Orwell's Revenge (21 page)

2. Freedom Is Slavery

There is one question which until this moment
I have almost ignored. What is it about the telescreen
that makes freedom inevitable?

Here we
reach the central secret. As we have seen, the mystique of the telescreen, and above all the Thought Police, depends on the telescreen's power to watch every citizen at every moment of time. But behind that power lies the original structure of the device itself, the never-questioned design that made it possible to place telescreens everywhere and to monitor any screen at will from any other place. The secret of the telescreen is the power of choice.

No society before has ever been able to vest that power fully in its citizens, not even within the marketplace of ideas. Even the freest
markets require defenses against theft, trespass, and coercion. In matters of discourse, that means keeping the peace between the quiet and the loud, the retiring and the intrusive, the decent and the vulgar. It means maintaining some sort of control over the noisy and the nosy And that requires government.

The essential problem is that free speech involves two individuals simultaneously, not just one. Speech is truly free only when there is mutual consent to it on both sides. Consent spells the difference between nudity in the bedroom and in a public park, between pillow talk and dirty words on the public radio.

But half a loaf of consent is easier to find than a whole. My handbill is your litter, my political soundtruck your interrupted rest, my radio broadcast your static, my street art your ugly graffiti, my cross burning your intimidation, my inept wooing your sexual harassment, my copyright your right to publish denied, my privacy your inability to listen, my pillow talk your vulgarity, my autoerotic flashing your indecent exposure. Every right to speak collides with some reciprocal right not to listen, not to speak, not to watch, not to give away your own words, images, or thoughts.

And so, to maintain a fair balance between those who wish to watch, listen, or speak and those who do not wish to be watched, heard, or bothered, even the most liberal governments have always relied on City Hall to license parades, on the courts to enforce copyrights, on employment commissions to proscribe sexual harassment, on public censors to suppress indecency, hate, and incitement, on the police to cut off fighting words, on the state to protect the softly spoken from the loud, and the retiring from the nosy Who then protects privacy? Big Brother. Who protects free thought? The Thought Police.

But now there is the telescreen. It offers a new, and altogether different power: the power of private choice, the power to control not only what you say and show, but also what you see and hear. The telescreen supplies the power of choice. It has to. It couldn't work otherwise.

O'Brien began to cough. He heard, to his surprise, an unspeakably repellent sound, a foul bubbling and retching as though his bowels were being
churned up within him. It was
a cough that almost tore him open. When it was finally over he noticed some
blood-streaked mucus on his hand.

Consider what a telescreen is expected to do. It must be capable of watching every citizen at every hour of the day, capable of filling every home and office, every pub and public square, with words, sounds, moving pictures, photographs, news bulletins, and ledgers. The machine must transmit pictures as well as receive them. It must send the right signals to precisely the right place. And it must be compact enough for mass production.

All of this became technically possible in the 1980s. A telescreen would be built of transistors, and at that time the technology was improving at an astonishing pace. Engineers learned to shrink transistors into unbelievably compact arrays. The speakwrites, the novel-writing machines, the versificators—all of the Party's familiar calculating machines that once filled entire rooms—collapsed into chips the size of beetles.

A grave new problem then became apparent. Even with the old television technology operated by the liberal capitalists, the airwaves were impossibly crowded. The Party required that every individual telescreen in every home and office become a full-fledged broadcast station in its own right. This was impossible with the old, high-powered broadcast transmitters. The millions of signals would have interfered with each other. The airwaves would have ended up filled with meaningless static.

Wires could be used instead of the airwaves, but this created other difficulties. Millions of wires would have to be routed for miles under the streets, to converge at the Ministry of Love in the heart of London. It was still hopelessly impractical to funnel a Niagara of information through a single faucet in the center of the city.

The telescreens themselves helped up to a point. Words, sounds, and pictures all contain vast amounts of information that is wasted
on the sluggish eyes and ears of humans. Efficient coding can compress telescreen pictures by factors of a thousand or more, with no loss apparent to human senses. Compression requires fantastic mathematical calculations to distill what is sent and then reconstitute the original at the receiving end, but the telescreen chips developed in the '80s contained those capabilities. The carrying capacity of even the old, copper-wire network could have doubled and doubled again, year after year, for as long as chips increased the telescreen's power to squeeze gallons of information into cupfuls of compressed digits.

At the same time the engineers were radically improving the wires. Light-transmitting glass proved to be vastly more capacious than electricity-conducting copper. The engineers developed single-mode transmission methods, built new lasers, perfected frequency modulation, and deployed erbium-doped amplifiers. Every four years the transmission capacities of the optical fibers increased tenfold. Thus, the wires in the tunnels shrank a thousandfold in size, and increased a millionfold in carrying capacity. Scarcity again gave way to plenty. The tunnels, once filled with great bundles of metal wire, were soon all but empty.

The last step was to cut the glass umbilical, so that telescreens could be deployed even where the wires could not follow. At first the problem of scarcity in the airwaves seemed intractable: if millions of transmitters sent signals through the air simultaneously, there would be a cacophony of interfering radio noise. Then the engineers hit upon an ingenious solution. The idea was to slash the power of every transmitter—to reduce its range, down to a mile, down to a hundred yards, down to a hundred feet, less still if necessary. When every personal television broadcast studio operates at low enough power, there is no interference. Space is divided into thousands of tiny broadcast “cells,” each controlled by a single telescreen.

