Writing the Essay

Okay - five texts in and time's up for the reading. I might read a sneaky bit of Anthem in the shop when I get a break on Saturday, but aside from that, I'm moving onto analysis and essay-writing. This is just a post to recommend three of the sociological sources I've used so far. What with the internet, books are getting forgotten as non-fiction sources; trawling through 300 pages of someone's thesis, however wonderfully written, is, admittedly, a daunting and miserable prospect in a busy life. However, Wikipedia is not a substitute. Editors have left the book that length for a reason, and it seems almost ironic to reject a book about technology's impending destruction of the human soul in favour of Googling the synopsis.

Heather Brooke's The Revolution Will Be Digitised
Heather Brooke is an American journalist and campaigner for the freedom of information, and her 2011 book worships the Net's propensity to aid democracy. At times, it reeks of Hollywood: all the little children walk into a better future where information is free and people are powerful and you are left with a tear in your eye. It could just be my preference for cynicism, but Brooke is perhaps a little optimistic in her view of a world made better by the World Wide Web; it's certainly a counterargument to the very pessimistic views of the dystopian writers, anyway.

Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion
Evgeny Morozov makes the point that the Net is only a freeing force when its users stop Youtubing cute kittens and start using it for social change. He argues that there is censorship of the net on a huge scale, contrary to many popular right-wing arguments about its uncontrollability; even when governments aren't shutting things down, Google is filtering, advertising companies are targeting. We are even censoring ourselves on the net, helping targeted ads companies to define us, box us, and develop us in our chosen direction through our acceptance of their suggestions. Also, he directly references Huxley in saying that the human race has an "endless appetite for distractions", and that mindless entertainment is what the Net truly gives the procrastinating masses, rather than change. We seek comfort in the world as it is, and once we have found it posting vacuously about ourselves on Facebook, inequality and injustice will remain unquestioned.

Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget
As a software developer himself, Lanier recognises the dangers of technology, the way it stands for freedom and progress and yet so often closes more doors than it opens, boxes things up for human consumption where the potential is so much more. Or at least was, before each new development has its parameters set. Lanier uses the example of MIDI music: where a musical note was once indefinable, almost transcendental, distinguishable from other sounds in its beauty by the human mind, the MIDI note (MIDI a musical transcription and editing software invented in the 80s) is a discrete bit of data, movable, almost artless. If the singer makes a mistake, sure, we can now fix it easily, make a vast array more electronic noises, but then why care about talent, about skill? It's a personal bugbear, I guess, but his points definitely got to me. Have a listen to this. Not for long though (I picked this video for its ironic visual).

The Machine Stops

E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is a weird little short story; it's a dystopia, but not as we know it, and written in a strangely disjunct style, though whether deliberately or not, I don't know.

In Forster's underground society, everyone is white as a sheet due to their lack of exposure to the sun, and everyone lives in separate little pods, services supplied to them via a huge central computer called the Machine. People worship the Machine and its Book, which tells them which switch links to which service (so, you press a button and get some food, press another and a bed pops out from the wall, etc). People watch and give lectures to pass the time using an interactive TV set, and barely ever leave their pods. The story centres around a rebel called Kuno who finds his way out onto the ruined, scorching Earth, only to get sucked back in by the Machine's guards ("the Mending Apparatus"). Most of the time, we follow his mother, a devotee to the Machine who will not take her son's rebellion seriously. At the end of the short story, everyone dies when the Machine breaks down and everything technological comes to a halt. Cheery.

Most of the ideas in The Machine Stops have been covered by other books, but it's a useful back-up text to discuss. There are 'cinematophotes', which are like interactive television sets, comparable to ours in the modern day, and a central computer which could be seen as Google HQ, although Google doesn't really provide for all our physical needs like the Machine does, and it couldn't really help us live underground in the same way as the Machine (other than by providing a WikiHow page on it, maybe.) In other words, there are comparisons, but I can't labour the point too much because Forster's world is quite detached from ours in its fundamentals, what with people white-faced and isolated under the Earth and all.

