Big Brother Watching

A sticker with text “BIG BROTHER WATCHING” and “Darth Barko 972016”, found on a bus stop along highway 520 from Redmond toward Seattle.

A web search for “Darth Barko 972016” brings up a Deviant Art profile at https://www.deviantart.com/darth-barko. This profile has a variation of the sticker at https://www.deviantart.com/darth-barko/art/BBW-Sign-jpeg-473230520.

bus stop of

Maplewood, Minnesota (Wikipedia) Maplewood is a city in Ramsey County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 42,088 at the 2020 census. Maplewood is ten minutes’ drive from downtown Saint Paul. It stretches along the northern and eastern borders of Saint Paul.

Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Wikipedia) Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in George Orwell’s dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party, Ingsoc, wields total power “for its own sake” over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the Proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan “Big Brother is watching you”: a maxim that is ubiquitously on display throughout the novel.