Transparency Good and Bad (Some Semi-Scholarly Dystopian Kvetching)

 Transparent: adjective

1. having the property of transmitting rays of light through its substance so that

bodies situated beyond or behind can be distinctly seen. [***].

4. easily seen through, recognized, or detected […]

5. manifest; obvious […] || 6. open; frank; candid […]

7. Computers. (of a process or software)

operating in such a way as to not be perceived by users.

[…N]owhere is there any license to waste time, […] to evade work —

no wine shop, no alehouse, no brothel anywhere, no opportunity

for corruption […] no secret meeting place. On the contrary,

being under the eyes of all, people are bound either to be performing

the usual labor or to be enjoying their leisure in a fashion

not without decency. — Utopia, quoted by Harold Bloom, who added the

emphasis and a note referencing Zamyatin's We and Orwell's 1984.

Secrets are Lies. / Caring Is Sharing. / Privacy Is Theft.

— Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)

            Some four centuries and more before we seriously got around to open-meetings laws in the American Republic, Sir Thomas More of emphatically unrepublican, undemocratic Tudor England imagined a Utopia where any "question affecting the general public" must be discussed by officials in public and with plenty of time for at least some of the public to observe the proceedings. Highly important matters go to an assembly of representatives — called District Controllers in modern Utopian — who go back to their Districts and explain the issues to their households before any action is taken. Relevant here: "It's a capital crime" — one of the relatively few in Utopia — "to discuss such questions anywhere except in the Council or the Assembly" (Turner trans. 74; early in Bk. 2).

            Now, death is a harsh penalty for private meetings, but Utopos the conqueror of what became Utopia, and his more democratic successors, were on the right track and instituted a highly positive form of transparency: public business done in public, with no literal or figurative walls concealing that work; only the transparent air stands between the Utopians and their officials.

            There is another side to Utopian transparency, though, as Harold Bloom recognized. The Utopians have plenty of everything they need or think to desire, plus admirable leisure time because all Utopians work: indeed, "[…] wherever you are, you always have to work," in part because there are no distractions of boozing or sex, and in larger part from social and what amounts to police pressure: there's nowhere to hide from work or Utopian norms, "no secret meeting places" and "Everyone has his eye on you" (Turner 84).

            Utopia is a total society, and in many of its aspects totalitarian. "The personal is the political" in a very literal sense there, and society claims the right to regulate all things political; so "transparency" is a figure of speech with several meanings, not all of which are good, and certainly not eutopian.

            Most citizens want to know what officials of our various governments are up to; we're less keen that those officials know what we're up to — or that our bosses know or the neighbors or the general public or, sometimes, our parents or spouses. We don't want Big Brother spying on us, or, sometimes, even "little brother": some kid with a smart phone, some punk hacker.

            Indeed, "transparency" is made literal and horrific in dystopias stressing surveillance, most especially in what is arguably the first of the great dystopian novels of the 20^th century, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921/24). Zamyatin is very direct: in the One State of We, apartment buildings are made of glass: transparent glass with coverings that can be used only during regulated sexual hours (any privacy for toilet functions is less clear). In addition to the "Guardians" — the secret police — "Everyone has his eye on you," or might have his, or her, eye on you, just by looking.

            In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are the ever-present telescreens, and they are the main reason "You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." Still, however much the protagonist, Winston Smith, dismisses all powers in his world except the Though Police, we do perceive through him another potential threat: "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away […]. It was the Police Patrol snooping into people's windows" (6-7; I.1). In the 1984 film version, a helicopter snooping at Winston Smith's window makes for a powerful image of the danger of that sort of windowpane transparency.

            In the science-fictional, Pomo world of the 21^st century, there is still the threat of fascistic "ethno-nationalism" of the Donald Trumpian variety, but in terms of surveillance, government action is only one threat.

            In the United States, we still have to negotiate fitting cops up with body cameras in such a way as to avoid dangerous precedents of on-the-job surveillance, plus renegotiate surveillance deals of the past and try to anticipate applying high-tech innovations in the future.

