984, the whole world was a surveillance society, and Big Brother could see you almost all the time. But the cameras were static, unmoving, and once a fella knew where they were, it wasn't too diffucult to avoid them when engaged in clandestine activity.

The real power of Big Brother was the way the totalitarian State turned people against each other - people feared their neighbors, parents feared their children. Terrified citizens fought to be the first to turn in their friends and associates to prove their loyalty to the State. No one truly liked Big Brother, but all feared him, and by proxy, each other.

How far away from Orwell's distopian vision is the UK? Certainly, the CCTV cameras are making some people nervous - as of 2006, there was one camera for every fourteen people in the UK, and human rights group Privacy International called Britain "the worst Westen democracy at protecting individual privacy."

Protecting?  That implies a neutrality - they are actively invading that privacy, and have now taken one more step toward 1984.  This is London is reporting that the government wants to employ "environment volunteers" to snoop on their neighbor's and report when there is too much garbage or improper recycling sorting, which can lead to fines.

 

Matthew Elliot of The Taxpayer's Alliance was critical, calling it "something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook," as recruitment ads in local papers say the government is looking for volunteers to report "issues in their area such as recycling, waste, fly-tipping, graffiti, dog fouling and abandoned vehicles."

 

Of course, in true Orwellian fashion, the doublespeak coming out of state spokesmen about the roles of garbage spies is dripping with creepiness: "[Environment volunteers] demonstrate environmentally-friendly behaviour, encourage other residents to recycle and are pro-active in the neighbourhood."

 

Encourage?  Right, like Winston's neighbor's kid "encouraged" his father to be a better citizen by turning him in to the Thought Police?

 

This isn't even necessary, really.  Most recycling is pointless.

 

Let me give you a quick and easy economic formula that can help you determine whether it is worthwhile to recycle something: If they are offering money for your rubbish, it is worthwhile.

 

Every resource in this world is scarce, but some are scarcer than others.  If they offer money for it, like aluminium, it means that it is scarce enough that less recources are consumed by recycling it than are consumed by making it from scratch.  So, in the end, the price of recycled aluminum is less than that of fresh aluminium.

 

If the recycled product - like paper, for example - is more expensive than that made from scratch, that means that more resources were burned recycling it than if they had chopped down a tree to make it.  

 

That's the brilliance of the price system - it aggregates all the scientific and economic information and gives people what they need to determine the wisdom of recycling something - all without having to have degrees in environmental science and economics.

 

What we do by ignoring these price indicators is actually waste resources in a misguided attempt to conserve them.  And what we do by enshrining it in law and charging our neighbors to spy on us in an effort to enforce that law is further the infuriating and pointless march toward that totalitarian distopia that no so long ago seemed a work of fiction.