George Orwell proposed in his book
1984 that a
dictatorship can control laws and technology to make its people believe whatever it wants, and thus make them do whatever it wants. A dictatorship could create fictitious people, wars and whole nations on TV and make its people believe that they exist. It could also deny the existance or change the perception of real people, wars or nations. In
1984 the government was already betraying its allies and lying about the past every day, but its antagonist
O'Brien said that eventually the government would even be able to deny the existance of the nations it opposed. "Ocenia is the world."
The government could force words and grammar in and out of language to make it impossible to even talk or think about things the government disliked. The character
Syme said that by forcing words out of language, people in the future who had never grown up with today's words wouldn't understand today's speeches and documents. They'd even be untranslatable because the ideas in those documents wouldn't exist any more.
Today, comuter animators can create videos of people, places or things that look real, but don't exist. Or they can create video of real people doing things that they never actually did. Today's governments are proposing monitoring all internet traffic for
politically incorrect ideas. They can tap all cel phone conversations, they want to outlaw
cryptography. And soon there will be enough bandwidth on the internet to support a video camera and microphone in every home. These cameras and microphones will be advertized as videophones, but they might double as spying devices.