            I want cops filmed going into armed confrontations, especially armed confrontations where they might shoot young males of color. And I want some guarantee that cops don't shackle someone and put him in the back of a van with no seat belt and then take him for a deadly ride. On the other hand, I don't want cops surveilled every minute they're on duty: for practical reasons of data overload and expense, but also because of the precedent. If cops have to put up with constant surveillance, why shouldn't ___________ also? (Fill in the blank, possibly with people working at your job.)

            There is also here the sense of "transparent" as a process "operating in such a way as to not be perceived." This can refer to people getting so used to invasions of privacy that as a practical, political matter they're invisible.

            Legacies of "The War on Drugs" should come to mind immediately here, as in your Little-Brother employer insisting that you urinate into a cup for testing to ensure you're not zonked on the job. Well, if you're zonked on the job and some supervisor doesn't notice, there's a problem right there, to say nothing of the problem of people having to work at jobs so mindless they can be done while zonked. Or when the doctrine of "Extraordinary measures to meet extraordinary dangers" justifies checkpoints at airports and such — and then the results of extraordinary searches (as in examining everybody's luggage) are used to arrest and prosecute such ordinary criminals as drug smugglers.

            "Do you want to fly next to drug smugglers or a murderer?!" Actually, yeah, probably; there's a good chance they'll remain sober and quiet and not draw attention to themselves. And looking just for weapons and explosives and ignoring a couple kilos of whatever should speed up the TSA lines.

            For the very-near future, there's the Silicon-Valley style gentle totalitarianism warned against in Dave Eggers's The Circle. It will soon be possible to produce relatively cheaply something like "SeeChange," which the Wikipedia entry on The Circle correctly describes as "light, portable cameras that can provide real-time video with minimal efforts. Eventually, SeeChange cameras are worn all day long by politicians wishing to be 'transparent', allowing the public to see what they are seeing at all times." And if that degree of "transparency" seems extreme, check out the TV commercials and on-line ads for electronic devices allowing parents to track their teens' (or others') mobile phones, and their teens' (or others') actions: figurative "helicopter parents" replacing the helicopters of Orwell's Police Patrols.

            There may be a kind of Karmic justice in the use of mobile phones to spy on young people. Much good has come from using the cameras on smart phones to get out to the public instances of police brutality and other crimes that until recently would have gone unreported and unpunished, however much police criminality still goes unpunished. But "kids with cameras" — camera phones — and older people who should know better have contributed to making surveillance transparent in that sense of not being really perceived, not being thought about, until, not long from now, people in high-tech societies will "live, from habit that became instinct […] in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

==========================================

Works Mentioned Without Citation or Link in Text

More, Sir Thomas. Utopia (initial publ. 1516). Trans. and introd. Paul Turner. London, UK: Penguin, 1965.

Orwell, George (pseud. for Eric Blair). Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Rpt. 1984. New York: Signet, 1961. 

       I give citations to this edition followed by section number in Roman and subsection in Arabic 

       numerals (Signet uses Roman for both).

Donald Trump: In America They Came First for the Muslims ...

Donald Trump suggests — if only suggests — registering Muslims, and the thought went through my mind that perhaps each registration would come with a green crescent to sew on one's clothes, perhaps with a color-coded "M" on it for Muslim and identifying the variety of Muslim. Then I realized I was being old-fashioned and silly: the new Yellow Star would be what we see in THE TERMINATOR, post modernized still further into a tattooed barcode on the forehead, with an embedded ID/GPS chip near the carotid artery (dangerous to dig out). As Mr. Trump has said, "There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases. I mean we should have a lot of systems. And today you can do it."

Okay, gang, it's time to roll out Martin Niemöller again. If I'm reading the Wikipedia article correctly, this is the version Niemöller preferred:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

Change the line to "In America they came first for the Muslims."

Or if you have more time, re-read Maurice Ogden's longer poem, "The Hangman," or watch (again) the still better 1964 animation of that poem.

