In "Harrison Bergeron," what does the "ear radio" represent and is there a modern equivalent?

The
government requires George, 's father, to wear a radio transmitter in his ear. Periodically, the
government transmits a signal to George's earpiece and the earpieces of other citizens who are
of above-average intelligence. Anyone who is smarter than Hazel, that is, who has an attention
span no longer than "short bursts," receives a screeching signal every twenty seconds
or so. The sound is so annoying and painful that it interrupts the thoughts of the intelligent
people so that they aren't able to take "unfair advantage of their brains" and
understand or discover things that their less intelligent counterparts can't figure
out.

This serves to equalize the population so that "nobody was smarter
than anybody else." Not only that, it keeps the intelligent members of society from having
the mental space and energy to question the wisdom and/or morality of the decisions of the
United States Handicapper General. Just as George begins to think about whether ballerinas
should be handicapped, he gets the transmission in his ear, and he loses track of that
idea.

Thankfully, nothing remotely resembling this level of totalitarian
control of citizens using technology exists today. However, the demand for "fairness"
that Vonnegut satirizes in the story was a reaction to trends that he observed in the US.
Measures like affirmative action, which attempts to balance the deficit of minority populations
in higher education, could be perceived to "inhibit" certain populations for the
benefit of other. However, the key difference between Vonnegut'sand Affirmative Action is that
affirmative action seeks to address a problem that is due to systemic societal oppression,
rather than an inherent lack of "talent," and that people are not being explicitly
prohibited from exhibiting any exceptional abilities.

To take an example from
reality, the government might also be thought to interfere with the free exercise of talent
today by passing regulations that make it harder for inventors or businesspeople to implement
their ideas in the marketplace. Biomedical devices, for instance, must go through a long and
expensive approval process before they can be sold to the general public. This might be one way
that the government is "holding back" talented people from exercising their talents
(and profiting from these inventions). However, once again, the rationale for such regulations
is not to level the playing field so that less talented citizens can competeit is mostly to
ensure the safety of the consumers of this product.

Vonnegut was also
satirizing government bureaucracy and its seeming removal from reality, illustrated through a
satirical situation that clearly demonstrates its absurdity. Vonnegut imagined an extreme
scenario that would probably never occur, but it is effective as satire that points out how
ridiculous valuing "equal outcomes" is (as opposed to creating "equal
opportunity").