Orwell's Revenge (22 page)

O'Brien looked up from the book. A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him—weariness
mixed with repulsion and bewilderment. The weariness was penetrating
the depths of his bones. He began to read again.

And then the Party lost its senses. It directed Orwell to deploy the telescreens. Any prole who buys razor blades or sells chocolates will someday discover how much he needs the network. The proles will learn to use telescreens sooner or later. The proles have incentives to learn useful things. The proles have a market.

Imagine the world that awaits now—a world shaped by perfect communication over any distance, between any pair, or any cluster, of telescreens. It is a world in which records can be maintained and manipulated, combined and merged, moved and processed, effortlessly and at almost no cost.

In a telescreened society, free markets will be irrepressible. The genius of a market is that it elicits information about what people have and what they want. That information, however, becomes powerful only when it is communicated to others. The invisible hand has no power unless guided by visible eyes and ears. Guided by telescreen, the most powerful eye and ear ever imagined, nothing can stop it.

What are the essential ingredients of a market? Communication, to connect together the willing buyer and the willing seller. Promises, so that trades begun today can be consummated tomorrow. Memory, so that promises will be kept. More memory, to record what belongs to whom. More promises, to create all other rights beyond
property rights, because all social norms depend on a shared commitment to enforce them. Promises again, by which honest traders agree to ostracize cheats, deadbeats, and thieves. Promises and memories, trust and loyalty: these are the essentials on which all else in the marketplace is constructed. And the telescreen is the greatest of all communicating machines, an electronic scribe of records and memory, a laser-light weaver of trust and loyalty.

The Party has abolished private property. The telescreen will recreate it. Private property is an idea, built around a memory and a promise. In their day, the capitalists maintained vast records to track who owned which parcel of land. That was the memory. And they committed among themselves to defend each other's claims and possessions. That was the promise. Now we have the telescreen, the most powerful machine ever imagined for recording memories and communicating promises.

With private property resurrected and the telescreen at hand for trading it, the market will create prosperity beyond anything ever before imagined.

The giant trusts and corporations that evolved in the early days of capitalism will not reappear. The old corporation operated in the image of Big Brother, as a homogeneous, collectivist autocracy, dominated by a single, all-powerful leader. In the age of the telescreen no such structures can survive. They will be replaced by independent but tightly interconnected business groups, linked by telescreen but disciplined in all their relationships by market forces. In the telescreened world, people will be paid because they work, not because they show up daily on the factory floor or in some glass-walled office. Services delivered over the new network will be metered with absolute precision. Specialists will specialize as never before.

Labor supplied over the network—which is to say, most labor—will be valued with scrupulous precision. People who really produce will be in high demand, and no one will care at all about their race or religion, their sex, social graces, physical appearance, or how they smell. Quality services will be purchased wherever they can be found, across the street or across the ocean. Inferior services will be
priced accordingly, and incompetence will not be bought at all, however much employment commissions may protest. No government agencies will even be able to keep track of what is being supplied where, still less dictate who should be employed or on what terms.

The factory will be irrevocably changed. A car manufacturer will become a truly efficient assembler of parts provided by hundreds of independent suppliers. Secretaries, accountants, designers—most of the enterprise's support services—will be replaced by independent outsiders, knitted together into an efficient whole by intercommunication over the network. Suppliers, assemblers, distributors, and customers will coordinate themselves with meticulous precision. Even the largest factory will operate with no inventory, no warehouses, no fitful starts and stops caused by shortage of supply or excess of output. A customer's order will be conveyed instantly up the chain of production to the assembly line, and back further still to the factory's suppliers of paint, tires, and radios, and hence back to their suppliers of rubber and steel. There will be little waste, few unsold goods,
almost no friction. Industrialism
no longer requires collectivism. In every collectivist society of the past, the aim was to make men resemble insects in the hope that they would cooperate as effectively. With the telescreen, the insect-men are dead; the ants are now in the chips. An almost anarchistic form of society is now completely compatible with industrialism and
a high level of technical development. Freedom and organization can be reconciled.
Cooperation can be by consent.

The old systems of marketing will be transformed beyond recognition. In primitive societies, the market operates with tiny stalls and without reliable currency; trading extends only as far as goods can be carried. In a barter economy, the seller exchanges the pig directly for a dozen chickens. Payment is assured, but the process is terribly cumbersome. In societies that are stable enough to issue currency and imbue it with value, money marks a great advance. It records value in a standardized form that is widely understood; it conveys value without any need to transport pigs or chickens. The paper itself is worthless,
except for the information it conveys. Money, then,
is just another network—a system of communication, a record of past effort and a promise of future return. With money, the record is on paper, a primitive, inefficient, and vulnerable medium of communication. And a single, master record keeper, the government treasury, with a single, centralized printing press, has absolute power to determine value.

But there is ultimately only one valuable currency: the currency of reputation, of stable, honest, reliable loyalty. Once it is established of a man, or a leader, or a nation's central banker, that his word is his bond, he can issue currency at will. Once it is established that he is a chiseler, a deadbeat, or a thief, no amount of currency will do him much good, for his paper will be shunned wherever he tries to peddle it. The value of money thus depends on trust and promises among the people who control the records.

If the network is powerful enough, nobody controls the records, or at least no central authority does. Trust begins among individuals; then it coalesces among larger groups; then it coalesces in larger groups still. At their peak, the old capitalists trusted a thousand different private currencies in varying degrees: personal checks, stock certificates, bonds, credit card slips, futures contracts, green stamps, patronage accounts of every kind. Even the primitive network at their disposal enabled them to confirm that an account had assets, that a business was functioning, or that an individual faithfully paid his bills. Private enterprises were already issuing countless private currencies, by verifying credit, clearing checks, evaluating investments, dealing in futures, and insuring risks.