Trump is incoherent in his statements on registration, and he should be pressed, starting with: "Mr. Trump, would you rule out the extermination of all Muslims? It's a 'Yes/No' question, so please start with a 'Yes' or a 'No' or 'Go to hell — no comment.'" Without clarification, Trump leaves us with "by-any-means-necessary"/"no options are off the table": an opened-ended threat into which we can read what we like.

I'll go with those who read Trump's comments as Trump's just not caring if he's thought a fascist, which itself is somewhere between bullying and fascistic.

I'm old enough to have seen neoNazis marching in the streets of Chicago and was in Oxford, Ohio, when we had to deal with a demonstration by the Ku Klux Klan. So I know that Fascism was both a new invention of Modern times and a kind of human constant. It is to be resisted, especially when it sets itself up to offer protection from competing forms of tyranny.

Why NSA, FBI, and Other Folk Will Continue Spying on Americans

            I'm writing this blog post shortly after a Federal court has ruled illegal — illegal, not specifically unConstitutional — "The unprecedented and unwarranted bulk collection of the entire U.S. population's phone records by the government" of the United States, and not long before the US Congress debates extending key provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act beyond their expiration date of 1 June 2015.

            Moving into a major election year, the Congress is not going to cut back significantly on surveillance of Americans nor are they — or any other moderate-to-highly visible group of politicians — going to cut back significantly in years without major elections. The surveillance of Americans will continue, along with anyone else heavily using electronic communications for two basic reasons.

            First, because large-scale bulk collection of data can be done and is routinely done by various political States and a hell of a lot more by "Non-Governmental Organizations" in a broad sense of the term: including commercial operations. American and others spill our guts to the companies, so the data are out there; and being out there, that data will be collected, sifted, analyzed, shared, sold, and used: by commercial operations and by security operations.

            Second, because no politician with ambitions, and only a vanishingly small number of politicians of any sort would be dumb enough to be totally honest on the subject on record.

            Let me repeat a thought experiment. Question to the President of the United States, or would-be President: "Sir (or Ma'am), given that the President's main duty is to protect the American people, will you do everything possible to prevent an attack on US citizens?" Answer from the President (or candidate):

          I'm not going to ad lib some bullshit clichés here, and you won't get a good sound bite; so I've e-mailed my text to your smart phones but will read it for the record.

          First off, Thomas Hobbes in the 17^th c. said that the first duty of any Sovereign was to protect his, her, or its subjects, and that's true enough; but Hobbes, at one time notoriously, followed that premise about protecting subjects to a logical conclusion that so long as the Sovereign provided protection, he, she, or it had to be obeyed absolutely; and Hobbes pushed his argument to recommend what we'd call totalitarian government.

                   The first duty of the President of the United States is "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States": my first job is defending America, and performing that job can cost the lives of some Americans or, at times, a lot of Americans. The first job of the President includes preserving the US Bill of Rights, and those rights can endanger Americans.

          Most Americans most of the time would be safer in a police state. That we don't have a police state protects racial and ethnic minorities and people with unpopular opinions, but the net effect, even among minorities, is a loss of lives of people who'd survive better under an authoritarian of even totalitarian regime. That "tree of liberty," as Mr. Jefferson said, "must be refreshed from time to time" with blood, but not just "the blood of patriots and tyrants" but also of average, innocent folk who'd be not be killed — or wounded or maimed — if America were as rigorously policed as Germany under the Third Reich: but, in a non-racist way, with equal opportunities for all trouble-makers to be neutralized.

          So, my duty is to protect Americans, but limited by — as the truism has it — limited by balancing safety with liberty.

         And balancing safety and liberty with concerns beyond liberty.          So: Will I do "everything possible to prevent an attack"? No, I will not.          What is possible to be done pretty obviously includes things that have been done. What has been done has been very well documented by chroniclers and historians, and in our time by courageous people working for groups like Amnesty international.