Perhaps my main comparator with today will be the furore at the end of the book when the Machine crashes; imagine all of the services that are provided by forms of technology suddenly stopping for us. No TV or computers, no light, no water, no forms of long-distance communication. It would be a bit extreme to say we'd all die within a few minutes, but we'd certainly suffer in ways we wouldn't have a century ago.

Zamyatin: Why Not?

My vigilant audience of about three may have noticed that my initial post stated I was going to study primarily Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984 and Zamyatin's We, but then the posts following made no mention of We at all. I decided that Fahrenheit 451 was to replace We just before I started reading it, for the following reasons:


• Zamyatin was Russian-born. One of the issues with this project is that I am covering both literature and Sociology, and loosely, I am studying in connection with an English qualification, so a text in translation is already a grey area for suitability. However, there are more problems with We's provenance too: if it was written in Russia, primarily reflecting on Zamyatin's experience as a Bolshevik, how useful and relevant will it be to compare with the Western modern day? The theme of technology is definitely covered in the book, but the ideas are a product of Socialist Russia, and though I could technically use it to comment on Britain and the USA anyway, I cannot make any suggestion that Zamyatin was predicting anything about the West if the context was radically different.

• We is quite long. Practical reasons only: it's about the same length as Orwell, only I've never read it before, so it would be a sacrifice of time which I may not be able to make.

• It is not as widely recognised as Orwell and Huxley for being canonical dystopian fiction. There are suggestions that Huxley and Orwell may have stolen segments of their plots from We, but the triad of 1984, Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are more widely considered the core reading in the genre, and are simply more well-known than Zamyatin's title.

• If it inspired Brave New World, I might end up studying the same ideas twice. I want to widen my scope as much as I can in this, get together as many ideas as possible, and I might just be re-treading old ground with We.

For those reasons, I will study We if I find I have a dearth of information and a surplus of time, but as it stands, I don't really think it will be necessary. Other books on my shortlist have had to be relegated or knocked off too, including a Swedish title called Kallocain, which is incredibly relevant, but a translation and very difficult to get hold of, and The Republic of the Future, which is very old and out of print. It's also a scathing comment on socialism, possibly skewing its usefulness to my technological focus.

I think the language of dystopian worlds would have been an interesting thing to study too: the language created by the authors, with their invented swearwords, new slang and governmental taglines and propaganda. I'm finding there may be too much to say for Technology in 5000 words, but I've got this far and it would be a shame to waste all that and change focus, so I may just have to chop out some of the more irrelevant or sparsely filled headings like "Technology for Transport".

This Perfect Day

Ira Levin's This Perfect Day is the first book I've read for this which I'd never read before, and it was definitely one I'm glad to have read. Written in 1969, it is the latest of the dystopian fiction I've looked at, and probably the closest to the present day I will get. Lodged firmly in the film age, there are moments in This Perfect Day which feel more cinematic than literary, which enhances it even if it does get a little bit James Bond every so often.

It has a lesser known plot to the other books I've looked at, so I'll write a synopsis. The world in Levin's novel functions around a central computer, which acts as a kind of God, choosing all the life-goals of each Family member, keeping constant track of where members are through the use of scanners and a tagging system of permanent electronic bracelets. Everyone in the world is apparently equal and selfless; there are only four names for boys and four for girls, followed by a number to identify individual citizens. Members are kept 'dulled and normalised' by weekly medical treatments, which contain 'vaccines, enzymes, the contraceptive, tranquillizer and a sexual depressant', all designed to protect and emotionally castrate mankind.

The plot follows Chip, or 'LiRM 35M4419' (let's call him Chip) from his childhood, throughout which he is a delightful little sheep. He is awoken from his uniformity by his grandfather's hints, experiences a troubled adolescence (haven't we all?) and throws off the cape of conformity for once and for all when he passes his induction into a tiny group of dissidents. There, he falls in love, something not possible in the drugged outer world, and discovers that there are un-unified islands on Earth through examining old maps. The group eventually get caught, and each person is 'treated', including Chip.