All this was done on a network that was pitifully slow and unreliable by comparison with Orwell's. Even then, the capitalists knew that governments could never be trusted, that even in the best of times the Treasury was corrupt and melted down the official currency a little bit every year, and that in the worst of times governments would simply repudiate their debts, deny their memories, and disclaim their banknote promises. But with perfect memory and communication the government bank is no longer needed—currencies of every imaginable description will be created by the market itself, like all
other goods. With the telescreen, virtually every kind of good can become the equivalent of a banknote, available for inspection, conveyance, and storage at any distance. The telescreen spells the end of our worthless dollars,
ration books, and coupons.

Money is just one example among many Almost everything that now belongs to Big Brother can be returned to the market.
Lighthouses for ships? With advanced communication, ships can be tracked and guided privately. Air traffic control for planes? Planes, like pedestrians, can avoid colliding on their own, if they can see far enough ahead and communicate fast enough among themselves. Pollution of natural resources? This too is ultimately a failure of private dialogue and negotiation, as to who is willing to pay how much
for air, water, or land. Prisons for criminals? The most pathologically violent will still need to be confined, but most antisocial citizens can simply be ostracized, or tracked by means of electronic collars, or credit reports, or private references.

Today, nothing is illegal in Oceania because there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden; a Party member is required to have not only the right opinions but
the right instincts. The rule of law will be
reborn spontaneously in a telescreened society. Law is created by consensus. Consensus is created by communication. The telescreen, the most perfect communicator, is also the most perfect police force. Not because the wires lead to a Ministry, but because free and honest people will always take up the hue and cry against brigands and thieves when the alarm is sounded. Our ancestors relied on branding and mutilation—crude records of past transgression, crude promises of future ostracism. An advanced network can brand people too, but with infinitely finer calibration and far less cruelty.

That is what you must fear most, comrades, the branding and the punishment. You may fear that the proles will turn your own tools of torture and violence against you. They will do worse: they will leave you to yourselves. And comrades, among yourselves you will starve, because you produce nothing of any value at all.

The proles' education did not matter so long as it came in our schools, from our teachers. Science did not matter, so long as we could isolate scientists in a few government laboratories and occupy them with useless military research. Private property did not matter, so long as it was protected by Party police. The market did not matter, so long as trade was conducted over our roads, using our currency. Now there is the telescreen. In the age of the telescreen, freedom will no longer be slavery. Freedom will be freedom.

O'Brien felt coarse and worn. His shoulders surrendered to their weariness;
he slouched forward. It was almost as if he could feel the pouches under his eyes and tired lines from nose to chin. He turned back to the book with a mounting sense of despair.

The telescreen will bring about the greatest liberation in the most important marketplace of all, the marketplace of ideas. In the age of the telescreen, men's thoughts will be freer than even the Utopian dreamers of yesterday ever imagined was possible.

In the best days of the old capitalists, freedom of the press still belonged only to the few who owned one. The telescreen will give voice to the average man, the man who has never before owned
a printing press or a broadcast station. It will mobilize public opinion, giving every man a stake in free speech itself. Once large numbers of people have their own, private interests in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech,
even if the law forbids it. By giving people the power to speak freely, the telescreen will also give them the right. No law, no Thought Police, will be able to change that.

Amid all our memory holes, the telescreen will resurrect memory too, and expand it indefinitely. The Party thought that history could be obliterated in a telescreened society; in fact history will be more accurately preserved, memory will be more constantly and widely refreshed, than ever before. Every act of communication creates a new memory, if only inside another human skull. With the telescreen, any document of importance, any title or deed, any record of science or business, any poem or book, any newspaper or photograph, can be replicated at will, and distributed far and wide, thus
creating new memories far faster than any Ministry can alter or incinerate them.

Ignorance—or at least rigid, class ignorance that endures generation after generation—cannot survive the telescreen. Not simply because wealth creates leisure, and
leisure creates literacy; as often as not, leisure in fact creates passive ignorance. But ignorance will be attacked by the telescreen itself. People will now educate themselves and their children, if they wish to. The Party may continue to own the public schools—the stone and mortar—but the telescreen can create a school out of any pair of desks. The great universities, the great libraries, will no longer be in places; they will reside in cyberspace, securely out of reach of the Party torches and bonfires. Heresy can no longer be eradicated by fire. Heresy is now fire itself, pulses of light in a network of glass.

The telescreen creates the one freedom that matters in the realm of free expression: the freedom to choose. When men lived as crowded as ants, they quarreled endlessly about who could make noise and who was entitled to quiet, who could watch and who had a right to close his curtains against prying eyes. The telescreen gives man eyes and ears that can see at any distance, so that thoughts and words and gestures can inhabit infinitely spacious parks. It frees his senses, and so frees his intellect and his conscious mind. It gives him the power to hear, see, and speak, to be heard and seen, in the company of his own choosing. Now men can create new assemblies, new congregations, new cities whenever they need them, in the capacious light beams of the network and the airwaves of the stratosphere.

The network is boundlessly public but also as private as the womb. The owner of the telescreen designates who may receive his transmissions. He designates which signals he wishes to receive. He can broadcast to the world from his bedroom, or reserve his great novel for the enjoyment of a few choice friends. He can exclude all racists, sexists, pornographers, drug peddlers, or others whose message he finds hateful. Distance was once privacy but also isolation, peace but also loneliness. The network erases distance, or creates it,
precisely as directed by the owner of each telescreen. The network is the true master of distance: it can maintain distance as easily as it can cross it. The power is in the individual's hands, and his alone.