          There has been at least one regime that has tortured children in front of their parents to break the parents and get them to cooperate in suppressing antigovernment activity — or minimally to terrorize the parents and population. Will I order the torture of even one child to prevent an attack that might save many Americans? No, I will not. I will leave it as an absolute prohibition, literally absolute: no torturing of children, not even if doing such evil might — always might — do good.          Great powers including the United Kingdom and the United States have bombed cities to flaming rubble to pursue war aims. The US invaded Iraq on the possibility it might become a threat. Would I order a military nuclear attack on a foreign city to preempt a terrorist attack on a US city? I would not. It's bloody arithmetic, but violating the taboo against nuclear weapons and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners wouldn't be justified even if it saved the lives of three or four or five thousand Americans.

          Get the point?

          Toughen up, people. If you're going to be free, you and your children are going to have to take risks. If we as a country are to behave morally, some of us who might've lived long, healthy lives will end up dead or wounded or maimed.

            So, I'll protect your butts but also your freedom and that of your descendants. I'll do what I can to keep you safe, but I will also "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and try to keep us, as a people, decent human beings.

          If you don't like it,
                   impeach me. OR

                   don't vote for me as President. OR

                   vote against me for re-election.
 

            Now, what are the odds on such a speech getting made, or, if made, the speaker's having a career in US politics?

            So long as politicians can't say, "Hell, no! I won't do everything possible to protect you," they're going to have to do such relatively innocuous "things" as spy on us.

Civil Libertarians Putting Americans in Harm's Way (7 June 2013)

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground;

Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

— Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Yo, Civil Liberties Pushers complaining about surveillance! (Cheek swabbing for DNA gets into other issues.)

            Are you saying that you would endanger innocent Americans, increasing the risks of death, dismemberment, rape, or maiming to American men, women, and even our children just to defend your right to privacy?!

            'Cause I will say something like that, except I would put it as defense of, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," to quote the US Bill of Rights, Amendment 4.

             To repeat the cliché: Freedom isn't free, indeed, and part of the cost of freedom is avoidable deaths of innocent people. Look, most Americans — that "great, silent majority" — would be safer from terrorism and crime in a police state. Anything less than a police state is a net increase in risk for most Americans. Let's all grant that.

            Let's grant also that John Kerry was right in his gaffe — definition: a politician's letting slip what he thinks and/or the truth — "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance," a deadly threat for the victims, but this side of a loose nuke not a threat to the Republic. Also, with nukes complicating the equation, not a major risk factor in American lives.

             If you're into the Constitution and Liberty and all that, you need to be willing to tolerate some increased dangers, and there has to be "a clear and present danger" before you even start to talk about giving up liberties. Then you have to do risk-assessment.

            You're worried about unlikely but catastrophic risks, and you should be? Well, there's Earth getting hit again by a substantial comet or asteroid, and there's full-scale thermonuclear war. Either could wipe out the human species, and a number of others, or at least blast human civilization back to a pre-industrial era. We can do a better job tracking extraterrestrial threats and we can reduce the number of nuclear warheads worldwide to a level below what risks Nuclear Winter. And we can do both without any reduction in liberty and, if nuclear build-down is done carefully, with an increase in security.

            Climate change is more complicated, but the risk can be reduced with only minimal loss of liberties and none of those of the basic sort. People will lose some of the "right to be left alone" as pollution controls become more rigorous and invasive, but there is no right to pollute. (I have a right to piss in the stream, as we used to say, only if the stream can clean up after me before it gets to humans and other critters that want to drink the water or take a swim.)

           If we really want to reduce the risks for Americans we can work on getting more people decent, affordable medical attention, reduce our production of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and improve our ability to respond to all sorts of lethal and otherwise harmful events, and not get hung up with  terrorism and crime. 

             Indeed, it's better to prevent a terrorist attack than to respond to one; but terrorist attacks are a whole lot less frequent than ordinary fires and explosions and high-speed car pileups. And robust response to all sorts of "Shit Happens" events can come with just about no costs in civil liberties.


            Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were more right than they may have intended with "Find the cost of freedom." Right: calculate the cost and do the bloody value judgments; and that's literally bloody: the cost of freedom has always involved innocent blood. 

