William Gibson's NY Times Op Ed article
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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."