After six long, conformist years, Chip re-awakens and finds a way to fight his treatments; he escapes and finds his old flame, who he abducts and rapes. She realises in the morning that he's a nice guy after all. (This book was written on the cusp of feminism, but Levin clearly didn't know about all that.) Together, they adventure their way to Majorca, or "Liberty", one of the free islands, where life is almost like ours today - lots of strong emotions, bad food and racism, but a certain amount of free will. Several chapters later, after marrying Lilac and having a baby, Chip formulates a plan to destroy UniComp. He gets a team together and they gather supplies; they manage to fight their way into UniComp's headquarters, but a spy in their midst takes them to his leader, the famed Wei, and the group are groomed as potential programmers, what with their startling independent thought.

Chip at first seems taken in, but he's an independent guy and throws bombs and apocalypse happens and stuff.

I lost the will at the end there a bit. But never mind, onto the analysis. This book abounds with technology to discuss; I had hoped that it might prove fairly sparse to make my essay easier, but no such luck. Then again, double edged sword, it was very relevant.

1) Drugs and Medicine. In This Perfect Day, weekly treatments keep everyone under control, serving a purpose even more important than soma in Brave New World, or Victory Gin in 1984. These treatments keep people healthy, but also serve to sterilise them of any rebellious thoughts. When a member puts a foot wrong, even mentally, they are sent for an extra treatment, which slows them down and shuts them up again. 'Doctors' replace police and 'medicentres' police stations.

2) Computers. UniComp rules the world, literally. All members have bracelets which they must touch to scanners dotted around the landscape and on the entrances to buildings. UniComp 'grants' members what they need - and stores every little bit of data about their life. Advisers each have 'telecomps' (let's say 'iPads') through which they can contact Uni and make changes to citizens'... hmm, I'll call them 'profiles'. UniComp is a single massive unit, run, as we find out late on, by a set of programmers who constantly update it, but the people outside believe it is an autonomous and infallible machine.

3) Eugenics. Most members look the same, and differences are considered ugly imperfections; Chip's grandfather tells him 'they fiddle around with the genes these days', although the process itself is never explained. Chip himself is assigned to become a genetic taxonomist, which with some Dictionary.com sleuthing, I deduce to mean someone who classifies genetic structures - a worker on what is basically the Human Genome Project. Slightly crazy Wei says he wants to breed "a Family improved genetically", to reach "perfection on Earth." Unlike the eugenics in Brave New World, the people all appear to be bred the same in This Perfect Day, all clever and yet all functional, which Huxley may have had a problem with.

Can we see any of those technological ideas in our present day? Have we taken steps towards these dystopian perfections since Levin devised his unified universe? Eugenics, I've loosely considered before: we can sex select children, we can terminate pregnancies to eliminate disabilities, we can clone animals, we can breed designer babies. We Can, but Do we? The ethics of this are constantly discussed in the world today, whereas they aren't in the literature, so maybe we will put a stop to some of the more "fake-God" developments in genetic engineering. And what about drugs and medicine? It is possible to go through life without a single injection, though there are a lot more vaccinations these days than ever before; we're a more medicated society than in the past, but it's not nearing the weekly doses of everything that the Family get. It could be argued that increasing diagnosis of drugs like anti-depressants is a very dangerous step towards numbing the population's feelings, but to have them prescribed, you have to look for help, a choice that Levin's and Huxley's people don't really get.