Now Let Us Praise Some SF Prediction: Privacy and Philosophy (9 June 2013)

      In her introduction to the 1976 reissue of her book, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin denies that she, or most SF authors, are into prediction: "Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying." Le Guin, though, thinks novels particularly and fiction generally can earn their keep because, paradoxically, fictions are not just complex and convoluted lies but also thought experiments that can tell us important truths about current society and may be useful, on occasion, in thinking about truths for the future.

      Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., approached the issue with the metaphor and image of artists as canaries: "I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coalmine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."

     Science fiction isn't very good at prediction because, as Le Guin notes, it's into extrapolating current trends — and history indeed consists of the continuation of most current trends, but also the occasional weirdo change, frequently (and ironically here), a scientific and/or technological change that changes a lot.

     So every now and then I praise some SF that has been kind of good at predicting and very good at the canary-in-the-coal-mine job and warning of increasing dangers. The occasion for beginning to write this essay was my listening to Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (2004), which kills off a flock of canaries warning about global climate change. Still, this time around I want to return to four classic dystopias — and I'll allude to a couple more works — and an anti-utopia; two of these stories you've probably heard of, the rest maybe not.

     Okay, for the more pedantically inclined, a brief justification of differentiating "dystopia" and "anti-utopia": If a eutopia is a story about a Good Place (eu-topia), a dystopia is a story about a Bad Place (dys-topia). Some dystopias may have started out as eutopian projects, but if so that point isn't stressed, and dystopias are mostly agnostic about the possibility of eutopia. An anti-utopia is an attack on trying to set up at least one kind of eutopia and, at an extreme, an attack on utopianism root and branch (and leaves and stems and seeds). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a dystopia, with no patience with the idea that Nazi and (more to Orwell's point in the late 1940s) Stalinist thugs are spoiled eutopians: when the novel's severely-limited protagonist, Winston Smith suggests that the totalitarian Party of Oceania works for the common good, the Party official O'Brien cruelly corrects him: "The Party," O'Brien says, after blasting Smith with excruciating pain, "seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others […]. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end" (Part Three, section 3).

     In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), however, the Powers that Be emphatically intend remaining in power, but they know enough to do that by creating a society where people are thoroughly unfree and controlled and set in a class and individual place in a rigid hierarchy — and therefore are happy: innocents, of a sort, in paradise, this Brave New World ("that hath such people in it"). Huxley was to go on to write the eutopia Island (1962), and Island and Brave New World should probably be read together as a complementary pair, but Brave New World is an anti-utopia.
     Anyway, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are two of the works I want to talk about, and I assume you know them. (If you do not, stop wasting your time reading my schlock and read them now; they're in most libraries and on the web.) The others you may not have heard of: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920), E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," and Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's Space Merchants (1952/53).

     What We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Space Merchants all get right and what interests me in this part of my essay — who stole what from whom does not interest me — is privacy in two senses.

     First, all these worlds except the Brave New one are worlds of total (We and Nineteen Eighty-Four) or large-scale surveillance. In We, people live in apartment buildings, and the buildings are made of transparent glass; spies are common, and, of course, one's friends and colleagues will be honored if they betray you to the One State. Even more of course, in Oceania in 1984, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." In Space Merchants, there are just microphones and taps on rooms and such.

     I have dealt with surveillance fairly frequently, and at the moment of writing this piece (June of 2013), I needn't add my voice; people have been talking a lot about surveillance. And, frankly, right about now what I'd have to say is mostly (pause here for dramatic effect): You know, the three most beautiful words to hear may be "I Love You"; but among the most enjoyable to say are "Told You So." All sorts of people have told you so. Orwell's London of 1984 explicitly prefigures in terms of surveillance London of the early 21^st century, one of the most "surveilled" places on Earth outside of a penitentiary or Las Vegas casino. Certainly, Americans who are shocked — Shocked! — at government surveillance in 2012-13 just haven't been paying attention: the National Security Agency has been gearing up for widespread, computerized-assisted surveillance since at least 1978. And cheek swabs for DNA testing have been an issue for nearly a decade, and were central — in decorous satiric exaggeration — to the 1997 film GATTACA.

