From: steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 17:39:17 +0100 (BST)
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?Q?more_thoughts_that_impact_the_Matrix?=


Eric/Geoff/All

I recieved the below today. What interests me is the thought that this can
be applied as well to the matrix as to the Orwell text. By implication after
all the 'virtual world' of the Matrix is as outdated and irrelevant as the
Orwellian worlds of 1984 and Animal Farm. After all Gibson's vision of this
world, or indeed his earlier worlds of Count Zero etc - are perhaps even
more ludicrous than Orwell's dystopian nightmare. To clarify like much of
contemporary SF it simply fails to address the issue of the state... However
notwithstanding that - I always wanted the job of either "AI Cop" or even
better I wanted to teach the "AI" systems ethics...

enjoy.

regards
steve

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."