Computers, however, are potentially nearing the abilities of those in This Perfect Day. The invention of the internet in 1989, and its rapid expansion, have pretty much tied every country on Earth into a global network; as far as numbers are concerned, we're up to over 2 billion users globally, if the stats can be trusted, spread across the planet. Computers may not run our planet, but they certainly give us limitations as well as expanding our horizons - just yesterday, Amazon told me it couldn't ship me a box of French truffles, which is a bit like UniComp flashing its little red 'No' when asked to grant someone something. Computers are now portable, which they definitely weren't in 1969 (see my 'iPad' reference earlier), meaning they reach more people for more of the time now. They're also key in surveillance: Seomoz.org puts it that "Along with the data the user enters directly into the forms (username, password, etc), Google logs the time and date and location of submission." (I recognise that Seomoz are not exactly well-known, but it does give a verifiable screenshot of the html page source.) So our computers can, and do, do all of the things which Levin's computers did, just not on quite the scale that they do in This Perfect Day.

I'm everso slightly behind on my reading, so the next few will have to be short stories or skim-read, I think, which is a shame but a necessary step to completing this EPQ. (Bit of AO4, right there.)

Fahrenheit 451

I remembered Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury not being as good as Orwell and Huxley, despite its reputation as being a classic of the dystopian genre. Overwhelmingly, on my second read of this book, my opinion was confirmed. Bradbury's rather clumsy (or expressionist) writing style and sometimes difficult-to-follow narrative pace were a shock to the system after the beauty of Orwell's prose. However, it did cover some useful ideas which support those in 1984 and Brave New World.

Fahrenheit 451 focuses on Huxley's primary idea that the human race has an "endless appetite for distractions", only where Huxley visualises orgies and ever-more-complex versions of golf, Bradbury's distractions are a little bit closer to home. Books are considered a waste of time and burned, while four-wall walk-in television 'parlours' provide twenty-four hour entertainment on programmes featuring characters who are affectionately named "the relatives" or "the family". These soap operas feature mind-numbing domesticities and silly disputes. (Most of the US soaps Bradbury could have based this on were not around until after 1960, so this national soap-opera fixation was quite prophetic.)

Of course, Bradbury had an advantage over Huxley in predicting a technological revolution: he wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and between 1931 and '53, jet engines, helicopters, photocopiers, LSD and colour television were all added to Western civilisation, along with credit cards, super-glue and video tapes. Basically, if anyone was in doubt in 1931, then by 1953, it was pretty certain that this world was becoming more mechanised and electrified by the day, and so dystopian literature could be adjusted in accordance if it wished to project futuristic images, or warn of the potential downfall of man.

I'll concede, Fahrenheit 451 does cleverly bring together elements of a totalitarian state and a democracy, suggesting that the Orwell/Huxley dichotomy is not an inevitable one: perhaps it's true that endless distractions could be brought together with iron-fisted rule to make the 'perfect' controlling state. Symbolic of the whole balance of things, in Fahrenheit 451, books are burned, but they needn't be really, because nobody can be bothered to read them anyway. The intellectualism that goes up in flames is a mere token, because the masses are complacent with their sleeping pills, their 'beetle' cars that can hurtle along the motorway at hundreds of miles an hour, and their interactive virtual realities.

I've covered it to an extent in the Brave New World post, but it's worth reiterating that this is very much a reflection of our Britain now, our America, and to an extent, all modern democracy. The people can vote, but why bother? They have video games, TV, warm beds and full stomachs. US election turnout was at 63.1% in 1960, and now it is at around 56.8%, which means many millions of people have broken their forefathers' voting legacy, and therefore accepted dictatorship - for if a party rules with less than 50% of the population's vote, then they have no literal majority. The president of the USA is ruling over general disinterest, making decisions 'for the people' without the people having confirmed their support. As it happens, the turnout had already dropped to a low in 1972 of 55.2%, which coincides nicely with the year that over 50% of US households had a colour TV set for the first time in history. Whilst this is only correlational and ignores other factors, it's an interesting first step in analysis of the depoliticisation of the Western World. It follows common sense, of course - our schemas tell us that there must be a connection - but alas, stereotypes cannot be evidence.

Huxley vs Orwell: whose picture is more reflected in today's society?