     But surveillance is just one way to invade privacy, and the great 20^th-century dystopias showed The Powers That Be invading personal space not just to get information out but also to get indoctrination in.

     Big Brother is not only watching you, he is also drumming in slogans and boring you to unconsciousness: "Orthodoxy," after all, "means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"(1984 1.5), and there ain't nuthin' BB loves more than that orthodoxy! And, of course, in the Brave New World conditioning starts in the womb-bottle and continues life-long, though growing more subtle in bodily adulthood. (The goals of the State include keeping people emotionally juvenilized.)

     We missed the bullet of fanatical totalitarian indoctrination, but Pohl and Kornbluth extrapolated from the capitalism and crazes for psychology, marketing, and advertising in the mid-20^th-century and presented a future world where personal-space is constantly violated by long TV commercials, intrusive advertising, and, well, other people. The near-future society of The Space Merchants is ruled by ad agencies and others — but especially ad agencies — who worship The God of Sales. And Sales wants worshippers: the more the better, the dumber the better, the more passionately consumed by their role of consumers … the better.

     Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., started out his writing/canary-bird career with Player Piano (1952), warning against structural unemployment due to automation of industry and reminding us that private-enterprise, industrial bureaucracies are, by God, bureaucracies; Pohl and Kornbluth help teach that pervasive advertising and marketing is a form of propaganda: «Capitalism is good; consumption is good; my general identity is consumer; my more specific identity is a consumer of __________ products [fill in name of Agency]. Buy! Buy! Buy! __________ [fill in names of some specific products, but the controlling idea — and I do mean controlling — is Buy].»

     In the near-future world of Space Merchants, the Agencies, Chamber of Commerce, and big firms generally pretty directly control the government of the United States, and most of the rest of the world. In our present, power is more diffuse, which is good — but a bunch of Little Brothers and Medium-Size Brothers are also a threat; and minimally regulated markets impinge on us in ways undreamed of in Orwell's Oceania or even Pohl and Kornbluth's hucksters' utopia in Space Merchants.

     E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) is set in a far-future that seems extremely implausible. The opening sentence of instructs us to "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee." The room is underground, inside a world-machine; and at the center of the room "there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." In a very short space in this sentence, Forster brings together some of the major motifs of 20th-century SF. He gives us a degenerate future humanity, but more important he places our species underground, inside a machine, and in an environment explicitly likened to a hive.

      Mechanizing the underworld had been done before, by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), and Wells has a sublunar world of rather degenerate Selenites (Moon people) in The First Men in the Moon (1901); still, to put a whole human civilization underground was something new and important. Back to the time of myth-making, the underworld was the realm of "Chaos and Old Night," the womb of the Earth Mother. It's no less than the complete reversal of an archetype to mechanize Mamma, and the motif will be familiar to anyone who knows such SF films as Metropolis, THX-1138, or A Boy and His Dog.

     We don't live in a literal machine underground, and we are not bloody likely to. Forster, though, is known for the brief epigraph, "Only connect…," and what Foster gets very right is showing us a world of connection and radical lack of connection.

     The world of the Machine is highly connected: air and food and data and ideas are conveyed in to each of the cells and excrement and data and ideas and scholarship go out. And every now and then one can get new clothes and stuff, and I'm sure there are entertainment channels we don't learn about (the point-of-view character consumes and produces lectures and Ideas). The Machine connects people, but only mentally, so to speak — and connects them within the limitations of high-volume machine-mediated connection. The visuals are a little degraded, and other communication subtleties are lost.

     Nowadays, this may sound like a cliché of a nerd's life in his parent's basement working the Internet, using his iPhone, and waiting for new shorts and sandals from Amazon.com. Foster was writing at the beginning of the 20^th century, and he seems prescient.

     Well … maybe.

