Technologies of Freedom. - book reviews

Published in early 1949, George Orwell's 1984 is the most important piece of political satire of our times. To this day, Orwell's one truly great book impels us to launch giant antitrust suits against companies like AT&T and IBM. Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. These are all Orwell's words, Orwell's ideas. In fact Orwell has added his own name to the English language: Orwellian--the word is filled with chilling power.

The future that Orwell describes in 1984 is a future of an evil machine controlled by an evil ministry. Orwell calls the machine "the telescreen"--a sort of two-way television set. Telescreens are bolted to every wall, they hang on every street corner, and in every living room, even in the toilets. There is no way to shut them off. The telescreen connects to a huge Ministry that towers over central London. The machine is evil because it serves as the eye and ear of the Ministry. And the Ministry is powerful because it is master of the machine. Indeed, Big Brother, the omniscient, omnipotent leader of the state, has never been seen in the flesh. He is nothing more than a face and a voice on the telescreen. And every minute of the day and night, Big Brother is watching...you.

Technology has taught us otherwise. If you want to transmit large amounts of information, to and from large numbers of people, efficiently, flexibly, and reliably, you must use many switches, many points of interconnection. Unless you disperse the power, the system just won't perform. Thus, the centralized mainframe computer is being broken apart and spread out into hundreds of desktop machines. The large, central telephone exchange is being replaced by distributed switches with multiple levels of interconnection among them. We are building networks of networks--one for conventional telephone, several for cellular telephone, several for data transport, several for video transport, all interlinked and interconnected like the ribs and spines of a geodesic dome.

In a world of really advanced communication--the world now unfolding before us--people will be able to form communities, collaborations, alliances, almost at will, over any distance, from San Francisco to Singapore. The telescreen gives a man eyes and ears that can see and hear at any distance, and a tongue that can speak to anyone on the planet. The telescreen frees a man's senses, and his voice, and thus frees his intellect and his conscious mind. The telescreen gives man the power to hear, see, and speak, to be heard and seen, in the company of his own choosing, wherever it may be found. With the telescreen, men can create new cities whenever they need them, in the capacious light beams of the network and the airwaves of the stratosphere. For the first time in history, it is becoming possible to have brotherhood without Big Brother.

Orwell imagined the world of Stalin filled with Apple computers and concluded that it would be more horrible than any world ever seen before. Orwell was wrong. As Ithiel de Sola Pool would explain in his landmark 1983 book by that title, telescreens are, in fact Technologies of Freedom.

Peter W. Huber is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist at Forbes.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Reason Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group