June 25th marked the 100th observance of the birth of George Orwell. This essay from cyberpunk author William Gibson is a provocative celebration of Orwell’s life and work. For equally challenging and provocative work, I recommend Gibson’s novels, particularly his early work and his most recent, Pattern Recognition.
The Road to
The New York Times,
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
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
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
William Gibson is author of
the novels Neuromancer
and, most recently, Pattern Recognition.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times
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