Real Freedom - True or Fiction?

iwnaknw asked:


Or is Huber mistaken in his assessment of how ever-present communication and surveillance devices have resulted in the democratization of class and status?

From the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - Greetings!” These words were written in 1948 by a lonely, iconoclastic genius of English letters. He was 44 years old and was dying of tuberculosis. He chose as the title of his book the year in which he wrote it, with the last two digits interchanged.
1984 was an instant, huge success. To this day, Orwell’s vision is invoked in every major debate about electronic technology and telecommunications. Big Brother. The Thought Police. Newspeak. Doublethink. These are all Orwell’s creations. Orwell achieved something that very few writers ever do: he added his own name to the English language. Whether you know it or not, your thinking about how communications technology will shape society has itself been shaped by Orwell’s unforgettably dystopic vision.
And the trouble with that is that Orwell was wrong. Not wrong in the details - he was in fact remarkably prescient about what technology in our day would accomplish. But wrong in his most fundamental logic. The gargoyles in 1984 are magnificent. But the architecture beneath is rotten. Orwell despised machines of every kind, but he despised the machines of telecommunications the most. His other big obsession was the Ministry - big government. He was a passionate socialist and looked forward to a government takeover of all major industries. He was certain that complex machines required centralized management. But he also loathed the radio propaganda of Goebbels and hated government censorship. The Orwellian future in 1984 is simply the magnificent synthesis of Orwell’s own schizophrenic beliefs. In 1984, he foresees an evil machine, controlled by an evil Ministry.
Orwell’s machine, which he calls the telescreen, is a two-way television. In 1984, telescreens are bolted to every wall; they hang on every street corner and in every living room, even in the lavatories - and there is no way to shut them off. The telescreen displays nothing but mendacious propaganda from the Ministry of Truth. And it sends back sound and pictures to the iniquitous and hateful Ministry of Love. Linked by telescreen to everyone, everywhere, the ministries tower over central London, “vast and white above the grimy landscape.” Big Brother has never been seen in the flesh. He is what Orwell in other writings called a “brain in a bottle.” Big Brother is the communicating machine incarnate. He is the telescreen.
From a strictly technological perspective, we are today very close to having in hand exactly the gadgets Orwell described. Broadcasting, cable television, telephony, and computers are fast converging, just as Orwell expected. And yet Orwell was wrong - dismally wrong - about the social and political consequences. “Telescreens” have turned out to be what Ithiel de Sola Pool called the Technologies of Freedom.
Begin with a fundamental engineering fact that Orwell completely missed: a network with the capabilities that he imagined simply cannot converge at a single large central ministry. The network must instead be dispersed, fragmented, and connected at many points. Really powerful communications networks are not and cannot be built to look like the pyramid of Cheops, with a single, all-powerful controller at the pinnacle. They must look more like a geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller.
Why? 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. Your telescreens must be linked as one technological peer to the next, with each unit more or less equally powerful. Unless you disperse the power, the system just won’t perform. The bottlenecks will throttle the cataracts of bits. It is as simple as that.
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.
This technological imperative has profound social and political consequences. Consider first the most basic social problem of all, the problem of unity. All great achievements of civilization are creations of communities. People build families, religions, scientific disciplines, only when they join together and cooperate. Until recently there was only one efficient way for many people to cooperate, and that was to surrender their freedom. They appointed a king, or handed over authority to a small council of elite rulers. Leaders assembled in some centralized citadel, castle, minis

Kelly