     Le Guin and most SF critics would say what he was doing was telling lies in the form of an insightful fable, a fable for his time that turns out highly relevant to ours. The Machine can stand for advanced human culture, for technology and techniques of social organization: all useful things but which, taken too far, no longer connect people but alienate us. The world of the Machine is a world of humans tenuously connected to one another and radically disconnected from the physical world and direct experience, disconnected from nature, history, and, ultimately, disconnected from each other.

     Out of touch.

     This much is very clear in the story: subtlety is not totally a virtue in the popular arts. Nuance is, though, and there is one nuanced bit relevant for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the late 20^th century, and maybe nowadays, as products of US and Western European higher ed. in the late 20^th century move into positions of authority.

     The bit of nuance I'm talking about comes in a paragraph many readers may skip through quickly because it appears between two major plot developments. The second is "the reestablishment of religion" as many people come to worship the Machine (beginning of part III, "The Homeless"). The first change in the culture is "the abolition of respirators" so that the people of the Machine, who can no longer breathe easily the air on the Earth's surface, are now prevented from leaving the Machine. This was a problem for students of surface things — the sea, for example — but such scholar/scientists were few and their activity mildly vulgar. More important, advanced intellectuals of the time theorize the rightness of restriction to the Machine.

     A lecturer on what we'd call the web, "one of the most advanced of them" in his thinking, enjoined his audience — we're told he "exclaimed" the line, "Beware of first-hand ideas! […] First hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The lecturer uses for an example his own field. "Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought" — significant name there, Urizen, unimaginative reason and law in William Blake's mythology — learn instead what "Gutch thought Hu-Yung thought […] Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these eight great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives," although he never says how this idea might be employed. What is important is to this advanced intellectual and to the story is abstraction away from the physical, the material. "'And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation absolutely colourless, a generation "seraphically free / From taint of personality," which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'" His conclusion is greeted with "Tremendous applause," less because of the genius of the speaker and more that that lecture "did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men — a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored," so abolition of the respirators and confinement to the Machine "was a positive gain."

     Making fun of cranks is one of the oldest shticks in satire, but what is mocked here is significant. Parallel to people's physical alienation from the world and the human body is the psychological and philosophical alienation of literal Idealism, capital "I" Idealism of the Platonic/neoPlatonic, religious-fanatic extreme sort.

     Idealism is a perennial philosophy and always out there, going in and out of fashion. Forster earned his keep as canary in the coal mine if for nothing else attacking this trend in a popular and understandable medium — as opposed to, say, most academic philosophy — in 1908.

     Re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in an English department in 1984 and following, what struck me most forcefully was the part of "The Grand Inquisitor Scene" — Winston Smith's interviews with the Party official O'Brien — where O'Brien corrects Smith's naïve, old-fashioned, empiricist view of the world. Today we might say that O'Brien makes Smith sane again by getting him again in love with Big Brother, gradually talking and torturing Smith away from membership in "the reality-based community."

     Totally cut off from the world, in a torture room in the Ministry of Love — for all practical purposes, as much a man-made total environment as Foster's Machine — Smith is taught "that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." And if this is the case — if reality is what came to be called socially constructed, literally, ontologically socially constructed, what then?

     I've put it, If reality is created between our ears, it will be determined by the guy with a gun in our ear. O'Brien more elegantly clarifies that reality exists "Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party" (1984 3.2).

     Well, maybe Foster's warning and Orwell's did some good, not predicting the future but, in Ray Bradbury's formulation trying "to prevent it," or prevent things from being worse. Hitler and Stalin are dead; the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — "four lies in one phrase" — are gone; and I can hope that those in power sympathize strongly with "The Social Construction of Reality" in terms of world-views, of epistemology, but otherwise are dues-paying members of the reality-based community.

     Whatever: if we acted only if certain of the results of our actions, we wouldn't do much of importance. Speaking out against vice and stupidity was much of the job of Foster, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and their generations. As I write, Fred Pohl is still alive — and we'd now better start working on the warnings of Pohl, and of the team of Pohl and Kornbluth.