How then are signals carried over larger distances? Adjacent telescreens relay them one to the next, or hand the signals off to the glass network underground. Every telescreen supervises, relays with, and connects to its neighbors. With cellular technology there
is no practical limit to how much information can be moved through the air. As new telescreens are added to the network, the number of possible pathways between any pair increases. The more crowded the system gets, the more capacious it becomes, and the better it functions.

A cellular system of course requires massively complex coordination. At any instant, the signal from one telescreen must be tracked by its immediate neighbors. As the signal strength varies, each telescreen must monitor where its neighbors are moving. Connections are handed off from one cell to the next as units move, or are turned on or off. Coordination of this complexity was completely infeasible—until the arrival of the new calculating chips in the telescreens themselves. Then it became easy.

There remained one final problem. The network permitted—in fact required—that every telescreen be able to communicate with every other. But in front of each screen is a person. And the human eye can only assimilate one picture at a time.

So every piece of information, whether traveling as light in a glass wire, or as a radio signal through the air, must be preceded by an electronic address, specifying where the signal came from and where it is to be displayed. Every telescreen must be able to dispatch outgoing signals and select among incoming ones correctly The telescreens themselves must have the power to “screen”—to select what comes in and what goes out—or the human viewer in front of the unit will be utterly overwhelmed by an excess of information. This power to select signals, to tune one in and others out, is not a luxury, still less a device for sabotaging Party control. Without such capabilities, telescreens as powerful as Orwell wanted cannot be made to work. With them, the telescreen becomes possible.

No other network architecture could ever have supplied the capabilities the Party demanded. A network able to watch everywhere, all the time, every hour of the day and night, must operate without hierarchy, without central control. Telescreens must be linked as one technological peer to the next, with each unit equally autonomous and powerful. Whatever one telescreen can transmit, another can
receive; whatever one can store, another can retrieve. It is impossible, and in any event useless, to build a network of infinite capacity without matching power to direct the flow of information. If
it is to junction at all, a telescreen must incorporate the power to choose.

Yes, the power to choose! The power to select, as your telescreen company, other flower lovers, stamp collectors, pigeon fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon snippers, darts players, and crossword puzzle fans. The power to build private communities, to assemble network equivalents of the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside, and the “nice cup of tea.” The power to choose your own company and your own amusements, instead of having them
chosen for you from above.

O'Brien rubbed his eyes, then reached over and adjusted the green lampshade on the light beside his chair. From the large window that ran the length of his office he could look out over the vastness of London. It was a moonless night, and the sky outside was now pitch black. Nearby, only the monstrous pyramids of the other three ministries, brightly lit, stood out against the black shadows of the night. But toward the east he could see the glow of the proles' market. He turned back to the diary.

Even the telescreen might have changed little if the Party had been right about the proles. The proles, the Party believed, aspired to material equality more than anything—or would have aspired to it had they not been too crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently
conscious of anything outside their daily lives. The Party would appeal to their prurience with rubbishy newspapers filled with sport, crime, and astrology, sensational novelettes, vapidly sentimental songs,
films oozing with sex. The pornography section of the Ministry of Truth would churn out “Spanking Stories” or “One Night in a Girl's School,” to be
peddled furtively to their youths.

The proles had the numbers to brush the Party aside, of course, like a
horse shaking off flies. With a broader vision, with standards of comparison, with higher levels of education, the proles might become aware that they were oppressed and might then rebel. Left to themselves, however, they would continue from generation to
generation without any impulse to rebel. They might remember a million useless things—a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago—but all the larger issues would stay outside
the range of their vision.

Except in one place—their market. Yes, their
market!
It is in the market, after all, that humans learn to assemble, to write, to count, to compare, to remember, to interact, to cooperate, to plan—and thus, ultimately, if they must, to conspire. The market requires no autocrat, no queen bee, no central planner, no citadel, no all-powerful executive suite. Communication across the span of a market occurs through the accumulation of small, face-to-face deals. The market, like the currency on which it depends, is a network—a system for communicating across time and space. The market creates the strength of numbers outside Party control.

The Party's road to serfdom was built on the rubble of the free market. Private markets—money itself—were inimical to Party control. The Party abolished private property and condemned individual enterprise. It degraded the currency and substituted for it fistfuls of special coupons and ration tickets.

And yet the Party could never completely eradicate the proles' market, and never really bothered to try Their market was efficient at discovering that one family needed a blanket, and that another had some food to spare. But it still depended on roads and bridges and the creeping movement of people and things. Currency could streamline everything—but currency was controlled by the Party. So the proles' market depended intimately on Big Brother. Their loyalty, their trust, their efficiency, depended on the Party's; the most valuable item in their market—the dollar bill—in fact had no value at all. For their market to reach any farther than their legs could carry them, the proles had to trust the Party's dollar—which the Party could short-weight, inflate, and corrupt at will.

Even when the Party kept the currency reasonably stable, the proles' market failed at every turn. Even the capitalists of the old days rejected the market within their own corporations, because it was too
inefficient to negotiate a contract each time a letter had to be typed or a waste basket emptied. Internally, a corporation had to operate as an oligarchical collective. The proles faced similar problems. Their market could not supply them with highways, bridges, parks, or lighthouses. It thus depended on all sorts of shared goods which, like currency, had to be owned and managed collectively. The Party was confident that these problems would protect Party rule forever.

And then the Party lost its senses. It directed Orwell to deploy the telescreens.