JiscMail Logo
Email discussion lists for the UK Education and Research communities

Help for CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE Archives


CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE Archives

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE Archives


CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK


View:

Message:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Topic:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

By Author:

[

First

|

Previous

|

Next

|

Last

]

Font:

Proportional Font

LISTSERV Archives

LISTSERV Archives

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE Home

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE Home

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE  2003

CYBER-SOCIETY-LIVE 2003

Options

Subscribe or Unsubscribe

Subscribe or Unsubscribe

Log In

Log In

Get Password

Get Password

Subject:

[CSL]: William Gibson: The Road to Oceania

From:

J Armitage <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Interdisciplinary academic study of Cyber Society <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 09:11:10 +0100

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (119 lines)

June 25, 2003
The Road to Oceania
By WILLIAM GIBSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/opinion/25GIBS.html?th
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 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."

************************************************************************************
Distributed through Cyber-Society-Live [CSL]: CSL is a moderated discussion
list made up of people who are interested in the interdisciplinary academic
study of Cyber Society in all its manifestations.To join the list please visit:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/cyber-society-live.html
*************************************************************************************

Top of Message | Previous Page | Permalink

JiscMail Tools


RSS Feeds and Sharing


Advanced Options


Archives

March 2024
February 2024
January 2024
December 2023
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
February 2023
January 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
June 2022
May 2022
March 2022
February 2022
October 2021
July 2021
June 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
June 2014
May 2014
April 2014
March 2014
February 2014
January 2014
December 2013
November 2013
October 2013
September 2013
August 2013
July 2013
June 2013
May 2013
April 2013
March 2013
February 2013
January 2013
December 2012
November 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
July 2012
June 2012
May 2012
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
December 2011
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
July 2011
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
March 2011
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
September 2010
August 2010
July 2010
June 2010
May 2010
April 2010
March 2010
February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000


JiscMail is a Jisc service.

View our service policies at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ and Jisc's privacy policy at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/website/privacy-notice

For help and support help@jisc.ac.uk

Secured by F-Secure Anti-Virus CataList Email List Search Powered by the LISTSERV Email List Manager