Gibson on Orwell

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

June 25, 2003
The Road to Oceania
By WILLIAM GIBSON


VANCOUVER, British Columbia
Walking along Henrietta Street recently, by London's Covent Garden, looking
for a restaurant, I found myself thinking of George Orwell. Victor Gollancz
Ltd., publisher of Orwell's early work, had its offices there in 1984, when
the company published my first novel, a novel of an imagined future.

At the time, I felt I had lived most of my life under the looming shadow of
that mythic year ? Orwell having found his title by inverting the final
digits of the year of his book's completion. It seemed very strange to
actually be alive in 1984. In retrospect, I think it has seemed stranger
even than living in the 21st century.

I had a valuable secret in 1984, though, one I owed in large part to
Orwell, who would have turned 100 today: I knew that the novel I had
written wasn't really about the future, just as "1984" hadn't been about
the future, but about 1948. I had relatively little anxiety about
eventually finding myself in a society of the sort Orwell imagined. I had
other fish to fry, in terms of history and anxiety, and indeed I still do.

Today, on Henrietta Street, one sees the rectangular housings of
closed-circuit television cameras, angled watchfully down from shop fronts.
Orwell might have seen these as something out of Jeremy Bentham, the
utilitarian philosopher, penal theorist and spiritual father of the
panoptic project of surveillance. But for me they posed stranger
possibilities, the street itself seeming to have evolved sensory apparatus
in the service of some metaproject beyond any imagining of the
closed-circuit system's designers.

Orwell knew the power of the press, our first mass medium, and at the BBC
he'd witnessed the first electronic medium (radio) as it was brought to
bear on wartime public opinion. He died before broadcast television had
fully come into its own, but had he lived I doubt that anything about it
would have much surprised him. The media of "1984" are broadcast technology
imagined in the service of a totalitarian state, and no different from the
media of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or of North Korea today ? technologically
backward societies in which information is still mostly broadcast. Indeed,
today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically
backward society.

Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity
and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking
technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute
informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer
a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a
democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too,
do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the
short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove
in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

Certain goals of the American government's Total (now Terrorist)
Information Awareness initiative may eventually be realized simply by the
evolution of the global information system ? but not necessarily or
exclusively for the benefit of the United States or any other government.
This outcome may be an inevitable result of the migration to cyberspace of
everything that we do with information.

Had Orwell known that computers were coming (out of Bletchley Park, oddly,
a dilapidated English country house, home to the pioneering efforts of Alan
Turing and other wartime code-breakers) he might have imagined a Ministry
of Truth empowered by punch cards and vacuum tubes to better wring the last
vestiges of freedom from the population of Oceania. But I doubt his story
would have been very different. (Would East Germany's Stasi have been saved
if its agents had been able to mouse away on PC's into the 90's? The system
still would have been crushed. It just wouldn't have been under the weight
of paper surveillance files.)

Orwell's projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are
not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with
all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing
from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our
situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from
ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but
this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and
individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection
and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered
by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national
boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep
a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link
discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is
something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and
corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future,
wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In
the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

I say "truths," however, and not "truth," as the other side of
information's new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright
crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract
patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with
interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of
informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple
viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy
theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what's
going on more quickly, but that doesn't mean we'll agree about it any more
readily.

 Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in
the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I've seen it said that
because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we
don't have to. I like to think there's some truth in that. But the ground
of history has a way of shifting the most basic of assumptions from beneath
the most scrupulously imagined situations. Dystopias are no more real than
utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either ? except, in the case of
dystopias, in the relative and ordinarily tragic sense of life in some
extremely unfortunate place.

This is not to say that Orwell failed in any way, but rather that he
succeeded. "1984" remains one of the quickest and most succinct routes to
the core realities of 1948. If you wish to know an era, study its most
lucid nightmares. In the mirrors of our darkest fears, much will be
revealed. But don't mistake those mirrors for road maps to the future, or
even to the present.

We've missed the train to Oceania, and live today with stranger problems.


William Gibson is author of the novels "Neuromancer" and, most recently,
"Pattern Recognition."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company


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