Distrust That Particular Flavor

access for Wired. Just not possible. The fiction-writing space was occupied, this time, and my very cursory showing, in this piece, is the result of my having had no place, within myself, to do the work required. Really I should have found a way to spot-weld on some inner sidewalk, but all I managed to do was something that feels to me, in the end, literally phoned in.

The Road to Oceania

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 they 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 twenty-first 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 meta-project 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 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 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 Nineties? The system would still have been crushed. It just wouldn’t have been under the weight of paper surveillance.

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. Nineteen Eighty- Four 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.

I do still trust that somewhere down the line, closer to full-on Borgesian digital singularity, pretty much all will have eventually been revealed.

In the meantime, though, the thought in this piece that seems to me to have been most meaningfully predictive of that meantime is that the digital is also an ominously perfect medium for the propagation of all manner of conspiracy theories and “alternate truths.” We have certainly seen a lot of that, since the centenary of Orwell’s birth, and in ways that I imagine would have concerned Orwell.

This idea, of the digital’s simultaneous tendency to increase transparency while increasing craziness, wasn’t mine. I encountered it in the Global Business Network’s 2003 Scenario Book, History in Motion. I have been a grateful if largely inactive member of GBN since shortly after its founding, as membership has brought many new and often crucial ideas into my fiction-writing space. GBN used to have the loveliest imaginable free book club for members, as well as the loveliest possible cardboard shipping cartons, in which I still store my manuscripts. Thank you, GBN, for having allowed me to be a wallflower all these years.