I read in an opinion in a book called The Net Delusion a week or two ago that suggested Huxley's Brave New World is a better comparison with the West in the modern day than Orwell's 1984 because it examines the flaws of democracy, where Orwell examines totalitarianism. Overall, in the West, a semblance of democracy is winning. Brave New World is a land of conditioned submissiveness, where everyone is happy in their subservience, each individual a functional and uncomplaining unit in a homogenised population, where Orwell considers a land where its citizens cower before their masters feeling repressed dissent, under a state that reads people's thoughts to keep them in line, and tortures them back onto the straight and narrow if they stray.

In a letter to Orwell, Huxley wrote: "My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World." The pair quibbled about the nature of the future because Orwell was drawing on oppressive governments who would stamp on their citizens' rights, where Huxley was drawing on liberal societies where the lack of suffering would lead to mass complacency about political ideology.

This strange semi-fictional mock-up interview with Orwell presents Orwell's view on the future, based on his comments on 1984, showing up the differences between the two books: you could not say of Brave New World that it was comparable to 'a boot stamping on a human face forever'. Brave New World is a picture of a smiling face on a soma holiday. The differences are nicely summarised in a lovely, patronising cartoon here.


Having said this, both books address collectivism. In both, the individual means nothing, and the state and population mean everything. However, Huxley's considers collectivism in consumerism, a world built on consumption: everyone is equal in that they must use lots of stuff and be resigned to infantile pleasures. Orwell's world is built on under-consumption: everyone must be kept on the breadline in order to preoccupy them with their basic needs, filling their hungry stomachs with hatred, distrust and misdirected anger at a shared enemy. Looking at it from this angle, it is clear which more represents our Western world now: we are overeating, consuming vast amounts of goods, using alcohol and cigarettes prolifically. Even during an economic crisis, we have a lot more to lose than our chains - enough, in fact, to be comfortable, and spending. The power we have submitted to is the highstreet shop, not the government - indeed, it only takes a hasty Google to find that 80% of British voters say they do not trust politicians. This is the World State, not Oceania.

Orwell's book is also harder to compare to the modern day in its technological advances because a lot of the information you'd need to compare it to is incredibly confidential. No government body is going to publish how many of our internet histories it spies on - we can only ever guess, or invent (often hilariously hyperbolic) conspiracy theories. CCTV cameras are deliberately covertly placed, or they'd get vandalised; phone hacking is not something you find out about until, maybe, your arrest (or when you see your dirty linen across a double page of the Daily Star). Places where torture and execution are carried out definitely exist, but Guantanamo Bay and similar prisons are shrouded in mystery, their true conditions glimpsed only occasionally, to temporary public horror.

However, we can make some everyday comparisons. We can carry out two way video calls (see Skype) on machines which function very like telescreens, even if we can turn our computers off, where citizens of Oceania are subject to permanent scrutiny. There is a kind of permanent scrutiny of our public behaviour, through CCTV, though we still have private lives. Then again, sometimes what feels private isn't: Google keep a log of everything that has been searched, personal or not. Even if it is not for the government, corporations govern behaviour too, through targeted advertising and censorship. It's all spying, after all. There is even a trickle of research into mind-reading, the primary aim of the Thought Police (unrealistically efficient as they are in 1984). On the other hand, this usually requires probes of some kind, and so it has a long way to go before a fluttering thought of dissent could be picked up from a screen on a far wall.

All in all, I felt that 1984 was a masterpiece, if not a realistic presentation of the modern world as I know it. I'm sure there are states which are utilising modernity to Orwellian ends, but they could never achieve it. The human race's aims are too disparate for that; Orwell's Oceania relies on the complicity of Eastasia and Eurasia. Ironically, to achieve such a dictatorship, the whole world would have to work together, and I just can't see that happening. If anything, the impossibility of a unified totalitarian world is more of a sad reflection on humanity than if it were achievable.

Maybe. Actually, no.